/ 17 July 2009

Tips for the minister

Right Honourable Minister.

Unlike Prim Gower in her letter to you in the previous edition of Higher Learning, I think you have the most exciting job in the country. You have the rare opportunity, skills and resources to change the destiny of South Africa.

As you know Karl Marx himself declared at one stage that he was not a Marxist. You need to do something similar and stop the use of Marxism as a religious attitude in our secular age and synthesise the best of the reformist and the revolutionary wings of our specific struggle history.

On “massification” (what a dreadful word for the worthy cause of equal opportunity in higher education), go for it minister, but remember that university of the masses is not merely a university with masses of students. It has to be one that uses the multimedia developments of the past few decades to ensure the effective delivery of curricula. Therefore, we do not need new universities, but you need to transform cooperatively the existing ones.

Speaking of private providers. Yes, by all means seek help from the old and the emergent millionaires, but do not place all your eggs in the basket of private initiatives. As early as 1930 Jamsetji Tata, founder of the Tata Group in India, realised that his business interests were best served by helping to create quasi-governmental institutions, especially research-oriented ones.

Gower is wrong to equate funded students failing with funding failures. The issue is insufficient funding. Our university students pay up to R800 a month for taxi fares. Can we blame them if they have to choose between attending lectures or having a modest meal?

The point is our universities do not provide sufficient pastoral care for needy students. My experience in one of the oldest universities in the United Kingdom suggests that there is more committed pastoral care there than here.

Certainly we lose qualified people to the private sector but salaries are only part of the equation. Incidentally, no university in the world pays market salaries to academics. More to the point is the question of supply and demand.

Unlike India and China we do not produce enough doctorates and you need to help us to leapfrog here. The only way to do this is to bridge the gap between the university and industry.

Professor Kumar Bhattacharyya of Warwick University did some pioneering work that enabled senior people in industry to work towards a doctorate. This increased the number of doctorates. It also enabled a high level of collaboration between the university and industry.

In an infinitely more multilingual country such as India, multilingualism in higher education has proved to be a myth. Education, like everything else, has become increasingly international. We better take the bull by the horns and opt for English as the medium of higher education and study other languages as compulsory electives.

Equity in employment is difficult and I have, as gently as possible, suggested to my university the idea of ring-fencing posts for black people for a limited time. But the initiative has to come from the universities and not the ministry.

There are, however, more important issues related to equity. Until the financial security of black students is ensured, there will be no equity. Many of us hope that you will put your socialist credentials to good use and come up with solutions.

On the cruelty of initiation ceremonies, we have as much chance of banning them as we have of banning vuvuzelas from football matches. If we try to we will only make it into a clandestine activity. Experience in British universities suggests more sophisticated strategies than a Big Brother ban. There is, for example, no alternative to a dialogue with senior students. We need to transform them from being tormentors into caring foster parents of first-years.

Although I make many references to overseas practices, we need to come up with our own solutions. We tend to copy unsuccessful solutions from abroad.

Think about outcomes-based education and the excessively bureaucratic performance appraisals. In all these we have failed to reflect on their suitability to our context. The fumbling and mistakes which Gower warns you about can be avoided by clear and articulated thought for which you are known. I hope you will use it in your challenging task.

PG Raman is a research professor in the department of architecture at the University of the Free State