Tough tertiary stuff

Michael Burawoy

30 APR 2010, 04:00

4 min read

Bringing together the stakeholders of academe under one roof for one-and-a-half days could be courting trouble, but it will hopefully bear fruit.

It was a good thing to recognise all stakeholders and agencies, including students and unions.

I would like to congratulate Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande and his team for organising this summit. It has been an extremely brave initiative.

My conclusion is: transformation is not for sissies — it is tough stuff. I will list only six of the challenges I see:

Students — their access to and success at universities;

Institutional differentiation and inequality;

The articulation between basic and higher education;

The revitalisation and/or renewal of academic staff;

Fraught pedagogical relationships within a transformation context; and

Relationships between support staff and academic staff and the outsourcing of certain functions.

South African education has numerous legacy issues plus the pressures of the present with which to contend.

We have to look at these globally in a positive, progressive way. This country has an amazing higher education system — there is nothing like it in the rest of Africa.

But transformation is not a thing unique to Africa or South Africa: universities are being changed, transformed, destroyed and built up everywhere.

The character of the university has changed globally. In the past the university was a participant in society, but also the observer having a say about that society. This was the ‘ivory tower” identity.

But universities are now deeply embedded in society and that outsider, ivory-tower role is being eroded. The ‘new university” to be produced by transformation could follow any of four different models:

The commercial model. When the budget at my own university, the University of California, was cut, the first two moves were to lay off non-academic staff and increase student fees. In one year student fees were increased by 30%. This is how we get money for increased infrastructure. A third move in the commercial model is to lower academic salaries, which was also done at my university. The key thing in this model is the corporatisation of universities. In the 1980s this meant universities could cash in on patents, which led to a lowering in state funding. This commercial model of transformation has severe consequences for those disciplines that cannot deliver in the marketplace. The irony of this model is that it was the academics themselves who instituted it.

Second is the Thatcherite project. This says that universities should be regulated to make them more efficient. The model introduces a monitoring system — done by ourselves, as university staff, on behalf of the state. We measured our targets with all sorts of indices. In this model academics spend 25% of their time trying to figure out how to dodge the system — for instance, to fake outputs in research and other areas. Trying to make the state efficient has brought about the pathologies of the very institutions that the government was opposed to.

The third model is a set pursued in China, India and Brazil. Like them, South Africa is still clearly committed to public education. But it is impossible for academics to survive on their salaries and they have to consult or outsource to make a living.

The fourth model is one that I’ve put together now after listening to this summit. The summit was called to empower the stakeholders to negotiate and engage in dialogue. It was a deliberate attempt at democratic dialogue, which is laudable. There is a model here — one of deliberate dialogue among stakeholders. This is going to be the healthiest movement forward in what could be difficult times ahead. We will engage in a process of mutual education, by learning the perspectives of other stakeholders. I congratulate you all. This is what in sociology we call empowered, participatory governance and is a way to deepen democracy and participate in governance.

Michael Burawoy is professor of sociology at the University of California and vice-president of the International Sociological Association. This is an edited version of his reflections on the two-day summit convened by Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande in Cape Town last week. (Transcript of Burawoy’s address to the summit courtesy of the Centre for Education Policy Development)