/ 17 July 2009

The great academic dash

You have to hand it to him. Professor Malusi Marcus Balintulo has led a charmed life in the history of South African higher education.

For those of you who have had the pleasure of meeting the man, you will know that he has galumphed from Fort Hare to Durham and Warwick, the University of Durban-Westville and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and, finally, emerged intact as the vice-chancellor of Walter Sisulu University of Technology and Science.

From sociology to anthropology, from being deemed “too old” to run CPUT to being just the right age to run a developmental university, Marcus is the Goldilocks of survival in higher education. Since his latest incarnation, he has been seen far and wide touting the benefits of a rural university network of technology (Runt for short) and its offerings to the wider society.

In fact, so successful has he been, he has just been named chairperson of the task team set up to revise the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), a position he was appointed to by Blade Nzimande. The process usurped the incumbent chair (former vice-chancellor Rolf Stumpf) who was appointed by the then minister, Naledi Pandor.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Marcus in that galumphing Goldilocks sort of way and you must admire the tenacity that has kept him as an on-and-off VC since 1995 when he took over as the head of Durban-Westville. That’s almost up there with Sir Richard Edmonds Luyt who hung on for 25 years as the vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town. Maybe it’s the perks that make them stick at it for so long.

I was also reminded of how some individuals and institutions just won’t go away when I came across a colourful flyer advertising a South African Technology Network (SATN) conference recently.

Now SATN should — but doesn’t — stand for the South African Technikon Network because somehow even though there is a body representing university vice-chancellors, the principals of our former technikons still see fit to have their own little organisation.

And not only that, they have aimed for the first double-bill of Blade and Naledi at the same conference. This is a real coup that will allow participants to fawn before the present and past ministers while also fawning across departments. Simultaneously.

If you recall, the technikon was generally perceived as an inferior version of a university; essentially an institution for those who couldn’t get into university.

But that changed when Naledi’s predecessor, Kader Asmal, bowed to technikon pressure and decided on a compromise. In the warm-up to the mergers he claimed that technikons would be renamed universities of technology or UoTs (Government Gazette No 24143).

Nothing, as far as Asmal was concerned, really changed. But if this was the message that he intended to convey it was lost on the newly named UoTs. He repeatedly warned that no “academic drift” should occur, but what did take place was an academic dash but not for greater research outputs or better students.

The Education Department promptly published a pamphlet in which it argued that the UoT was better than the university because the UoT had the added advantage of being more receptive to the demands of the working world. And this primarily because UoTs sent their students out there to experience the dull drudgery that the rest of us call a career. Work- integrated learning supposedly raised the offering of the UoT to that of the super-university.

Just because they called themselves emperors didn’t mean that they had any clothes. Sending students off into business for a few semesters doesn’t mean that the students necessarily learn anything apart from how to make a decent cup of tea. In fact, as school teachers know, getting the learners to self-study releases the teacher from teaching while getting paid.

So with more holidays, no concerns about increasing research output, no need for academics to have a master’s as a bare minimum, cosy relations with the new political regime and — as Aubrey Mokadi (former vice-chancellor at the Vaal University of Technology) and Aaron Ndlovu (suspended vice-chancellor of Mangosuthu University of Technology) can attest — brilliant pay and perks for the VC, who wouldn’t want to be a university of technology?

If I were the university of Zululand or Venda or the North; in fact, if I were the Mafikeng campus of North-West, I would be hammering at Blade’s door demanding to be reclassified as a UoT with immediate effect and back-dated benefits.