Wits University’s illustrious education policy unit (EPU) is considering relocating lock, stock and barrel to the University of Johannesburg (UJ).
This week UJ’s deputy vice-chancellor for research, Professor Adam Habib, confirmed that the EPU had approached UJ about a possible relocation and that UJ had made an offer that would see the whole unit housed there. “It’s now the EPU’s decision,” he told the Mail & Guardian.
UJ has been manoeuvring strongly to win a coveted place among the country’s top five universities, partly by beefing up its research capacity. Habib said that in the year since he joined UJ he has been approached by a number of individuals and units, at Wits and elsewhere, about joining UJ.
Wits vice-chancellor Loyiso Nongxa denied knowing of any impending EPU move and expressed “surprise” at the M&G query. “We are not aware of any official submission made by our EPU regarding a definitively different future,” he said.
Nongxa said he endorsed Dr Shireen Motala, director of the EPU, in her response to the M&G that “the EPU continues to be at Wits with business as usual”. The idea of the EPU moving is “pure speculation, mischievous and could jeopardise the good relations that the EPU enjoys with Wits and UJ,” Motala said.
Mary Metcalfe, head of the school of education, where the EPU is located, refused to countenance the possibility of losing the unit: “The Wits EPU is firmly part of Wits and will continue to be. If an individual in the EPU chooses to resign and move to UJ we would regret the departure, but the Wits EPU will continue and the projects under way will continue.”
The unit was founded in 1987 as a joint venture between Wits and the then National Education Coordinating Committee to research post-apartheid education policy. In recent years it has provided policy support, research and analysis to government departments and has focused strongly on education rights.
“If I were in Wits’s position I would be concerned. The EPU is important — for its historical link to the democratisation of this country,” said John Pampallis, head of the Centre for Education Policy Development. The unit’s move would be a “loss for Wits but a great gain for UJ”, he said.
The M&G understands that the extent of Wits’s financing of the EPU, which largely relies on donor funding, is a major factor in its possible migration. But the unit’s “financial arrangements have been under review within the faculty for some time now”, Nongxa said.
Habib confirmed that UJ was actively enhancing its research capacity and said “it is good for academics to be wanted by universities because they have been taken for granted for too long … There is always competition between universities.”
UJ recently introduced a grant of R5-million for senior research professorship and has, in the past year, attracted top academics from Wits and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).
Those who migrated from Wits are sociologist Sakhela Buhlungu and political analyst Xolela Mangcu. UKZN has lost anthropologist David Moore, political scientist Lawrence Hamilton and media and cultural studies expert Jenny Clarence Fincham.
“Wits is not aware of an exodus,” Nongxa said. “Given the particular sets of skills that [Wits staff] represent, it would be unusual for there to be no movement of staff.”