Education Minister Naledi Pandor has rejected ANC plans to divide the education portfolio in two, warning that such a move may cause ‘incoherence”.
In an exclusive interview with Higher Learning, in which she looked back at her four-year term, Pandor cautioned about a loss of coherence in the education system if the ministry is split into one part broadly catering for schools and another for higher education.
‘I believe one of the things the ANC inherited when they came into office in 1994 was a fairly incoherent system of education. ‘By placing the system under a single minister some coherence was achieved and I hope whatever model is adopted will maintain that coherence … a dislocation of higher education from the rest of the system will have an impact. I have made my views clear to the ANC on this,” Pandor said.
On the university mergers, which came into effect as she took office in 2004, Pandor said that the the government has not set aside enough money or time for the process. ‘I believe that the government has to rethink the fact that the [R2.1 billion in] funding for merger costs essentially comes to an end from this financial year and the new financial year assumes institutions don’t need additional resources. My argument is that they do,” Pandor said.
She said that when the education minister goes to the budget committee this year, it needs to be said: ‘Walter Sisulu University does not have a proper physics laboratory and to complete the merger we have to put that facility in.
We believe that Mafeking can develop animal husbandry [up to] the level of veterinary science,” but to do it funding is needed.” She said: ‘I think there was not a full appreciation of the length of time [needed] to bed the mergers down and the investment we must make to get the desired outcomes … the department will have to go back
to treasury and ask for more.”
Pandor also emphasised the need for a ministerial committee or a commission to look into the mergers and report on their efficacy, against
objectives set out in former education minister Kader Asmal’s policy paper of 2001.
Although the ANC has made noises about de-merging institutions, Pandor said: ‘I hope a very careful look will be taken at where institutions are and what the advantages or disadvantages of any changes will be. ‘I think sometimes we comment without having looked closely at what actually exists and we also tend to be thinking of education in terms of what we observed three or four years ago and haven’t kept up with developments.”
Pandor believes that universities are ‘not yet sufficiently convinced” of the need for differentiation. ‘Everyone wants to do everything,” she said, whereas she would like to see them identifying their niche areas, looking at the skills sets among their staff, the regional, local and national needs and then let these elements inform their core focus areas.
Pandor said her department is ‘not saying fewer disciplines; we are asking, what are your strengths?” Higher education, she says, is about knowledge creation and if all institutions are doing the same lower degrees they are not going to advance South Africa.
She is disappointed that ‘not all our universities see themselves as making a contribution to South Africa”. ‘They sometimes want to extract themselves from the country’s core tasks and objectives, so they will say … we are not about training people for work … we are about knowledge creation.”
If it is not in the interests of society, what is the imperative? ‘Universities are where clever people are and if they decide to abandon society we lose that intellectual contribution, so I am hoping in the next five years we are going to see our leaders in higher education and the practitioners fully engage in our society …”.
When asked about her hands-off approach to universities, she said: ‘I am an ex-university lecturer. I am the granddaughter of an ex-principal of a university.
I know higher education thrives where there is freedom, and the notion that government can, through regulation, run universities is one I do not share. ‘I don’t think there can be absolute autonomy, but I do believe universities do best if they have a space for that freedom and maybe I was a little too hands-off.
No academic will agree with you, but perhaps I should have been more forceful.” She said a reason for her approach is the poor relationship that existed between higher education and the education authority when she took office in 2004 and she wanted to create room for this to normalise.
Pandor said she is still concerned about issues relating to transformation, race, gender, institutional culture and curriculum change. ‘I don’t think we are monitoring these at the moment.
And of course [we have to look at] the improvement of the remuneration of academics. I don’t think they are treated very well.”