Universities are the products of the political and socioeconomic systems they are embedded in. Because South Africa’s political and socioeconomic system has undergone significant transformation as a result of the country’s democratic transition, so too have its universities.
The political transition has had a number of positive consequences for the higher education system, including, among others, a more accountable, massified and diversified set of universities.
But there have also been negative consequences as the economic features of the transition impacted on state institutions and, through them, other public entities such as universities, all of which have become increasingly corporatised. Managerial practices and accountability mechanisms from the corporate sector have been imported unthinkingly into public institutions and universities.
Universities and their divisions are increasingly treated as business entities and power has shifted decisively from structures such as the senate (where academics predominate) to finance and the council (where administrators and external stakeholders are in the majority). The net impact has been dramatic. Profitability rather than sustainability seems to be the driving ethos of universities.
Academic departments have had their budgets slashed dramatically in real terms. The administrative workload on academics has significantly increased. There is a greater push for third-stream income and quantitative indicators of performance have begun to proliferate in these institutions.
What is to be done? The standard progressive response has been largely one of wringing hands and bemoaning the current state of affairs. Sometimes there is a romanticisation of the past higher education system as one in which universities were defined by a sense of collegiality.
This is of course a serious misrepresentation because apartheid’s universities were not friendly, collegiate places, either in the historically black universities, or in their historically white counterparts, especially for young black academics who were never part of the powerbrokers (both ruling and oppositional) within these institutions.
A more active and nuanced version of this response fights back by trying to keep at bay the worse consequences of corporatisation dynamics. It is a response manifested in most universities but is perhaps most successfully practised in small towns where corporatisation dynamics are least intense.
However, this is a response that is failing and is unlikely to be successful in the long term. For a while it may seem as if a successful strategy is being waged, particularly in small towns, but it is going to be impossible to create islands of collegiality in a market-oriented higher education system.
Another response is a proactive engagement with the context one finds oneself in with a view to subverting it in the long term. It is akin to a strategy suggested by John Saul in the early 1990s called “structural reform”.
This is a response that involves an engagement with a view to initiating reforms that have the effect of enabling further reforms, all of which in the long term creates a new structured balance of power that enables the transformation of the very system itself.
This is a response that tries to advance a progressive agenda within the context one finds oneself in. It is a response that recognises that there are negative consequences to the engagement, but nevertheless argues that it is better to advance a progressive agenda with some negative consequences than do nothing at all.
It is a response that recognises that there is a difference between a corporate culture and a managerial agenda. There is a difference between profitability and sustainability. There is a difference between corporate behaviour and entrepreneurial leadership.
It is a response that attempts to engage in ways that pluralise power in the higher education system because, as long as power is dispersed, checks and balances can emerge in a system that contain authoritarian tendencies and enable progressive change. One exemplar of this response is a recognition that any serious restructuring of an academic institution is going to require great academics who have a relative autonomy to focus on their work, who are provided with an enabling environment to do so, and who are rewarded for their initiatives.
Restructuring also requires resources and, if these are not immediately available, then they have to be mobilised, sometimes by making hard choices about what gets sacrificed so that more crucial and core initiatives are adequately resourced.
In the institutions that have been successful in restructuring and enhancing academic and research efficiencies — the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Human Sciences Research Council being two such cases in the past decade — there has been a hunt for successful academic talents who are sometimes paid beyond the scales of the mainstream academy.
At the University of Johannesburg (UJ), where I work, we have created an environment of incentives productive researchers. There is a small core of excellent research and teaching staff who are rewarded beyond the normal scales by a special non-pensionable allowance.
In addition, we have an annual vice-chancellor’s award — the top researcher gets R500 000 and the top emerging researcher R250 000. Three top teachers also get rewards of R150 000 each. UJ has also established a research incentive system through which between R22 000 and R33 000 of the research subsidy is invested in individual academics’ research accounts to support the continuation of their research.
Finally, the university has more than quadrupled its internal investment in research activities. The downside of these developments is that they create a much more unequal academic environment. But there is an upside as well.
As a result of these incentives, the new systemic message for younger academics is that one does not have to leave the academy and become a bureaucrat if one wants to earn a higher salary. This is, after all, the message that became prevalent in the higher education system in the post-apartheid era when managers were increasingly better rewarded than the academics who undertook the core business of the universities.
But what makes these reforms transformative or structural? What suggests that they are not simply accommodative within the parameters of the existing political economy? These reforms and practices, despite some negative consequences such as the increasing inequality in the remuneration of the academy, have nevertheless had some positive outcomes for both the higher education system and for UJ.
The university’s hunt for academic talent has broken the ethnic logic of academic recruitment in the Gauteng region. Until recently English-speaking academics, and a few Afrikaner academic dissidents, gravitated to the University of the Witwatersrand.
Afrikaner academics, with a smattering of English-speaking dissidents who fell out with the academic mainstream at Wits, tended to locate themselves at UJ and the University of Pretoria. But UJ’s active recruitment across the ethnic divide has broken this logic and created an open academic market that has enhanced the leverage of academics vis-à-vis their respective executive managements.
The infusion of new academics into UJ and the activation and empowerment of its existing staff have significantly enhanced the research productivity of the institution. In 2009 its output was 40% higher than what it was three years earlier.
Yet all of this is occurring in an institution that is increasingly racially and ethnically integrating and that continues to service primarily a working-class and middle-class student base. UJ’s student fees still run at a significant discount to that of its regional and national peers and it consciously acts to ensure that none of its campuses become de facto racial enclaves.
But it is not these positive ends — however important they may be — that define these reforms and practices as structural or transformative. What makes them so is that they begin, however timidly, to pluralise power and change its balance among stakeholders to enable further reforms down the line.
If the prevailing state of affairs in higher education is a product of the existing balance of power, then any agenda of change has to speak to the immediate context and be directed to changing this structured balance of power in the medium to long term.
The new practices of remuneration and drive to incentivise efficiency and productivity change the balance of power between academics and institutional executives. Younger academics do not only have to cast a gaze at senior managers as role models of better remuneration, and better-remunerated A-rated and B-rated scholars constitute an alternative configuration of power within the institutional settings.
These changes in the structured balance of power within both institutions and the higher education system create the conditions for further reforms down the line. Until now progressives in universities have fought a rear-ended battle to hold at bay corporate systemic pressures bearing down on the universities.
The recommendation here is to engage the system with a view to advancing reforms that focus on the methodologies of change and that transform the balance of power among stakeholders within the universities and the higher education system as a whole. Only then will we be able to change the tide in favour of progressive social and educational ends.
Professor Adam Habib is deputy vice-chancellor (research, innovation and advancement) at the University of Johannesburg