HIGHER EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
by
N Barney Pityana, PhD1
Higher education in South Africa, as in so many other parts of the world, has been
experiencing a decade of ferment. Universities which by inclination are conservative
institutions have had to contend with rapid and imposing change. This institution
generally considered to be at the centre of society’s self understanding, the hallmark
of its history and values, has had to be open to change and challenge – to embrace the
new. The institution that was always established to last an eternity, that takes pride in
its history and tradition, often faces the real prospect of extinction or renewal. The
place of privilege that has had to adapt market forces and many contradictory
demands. For centuries self-defining under the rubric of autonomy and academic
freedom, universities are seeing their missions being defined by others and having to
respond appropriately to visions set for a variety of purposes including the pressures
of the market economy and the speed of the information society.
Even if one considered the core mission of the university, the creation of new
knowledge and the construction of an intellectual society, one finds in effect that these
can no longer be confined to the academe. The cultivation of knowledge these days
can take place sans frontieres, or what has come to be known as borderless education.
If it is outside the walls, there where could it be? It is in the marketplace of ideas, at
the manufacturing plant, wherever people gather they trade in ideas and challenge
their understandings in dialogue with one another. For too long universities have been
very conscious of these ‘threats’ and had become very defensive and protective of the
gains amassed since medieval times. Alternatively, others have gone the whole hog to
embrace change and thereby traded essential values and traditions for ephemeral
gains.
1
Principal and Vice Chancellor: University of South Africa. Keynote address at Bill Venter/Altron
Literary Awards 2003; Wednesday 7 April 2004, Westcliff Hotel, Johannesburg.
1
Such was the environment which welcomed us into what has come to be known as the
Decade of Democracy in South Africa. South African universities had modelled
themselves on the best of the European and American elite universities. South
Africans benchmarked themselves against the best in the world and yet they served,
many without complaining, the ideological purposes of apartheid South Africa which
shaped much of the intellectual engagement emanating therefrom. In essence it was a
diverse, unequal and discriminatory system serving the various publics of South
Africa under the umbrella of a once-dominant apartheid social and political system
and a crumbling but uncertain economy. A social environment that was once
confident and domineering was less certain of itself and hesitant about its place in the
future.
The period since 1994 was a time of optimism. The new government came in with an
agenda of change and transformation. It was reshaping South African society and
constructing a new vision. Without any doubt, universities were key instruments in
this agenda for change. They would be the ones where the new democracy’s idealism
found expression, its leaders trained and its ideas formed. And yet the system that was
inherited was inherently unequal, in many respects its academic input outdated and
not in step with the emerging ideas in the democratic South Africa, its research
culture incompatible with the progressive agenda of the new South Africa and the
culture of the academic environment alienating to a large majority of South Africans,
black and white. And so the policy approach had to be both about dealing with the
legacy of the past and yet shaping and preparing South African universities to
embrace the future in a global world.
For me, any understanding of the policy thrusts of the South African higher education
system must be viewed against the backdrop of our constitutional imperatives. This
vision is best captured in the Preamble to the Constitution which aspires to “establish
a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights”
and to build a “democratic and open society” in order to “improve the quality of life
of all citizens and free the potential of each person.” It is against that background
therefore that one can understand it when the Minister of Education, Prof Kader
Asmal states that the strategic objective of the government in higher education is to
2
Produce graduates who are well rounded and thoroughly grounded; who are
skilled and competent; who are creative, flexible and adaptive to new
challenges; who are adept in critical thinking and cultural literacy; who are
enabled and empowered to participate fully in their economy, their society and
their globalising world.2
This is a very useful summary of government policy, but our task is to examine it
against some of the policy initiatives and the possible implications of such policy.
Given that the system that was inherited lacked coherence, and was uncoordinated,
the new policy framework sought to establish higher education as a seamless and
coherent system that addressed the inequalities of the past and enabled higher
education to face the challenges of the future and serve the needs of a developing
economy and technological society.
The National Commission on Higher Education (1996) became the policy platform
for the development of higher education in South Africa. A sufficient statement of
policy on higher education in South Africa can be found in the White Paper on Higher
Education (1997). The White Paper sets out a policy framework and purposes of
higher education:
To meet the learning needs and aspirations of individuals through the
development of their intellectual abilities and aptitudes throughout their lives.
Higher education equips individuals to make the best use of their talents and
of the opportunities offered by society for self-fulfilment. It is thus a key
allocator of life chances, an important vehicle for achieving equity in the
distribution of opportunity and achievement among South Africans.
To address the development needs of society and provide the labour market, in
a knowledge driven and knowledge dependent society, with the ever-changing
high level competencies and expertise necessary for the growth and prosperity
of a modern economy. Higher education teaches and trains people to fulfil
specialised social functions, enter the learned professions, or pursue vocations
in administration, trade, industry, science, technology, and the arts.
Contribute to the socialisation of enlightened, responsible and constructively
critical citizens. Higher education encourages the development of a reflective
capacity and a willingness to review and renew prevailing ideas, policies and
practices based on a commitment to the common good.
To contribute to the creation and evaluation of knowledge. Higher education
engages in the pursuit of academic scholarship and intellectual inquiry in all
2
Opening Address at Conference on Higher Education Curriculum and Society: Relevance, Quality
and Development; University of Pretoria, 1 April 2004.
3
fields of human understanding, through research, learning, teaching. (1997:78)
The statement appropriately begins with the individual learner and her/his aspirations
and then embraces society and its needs, then moves to the quality of the cultured
learner (to use Schleiermacher) and then sets out the intellectual task which every
learner must be exposed to. But in stating this complex set of interrelationships so
neatly, the statement hides many contradictions that higher education has to face,
what Mala Singh calls “antinomies of demand for change and continuity.”3
It is the truth that South African society is very diverse and expresses its identities in a
variety of ways. That in itself is not fatal because such diversity provides the material
for intellectual dialogue. Second, there may be agreement about the objectives of
higher education at the principled level but intense disagreement about the pathways
towards achieving that objective. Third, universities hardly ever anywhere have a
unified purpose nor will any such purpose be found consistently over time. Policy,
purposes and objectives must be continuously renewed and re-negotiated, though a
variety of ever-changing interests and stakeholders. Fourth, the logical understanding
of the role of the university may be irreconcilable: from the classical, positivist ideals
of the university as a still centre for intellectual reflection for its own sake to the post
modernist notions that essentialise engagement as the ‘raison d’être’ of the university.
Fifth, universities are forever in tension with their various essential partners: the
governments, donors and industry. Finally, the university may not always be in a
position to meet the expectations of society, maybe, universities should not even be
expected to.
There are two critical elements on the nature of the university I wish to advance. One,
is that the university must remain a provider of the ‘public good’ enabling society to
realise the common good. In order to do so, higher education is a beneficiary of the
contract between the state and the people and contracts with the state to provide
quality education for the common good. In order to do so effectively, the state
guarantees a measure of autonomy and academic freedom and yet effective
3
Universities and Society: Whose terms of Engagement?; Unesco Forum on Higher Education,
Research and Knowledge; December 2003, p.5
4
accountability. The university should provide a sphere for open debate and for all
manner of discourses to find expression and challenge. It serves society precisely at a
point where it mediates society’s concerns and interrogates its aspirations. It must
serve as Mala Singh puts it as a ‘discursive community’ “enabling society discourses
and their associated interests to assert their claims and concerns in a context where
other more powerfully driven discourses are seeking to shape the meanings of the
knowledge society.” It is the small voices that must be heard, the little men who must
tower not above but only to be equal, it is the visionaries who must make the
farsighted future become contemporary, it is the innovation for the future that must be
constructed today, from materials available to contemporary society.
It is against such a theoretical foundation that one must look at the current advances
towards higher education reform and transformation. The policy on mergers as a tool
towards restructuring the higher education landscape in South Africa has been very
controversial. Controversial because it was predicated on assumptions that many of us
consider contentious and lacked rational focus. Unfortunately, the Size and Shape
Report made too many ideological assumptions which had not been adequately tested.
For example, its point of departure was that higher education institutions in South
Africa had to be reduced from 36 to 21. It also used the singular instrument of
mergers and incorporations without examining other options to achieve the intended
purposes. It did not appear to be consistent with other national policy goals and
initiatives. It also made assumptions about the size and location of an ideal university
– in the process dabbling in the ‘fuzzy’ arena of policy and longterm planning.
The Minister’s statement in contrast was much more focused. The purpose of the
policy was to transform the South African higher education landscape in order to
maximise integration and diversity, promote equity and increase access. To many of
us these objectives are justified and indeed were long overdue. It was time for higher
education institutions in South Africa to acknowledge that universities could not
continue in the new democratic environment as if nothing mattered to them. If the
state was to be the major investor in higher education, then the state was entitled to
require some clear deliverables in return. A higher education system that privileged
some and continued to disadvantage others was not sustainable. A system where a
large majority of the new intake from previously disadvantaged communities dropped
5
out in large numbers, failed to achieve their grades or were confined to academic
programmes attractive to the labour market or who remained underskilled despite the
time spent at universities. Forms of discrimination and racism inherent in the system
needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency because it was alienating and
contributed to the failure of the system to be relevant and responsive. In sum, change
comes by processes of continuity and discontinuity but always begins with the
recognition of dissatisfaction, the observation of a problem and, to use Johan Muller,
to be curious about what we observe.
The transformation also established a new nomenclature in higher education:
comprehensive institutions. If one of the objectives of the National Plan for Higher
Education was to promote equity and maximise access, to redress the inequalities of
the past “through ensuring that the staff and student profiles in higher education
progressively reflect the demographic realities of the South African society”, then
comprehensive universities hold the promise of bringing more learners into the higher
education net, within the institutions by careful assessment, challenge them with the
possibilities of advancement within and achieving a variety of qualifications and exit
points. Trish Gibbons characterises the features of a South African comprehensive
university as
o Diversity: through offering a diverse range of academic programmes
(vocational, career-focused. Professional and general formative);
o Accessibility: through opportunities created in entry and exit points
o Mobility: developing vertical and horizontal pathways;
o Responsiveness: developing a suite of educational programmes;
o Flexibility: strengthening relationships.
Finally, the restructuring and transformation of the higher education landscape opens
up a variety of other innovative possibilities for a progressive higher education
system. For one thing, as the recent Conference on Higher Education Curriculum and
Society: Relevance, Quality and Development (Pretoria, 1 April 2004) convened by
the Minister of Education portends, universities are now freed to address as radically
as possible the curriculum and course contents at South African universities.
Questions are being asked as to the sources and objectives of curriculum, its
determinants, quality assurance and accountability systems. It has also caused that
6
conference to revisit the purposes of higher education and to test the notion of a
common or shared identity for a South African higher education ‘brand’. We could
interrogate our attachment to the European coat-tails of intellectual tradition or to
venture into a new and exciting future of rediscovery as an African society with a rich
intellectual and cultural tradition that can form the fulcrum for interrogating and
critiquing all other traditions. This means that South African higher education
institutions are rediscovering Africa as a discursive space for intellectual growth.
South African universities are now benefiting from scholarships from all over Africa
and attracting students and scholars from other African universities, building research
partnerships and academic networks. But the biggest challenge still lies ahead of us
and is proving almost intractable: that is to create at our higher education institutions
an intellectual environment and a cultural space that is not alienating to the majority
of our staff and students.
My central thesis, then, is that notwithstanding everything that has gone into the
processes of transformation of higher education in South Africa, with all the pain and
bother that inevitably accompanies these processes, we find ourselves back where we
began. We have to be troubled by the state of higher education in our country. We
have to ask ourselves whether a decade into democracy we are anywhere near a
transformed university system. The answer has to be No. We continue to examine
what it means in the current South African context, and in our scientific environment
and in a globalised world to be a scientific community at the heart of society,
differently organised, as the Magna Charta Universitatum suggests. Earlier, I invoked
the Archimedes’ Principle when I called for a fulcrum to move the world, an external
frame that puts the demands that higher education is being subjected to:
transformation as representivity, transformation as sound financial management
within diminishing resources, transformation as throughput rates and research profile,
transformation as representivity reflecting the demographic profile of the country at
all levels of the life of the institution, transformation as strategic positioning and
occupying a place of esteem among one’s peers and attracting large financial
resources from the private sector. Somehow within that plethora of competing
demands, what Mala Singh calls, the “messily multi-dimensional notion of university
engagement”, we must find and be centred by the core values and philosophy of the
7
university, the very one that must ultimately serve all the other expectations and
demands.
Somehow the Africa-centred university, with an engaging management style,
democratic participation, moral accountability, with a culture and values that are
reflected in its programmes, styles and products needs to be established. The
challenge we face in South Africa and in Africa, therefore, is to begin again at the
beginning – back to basics.
To end this address, I wish to invoke the words of Immanuel Wallerstein in his essay,
Knowledge, Power, and Politics: The Role of the Intellectual in an Age of Transition :
So, we must all simply persist in trying to analyse a world-system in its age of
transition, to make plausible statements about an inherently chaotic process.
We must continue to try to clarify the historical alternatives available and
thereby the moral choices we have to make. And finally, we need to try to
illuminate the possible political paths that might move the world in the
direction to which we are committed by these moral choices. 4
Wallerstein ends his paper by recalling the words of the ancient sage Hillel, if not we,
who? And if not now, when?
ends
4
Unesco Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, December 2003.
8