President Thabo Mbeki told university vice-chancellors of his deep dissatisfaction with tertiary education and demanded a ”short-term emergency plan” to remedy its failure to meet the country’s ”social and economic” needs.
The message is conveyed in a document co-written by Mbeki, Minister of Public Enterprises Alec Erwin and Minister of Science and Technology Mosibudi Mangena. Minister of Education Naledi Pandor appears to have been left out of the loop.
The document refers to its own origin as a meeting on March 31 of the president’s higher education working group (HEWG), consisting of Mbeki, some Cabinet ministers (including education) and university vice-chancellors.
At this meeting — the HEWG’s fourth since it was established in May 2003 — the document says a suggestion was made ”that a discussion paper should be prepared that would deal with the challenges facing higher education and what responses should be — or were being — developed. What was novel was that the responsibility for preparing the paper would lie with persons not directly involved.”
After identifying the three authors, the 17-page document makes its only reference to the Ministry of Education: ”Wisely, however, the Minister of Education would be on hand to ensure that there is a quality check.”
The Presidency’s head of communications, Murphy Morobe, confirmed to the Mail & Guardian that this meant Pandor’s role in drawing up the document was not substantive, but offered no further details. The Education Ministry referred this and other M&G questions to the Presidency.
Mbeki’s document says South Africa ”may well be wasting” the ”considerable resources” allocated to higher education. Stressing throughout the urgent need for technological skills, the document says there is a ”serious imbalance between university -numbers and those in technical universities [former technikons] and Further Education and Training [FET] Colleges [former technical and vocational colleges]”.
Strikingly, given the large-scale structural reshaping of tertiary education, especially through mergers that started last year, the document appears to question whether such transformation moves will remedy ”the perception and the reality that our tertiary education is not meeting the needs of the society and the economy”.
”It is our contention,” the document says, ”that the previous report that led to the current mergers may not have approached the problem in the manner we have sought here and therefore we need to assess the position.”
The Council on Higher Education’s ”size and shape” report in 2000 re-commended mergers, many of which were accepted in the government’s subsequent National Plan for Higher Education and ratified by Cabinet. The first wave of mergers took legal effect in January last year; the second in January this year.
But in response to M&G queries, the Presidency said it ”is not a fair reading” of the document to interpret it as questioning tertiary education structures and the wisdom of some post-1994 restructuring decisions, such as mergers. It did not elaborate.
Morobe also said it ”is a wrong and sensational reading of the document” to discern any frustration in it with the performance of the Department of Education since 1994.
The M&G had posed this question in relation to the document’s focus at one point on curriculum links between primary, secondary and tertiary education, and its conclusion: ”However, no amount of curricula change will be of any benefit if the educators are not equipped to transmit the required knowledge.” Teacher training is an Education Department responsibility.
The Presidency also declined to elaborate, the ”short-term emergency plan” urged by the document, saying this is a matter the HEWG needed to discuss.
As part of its call for an urgent reassessment of how education can better meet the country’s economic needs, the document appears to argue for a divide between pure academic research and technical or applied training, traditionally embodied in the distinction between universities and technikons.
Some tertiary restructuring has moved away from this divide, especially in cases where universities and technikons have been merged. However, asked to comment on the document’s apparent argument that returning to the divide is necessary, Morobe merely replied: ”We do not think that this is an accurate reading interpretation” of the document.
It would also be ”incorrect to construe the paper as a specific review of policy”, Morobe said.
The intention of this draft was to initiate strategic discussion within the leadership of higher education”, which must lead to ”concrete actions”.
”The Presidency has received numerous comments [in response to the document] and is currently examining them. It is likely that a new document would be discussed at the next meeting of the HEWG later in the year. The final draft should, once finalised, be made publicly available.”