A s a former professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal nothing much surprises me now about the fallout from the collective narcissism and authoritarianism of the new managerial elite at some of our universities.
In my own university I had seen innovative teacher upgrading programmes serving part-time students all over the province degutted and deresourced as well as a general onslaught against anything remotely hinting of collegial democratic processes.
The latest moves that threaten to “restructure” two of the last remaining adult education bases in higher education strikes me as the final stage of an inexorable campaign by many South African universities to divest themselves of any obligation to serve the really poor and disadvantaged.
When South Africans awoke in April 1994 and discovered themselves to be in a democratic country they had some of the best university-based adult education resources in Africa. These centres and institutes had contributed creatively and often courageously to serving adults, and the struggle for democracy during the late 1970s and 1980s. Some of them, at the universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Natal and the Western Cape, had international renown. University-based adult educators in 1994 thought that they were about to come into their own. But it was not to be.
The war against adult education started when the University of Cape Town closed down its famous department of adult education. The University of Witwatersrand followed suit. Nascent centres at the previously black universities died (only Western Cape and Limpopo still have units). All of this was rationalised in terms of bottom-line finances and the Gadarene rush to imitate managerialist and merger nostrums imported from the northern businessmen who have recently shown how brilliantly they managed the world economy.
Now the axe may be about to fall on the Institute for Adult Basic Education and Training at the University of South Africa and the Centre for Adult Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, partly as a result of the way academic “productivity” measures exclude community engagement. The threat to these centres reinforces the idea that “education” is only about formal institutions and qualifications, as well as the idea that we only consider important what can earn us subsidy points and money.
Unisa’s Abet Institute pioneered the biggest adult educator training programme in South Africa (and indeed in Africa and probably the world), with an output of more than 100 000 trainees, mainly with a Certificate in Abet, over the past 10 years. These graduates have been absolutely crucial for the staffing of a number of the government’s social development and poverty alleviation programmes. Most recently it provided the coordinators of the successful 2008 pilot of Minister Naledi Pandor’s Kha ri gude adult literacy campaign (which aims to reach 4.7-million illiterates by 2012).
Now the institute has already been robbed of its ability to respond directly and rapidly (“just in time”) to adult education and broader community education needs outside the university. It is now restricted to delivering formal Unisa courses. Next it will be absorbed as a mini-department into the school dealing with schooling. This is also a development that does not surprise. A university that retrenches most of its African language teaching staff (an essential resource for South Africa’s indigenous languages and particularly the smaller ones) and now wants to shut down the Abet Institute in spite of having the vision of being “the African university in the service of humanity …” clearly is totally untroubled by cognitive dissonance.
The fate of adult education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (“the premier university of African scholarship”) is also in the balance. The Centre for Adult Education there had become the largest higher education-based adult education unit in South Africa. It was a crucial agent in adult education policy development in South Africa and a noted research base for the field in South Africa and in Africa. It was also an open critic of the new government’s failures in adult basic education.
What is happening at Unisa is also happening at KwaZulu-Natal where the school of adult and higher education (within which the centre is housed) is to be closed down. The centre’s staff will be absorbed into another school and its capacity to continue its non-formal and outreach work uncertain (indeed is already considerably restricted). After more than 14 months its vacant professorial chair of adult education is still to be advertised.
So do we have Unisa and UKZN following a trend in South African universities to abandon service to the really poor and to close down effective adult education support operations? If so, it is astoundingly short sighted. The present government and all political parties agree that delivery to the majority of our population who have not benefited much from the democratisation post 1994 is a priority. Yet the universities they subsidise are closing down and disempowering centres that made serious efforts to serve this constituency. They all claim to serve humanity and Africa but the commitment is narrowly introverted to serving academia. One cannot actually understand why government has allowed this resource to be squandered in this way.
The recently released report of the ministerial committee on adult education (itself disappointing in its virtual non reference to the role of universities in adult education) has proposed some kind of parastatal type of agency to act in a coordinating role to work alongside universities and other bodies in order to develop adult learner-friendly institutions. Maybe it is indeed time for some sort of National Institute for Adult Education to be set up to redress the dreadful situation and make the new adult education strategy more realisable.
John Aitchison was a senior professor and head of the school of adult and higher education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal until his retirement at the end of 2007. He was a member of the ministerial committee that drew up the plan for the Kha ri gude Literacy campaign