It’s been a quiet few weeks in higher education.
Apart from, in no particular order, the resignation of the embattled Free State vice-chancellor, questions raised about the quality of some of Tshwane’s course offerings, violence at Mafikeng University of Technology, Carte Blanche‘s staple diet of interrogating Limpopo’s financial shenanigans and the University of Cape Town still getting bashed for its admission policy that says whites need 91% to gain admission, while it is 74% for black students.
Aside from that, hardly a peep out of our institutions.
Well, apart from Gwede Mantashe’s proclamations in his debate with Unisa vice-chancellor Barney Pityana. Apparently the ANC “demerger considerations” aim to arrange divorces from the arranged marriages put in place by Kader Asmal four to five years ago. This story, together with the new department of higher education, has kept the media furiously busy confusing preelection provocation with policy. But the subcutaneous debate — and one that will haunt higher education over the next decade — went largely unnoticed.
Central to Barney’s argument was an understanding of the purpose of the university that was at deep variance with Mantashe’s. For the former, the university is as much a site for the critique of society as for its development, a place where knowledge is disseminated and grown, as a finishing school that adds a crucial moral veneer to the individual. The university is an agent that pushes a moribund society as much as it reins in a disordered one.
Mantashe, by contrast, spoke like a true apparatchik of the Department of Labour: country (short of skills) + universities (produce skills) = gaps plugged = strong country. It is this kind of logic that has bedevilled, if not made redundant, the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquision (Jipsa), whose working group Mantashe chairs. It also establishes a false consciousness that sees the skill shortage in simple mathematical terms and risks ignoring the need for new knowledge to make a country truly competitive.
But the respective merits of these arguments don’t matter as much as the palpable shift that is signalled here. Since democracy came higher education has occupied a certain untouchable status. Even the mergers only touched the structure of the university, not its purpose within society. And it’s not hard to understand why. Nelson Mandela (Wits) and Thabo Mbeki (Sussex), Sibusiso Bengu (Geneva), Professor Asmal (London School of Economics) and Naledi Pandor (London and Stellenbosch) are all irrevocably shaped by higher education, and therefore determined to shape it in its own likeness.
Those days are over, at least for the foreseeable future.
What is more likely is that, after next year’s election, the new government will indeed establish a higher education department, but not to allocate additional resources for doing the same old things. More likely is that the call for the new department will be to control institutions better, to shape their curricula and their outputs to address the skills shortage.
That higher education should be called upon to solve the skills problem is not so odd given that the National Skills Authority, the sector education and training authorities and, for that matter, Jipsa have largely proved unable to solve the problem. It is not going to cut any mustard for universities to utter their usual defence: “We produce graduates who can think and problem solve, if they pick up skills on the way that’s fine, but that’s not the main point of higher education.” And that’s not the worst of it. It also follows that the sector will be differentiated in a way that it never expected.
The differentiation debate crops up every so often in the press, but largely remains behind closed doors because it deeply offends the former technikons which see their university status under threat.
Under the new skills discourse, they will inevitably become the first target.
It may be difficult to translate the more ethereal disciplines of the university into a set of skills — what readily applicable skills are produced in the study of philosophy or quantum mechanics? This is not the case for the universities of technology.
So, although the big five (research universities) might get away with business as usual, I suspect the ANC’s new national executive committee is looking on with horror at the “mission drift” of the second-tier universities, not to mention the universities of technology. I foresee that the new dispensation will see these institutions dragooned into service for the state, their “institutional autonomy” entirely dependent on their ability to churn out the right number of skills in the right areas.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Julius Malema as the next vice-chancellor of a technikon, an institution entirely dedicated to training the next cadre of state bureaucrats in ideological niceties.