/ 30 June 2009

Universities do serve communities

Along with research and teaching, community engagement is one of the three primary purposes of higher education in South Africa, as set out in the 1997 White Paper.

The Council on Higher Education, through the institutional audits conducted by the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC), has been trying to understand the ways in which universities provide benefits to communities.

There has often been criticism that universities are failing to respond to the needs of development and are not sufficiently attentive to the difficult challenges that communities face. It is easy to accept these criticisms at face value.

But universities are diverse organisations and there are numerous projects with community benefits: low-cost housing, improved sanitation systems, public health provision, adult literacy, research into education needs, infrastructure development , legal aid, oral history and informed policy development.

The problem is not that nothing is happening. It is rather a failure to conceptualise, define and validate work in community engagement. Given this, a first step is to take a fresh look at the ways in which knowledge is defined: whether for the purposes of research that creates new knowledge or for the purposes of transmitting knowledge through teaching.

One set of positions sees knowledge that has lasting value as created by experts working in welldefined disciplines in the university.The return on public investment in universities comes in the form of ‘basic” research that is then put to use by the public and private sectors. Community engagement is seen as a supplementary activity, which will be supported less and not rewarded as other ‘core” activities of teaching and research are.

There can be no doubt that discipline-based basic research is a cornerstone of our universities’ contribution to the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. But it is also clear that, in the contemporary world, vast amounts of vital new knowledge are created within organisations other than universities. This resulted in alternative positions that see the essential quality of knowledge as its structuring rather than its origins or the formal status of its originators.

The significance of this second set of theoretical positions for community engagement is that organisations outside the university are validated as supply lines of new knowledge in their own right.

There are a number of key areas where this is already well understood. For example, social anthropologists have long been interested in taxonomies of knowledge that have been created across varied societies.

Studies of science practice have demonstrated how ‘normal” science creates and validates wide-ranging networks that result in a greater understanding of the world. The field of public health recognises the vital knowledge structures that are created and used in community.

In these and many other similar cases the challenge is not to strengthen the traditional authority of the university. It is rather to develop strong and effective networks and partnerships. Retheorising the ‘knowledge project” in this way will result in valuable, long-term gains.

It will also result in systematic and appropriate definitions of both ‘community” and ‘engagement”. To argue that definition is important is not to argue that all universities should be the same. It is rather to be clear about categories of reporting and measurement, allowing a clear understanding of what universities actually do in this area.

One way of contributing to this process of redefinition is to make use of economists’ distinction between private benefits and public goods. Universities are an interesting type of organisation in this respect because they often provide both at the same time.

An individual derives private benefits –represented by increased lifetime earnings and higher social status — as a result of a university education. At the same time, there is a public benefit through raising the skills level of the workforce, contributing to economic growth and greater competitiveness.

Similarly with research, which may be a private benefit to the researcher in terms of promotion and employability, but which also contributes the public advantage of shared knowledge.

From this perspective, community engagement can be seen as a key public good in what is increasingly being understood as the ‘third sector”, filling the space between the private sector, on the one hand, and the role of the state in providing infrastructure and social transfers, on the other.

Thinking in terms of engagement with the ‘third sector” avoids fruitless debates about what constitutes a legitimate ‘community”. In South Africa the ‘third sector” ranges from formal NGOs through special interest groups and networks
to informal organisations and alliances.

Their diversity allows for a diversity of university-linked partnerships. Their common theme is the set of social and economic development imperatives that stem from South Africa’s unenviable levels of inequality.

Looking to the future, this review suggests several priorities. First, it is essential to achieve a consensus about the nature of community engagement. Community engagement is vital work that needs to be reunified with the ‘core” purposes of teaching and learning through a reappraisal of how new knowledge is made in our contemporary world.

Second, we need to map out what universities are actually doing in this ‘third sector”. Because of lack of definition, there has been no common reporting standard across universities in the first phase of the HEQC audits. As a result the audit reports are often a shadow of what is actually happening.

Third, there will be value in building case studies of good practice from across the full range of South Africa’s universities.

Finally, institutional audit criteria need to be revised for the next phase of quality assurance in South African higher education. This, combined with the retheorisation and realignment proposed here, should result in further improvements to our quality assurance system. This will demonstrate the key role universities play in ‘third-sector” engagement and the public benefit.

This is an edited version of a paper by Professor Martin Hall at a symposium hosted by the Council on Higher Education on community engagement in higher education. Hall is from the University of Cape Town and will take up the position of vice-chancellor of Salford University in the United Kingdom later this year.