Where’s the bloody horse
You praise the firm restraint with which they write —
I’m with you there of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where’s the bloody horse?
Roy Campbell, On Some South African Novelists
I seem to recall that, once upon a time, back in the Eighties, I attended a lecture given by Carl Rogers. I think it was at Wits University. I can’t remember much by way of detail, but I know that I wasn’t particularly impressed. You see, Rogerian therapy was a little too humanist for me at the time.
His ‘person-centred” therapy involved, and I’m putting it crudely, that the role of the therapist was to redirect advice back into questions. ‘I feel deeply alienated from the means of production,” would be greeted by ‘And why do you feel this alienation?” The idea was that asking the question forces the client to slowly heal her or himself. A coward’s way out, if you ask me, and a technique that should be used only as a last resort at Council on Higher Education (CHE) consultative conferences.
But the serendipity of Rogers and the CHE naturally led me to a more philosophical bent and, in particular, the strange therapeutic sessions that have been occurring between the CHE’s Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) and our universities. The audits have been going on since late 2005 and yet both institutions and the HEQC have been strangely muted about the process.
Oh, you can read the little potted summary that periodically appears on the CHE website and details the outcomes and recommendations of the audit process. Is it just me? I find this all deeply unsatisfying.
There’s something sanitised — I’m tempted to say bowdlerised — about a process that cuts the meat out of the matter. The audits should reveal the fascinating flesh and blood of institutions going through difficult transformations, but what we, the public, are shown finally are snippets of institutional praise and penance that emanate from the privacy of the confessional.
In the light of anaemic statements such as ‘The HEQC recommends that CUT (Central University of Technology) give serious attention to all aspects of community engagement, with an initial focus on its place in the overall institutional strategy and its integration with the other two core functions”, the reader is forced to reconstruct imaginatively what really happened. Does CUT, in this instance, not realise that it is located in the Free State? Have they built a moat around the campus to keep the pesky community at bay?
Not only are there no juicy stories coming out of this process, but the register of the HEQC’s recommendations also positively provokes speculation. One begins to interrogate the outcomes looking always beyond the obfuscating text for the bloody horse.
It is only on this other side that we would be able to see the identity of the institution, its culture, its struggle; in short, the real and vibrant tales of higher education. The very lack of a penetrable text from the HEQC means we have to fill in the gaps, incorrectly I’m sure.
Do you think, for example, that anyone at Rhodes had (or has) any idea what hit them? Or did Stellenbosch, in the run-up to the audit, distribute a management mantra reading ‘moenie Afrikaans praat nie” (don’t speak Afrikaans)? Or do you think that the good old University of the Free State did a year’s worth of role-playing on how to answer tricky HEQC questions? And if you listen carefully, can you hear the sounds of rain forests being ripped up, as we speak, by the steroids at Unisa as it gets ready to drown the HEQC in enough paper to ensure that it won’t even catch a game during 2010?
The core problem lies with the HEQC’s mandate. If it had been allowed to play the tough cop — to examine the extent of real transformation — institutions would have had a clear idea of what was expected out of the audit process. Instead, the HEQC has assumed a non-confrontational pose under the catchphrase of quality.
The result is that we are left with institutional recommendations that are gentle hints, oblique innuendoes and face-saving opportunities for institutions to do very little. In fact, the HEQC has apparently adopted a Rogerian methodology, right down to the self-evaluation report, encouraging participation and client feedback. That the institution is supposed to heal itself under the encouragement of a benevolent therapist misses our opportunity to have the really hard conversations about our past and our future.
Under the gauze of the HEQC’s deferential rhetoric, I fear that higher education has lost the bloody horse.