The ageing academic workforce is a key concern for Universities South Africa
The higher education system, like all sectors, is approaching a moment of reckoning. I think the 1994 settlement has achieved massive gains, but it is unable to continue without it being regenerated and revitalised,” says Professor Adam Habib, chairperson of Universities South Africa.
“People say we haven’t changed at all, but I think we haven’t changed as much as we would have liked. I think we could have been more imaginative as vice-chancellors than we have been, but I think it [South Africa] is also a very different place to what it was.”
He dismisses the argument that the sector has not transformed, but admits that challenges remain and that the foot has possibly been taken off the accelerator in recent years.
He identifies the need to grow African members of the professoriate as one of the top priorities, followed closely by reshaping an institutional culture that alienates young, black students, curriculum reform and equalising opportunities for access.
“The question is how do that in a way that works,” he says.
Much of the answer, or the vision at least, is contained in the organisation’s 2015-2019 strategic framework that outlines certain steps it has identified as necessary to achieve its goals.
On the question of the professoriate, it identifies the need to finalise a transformation barometer for gauging the sector’s progress on transformation. It has also committed to engaging with the Departments of Higher Eucation and Training and of Science and Technology on a targeted plan to increase the number of black and female professors.
Backing up this commitment is the recognition that regular engagement platforms are needed to “tackle difficult issues and share promising practices across the sector with a view to promoting inter-institutional collaboration”.
Allied to this question of transformation is the acknowledgement that institutions, generally, have an ageing workforce, with as many as 20% of academics due to retire in less than a decade. This number includes nearly half of the professoriate.
Active steps are therefore being taken to build the next generation of academics to improve succession planning in the existing academic and postgraduate pipelines.
A second, but hardly secondary layer of the transformation agenda relates to improving access for black students. This in itself is a multi-layered issue that has to facilitate access through bursaries or financing mechanisms, but which also has to deal with a disturbingly low graduation rate.
A 2013 report by the Council on Higher Education revealed that only 35% of the total intake and 48% of contact students graduate within five years, while the completion rates of white students is 50% higher on average than those of African students.
The Universities South Africa strategy notes that the higher education sector has to devise effective strategies to match equity in student access with equity in student success.
At the same time, the organisation acknowledges that universities should equally provide students with opportunities and experiences that will foster their success. This issue relates to producing students who are prepared for effective participation in a continuously changing world of work.
One of the ways it intends to address this is by building closer collaboration with the business sector to ensure that its professional and skills needs are being met through producing suitably qualified graduates. (see Building relations with key stakeholders).
A highly charged debate that is central to the transformation agenda is that of creating a differentiated university sector.
This issue is addressed in Universities South Africa’s strategic framework as pursuing diversity in the institutional landscape and its organisational form, as well as in the universities’ institutional missions and mandates.
It recognises that there is no virtue in the pursuit of absolute homogeneity, where every university seeks to be the same and to undertake exactly the same functions and have the same purposes.
“You can’t respond to the multiple concerns of society unless you diversify the system. And that is what we are going to have to do very quickly in the coming months and years,” says Habib.
“Some have to be undergraduate training colleges, some have to be vocational colleges, some have to be postgraduate training colleges and some have to be a mixture. We need a multiplicity of those expressions and that is still something we have to come to terms with. If we don’t do that we will pay the consequences.”
Universities South Africa has achieved a broad consensus on the issue internally; Habib says it has to produce collective consensus and motivate that with key stakeholders in government.
Given the pressure from both government and the student body, Universities South Africa has its work cut out to ensure that its strategy is quickly and efficiently implemented.