The bride is thrilled; the groom is grim. But Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) will not leave Technikon Witwatersrand (TWR) standing at the altar when their union is solemnised on January 1 next year.
‘It is just a question of trying to make the best of a bad situation,” says Peter Alexander, a member of RAU’s council, its highest decision-making body. ‘I haven’t come across colleagues at RAU who think that the merger with TWR [is] a good idea, [but] everyone is working to make it a success.”
By contrast, TWR vice-chancellor Connie Mogale has enthusiastically embraced the merger from the start, saying she ‘strongly believes that there is merit in having parallel streams of the TWR’s career-focused programme and RAU’s academic programmes”.
RAU’s merger with TWR is part of the government’s nationwide tertiary restructuring aimed at promoting efficiency, equity and redress in higher education. Mergers are the major tool of this restructuring and, when they are all implemented, will reduce the country’s 36 institutions to 21.
As late as December 2001, RAU must have been thinking its staunchly protected bachelorhood was secure, when Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s National Working Group recommended that RAU and TWR remain independent. RAU would merely be required to absorb Vista University’s East Rand and Soweto campuses.
But in May 2002 the Cabinet sent shockwaves through the Afrikaner bastion by recommending the merger. Reaction from RAU was swift: ‘We deplore the decision of Cabinet,” RAU’s senate, its highest academic body, said in an official statement. ‘The proposal places the future of these two institutions at serious risk.”
Staff at RAU soon joined their senate in implacable opposition. ‘We are concerned that the proposed merger would wreck a very good university,” Alexander said in September 2002. The students soon joined in, questioning the logic of merging a university with a technikon.
RAU even looked set to take legal action against the merger. But the RAU council voted in February last year to accept – apparently with gritted teeth.
The merger will form the University of Johannesburg which will boast about 44 000 students. RAU now has a total of 25 000 students, of whom 5 680 take distance learning courses. About 2 000 students from the Vista University’s Soweto campus and 950 from the East Rand campus were incorporated into RAU at the beginning of the year. TWR has about 16 000 students.
The merged institution will offer higher degrees, degrees, diplomas and certificates. At the moment TWR offers a variety of diplomas and technical degrees in art, design and architecture, business management, engineering and health sciences. RAU’s accounting, engineering, law and business degrees are particularly admired.
Alexander says that staff attitudes to the merger have not changed much in the past two years. ‘Lecturers are apprehensive that the merger should not lead to a shift of resources from teaching and research towards bureaucracy, something that happened with Australian mergers,” he says.
Many RAU students are scared that academic quality will suffer, says Elmen Lambrecht, a member of RAU’s Student Representative Council (SRC). ‘But we are positive that these fears are being addressed. You will still have your degrees and we do not anticipate that the academic programme will change dramatically.”
Makalakatja Phasa, chairperson of TWR’s SRC, says that although students at his institution are ‘positive” about the merger, they have fears about the accessibility of the new institution. ‘Will the new acceptance standards exclude students? They are also fearful of how the merged institution’s fees will affect them.”
The merger will also bring together 1 254 RAU staff members and 1 754 TWR staff. Managements at both institutions say no retrenchments are foreseen in the short term.
But staff at TWR are fearful about the future, says Joe Mpisi, chairperson of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers (Nehawu) branch at TWR. ‘Fortunately, we have been involved in all the decision-making at TWR regarding the merger, and we are happy with what TWR is trying to achieve.
‘Our major problem is with RAU, which we feel has not given us all the cooperation we need. All the proposals for the merger are coming from TWR at this stage, not from RAU. They give us nothing,” adds Mpisi.
His Nehawu counterpart on the RAU campus, Michael Mokeona, says that staff members felt left out of the merger process at first. ‘But we talked to management two weeks ago and they have now involved us in all decision-making, though communications about the decisions remains a problem.”
The two institutions have laid the groundwork for the merger by establishing a joint merger office with specialised task teams, but they still have a long way to go, says Mogale. ‘At this time I am not even in a position to say how many faculties there will be.”
The merger will not bring that many academic changes, Botha says. ‘The present courses will go on.”
The two institutions still have to discuss how to accommodate Afrikaans at the University of Johannesburg. The main focus at the moment is on establishing a mission and vision for the new university, Mogale says.
Antenuptial discussions, in other words, continue.