Are all South African universities in systemic crisis? One would imagine
so, given the recent legislative and policy actions of Higher Education
and Training Minister Blade Nzimande.
In recent months, he has been responsible for three sets of regulatory interventions.
The first is the Higher Education and Training Laws Amendment Act, which
passed through parliament with many of the amendments not presented to
the university community for consultation. It was promulgated on 19
December.
The second is a set of proposed reporting regulations meant to replace
the reporting regulations of universities implemented in August 2007.
The third is the establishment of an ‘oversight committee’ to study,
evaluate and determine the effectiveness of transformation in
universities and to suggest a reporting mechanism.
All three have onerous implications for universities, eroding their
institutional autonomy and their capabilities in their core business:
teaching, learning and research.
I wish to focus here only on the first of these two regulatory interventions.
Intervention powers and reporting
The act enhances the powers of the minister to intervene in
universities. These powers were already available but were subject to
careful checks and balances. The minister could appoint assessors and
administrators in universities where there was financial and other
maladministration, or when a university council requested it.
Now, however, these checks and balances have been weakened, apparently
in response to an unfavourable high court ruling in the case of the
Central University of Technology versus the state, enabling the minister
now to issue directives to a university council if he believes it has
behaved in an unfair or discriminatory manner or against the interests
of society.
The minister can then appoint an administrator to replace the council should it not comply with such directives.
In the case of assessors appointed by the minister, the law previously
had not prescribed their powers. Now the amendments provide extensive
powers to assessors, transforming their investigations into a formal
legal process.
The proposed new reporting requirements for universities also enhance
the powers of the education department by increasing the administrative
burden on universities.
Until now universities were, correctly, required to develop a detailed
annual report demonstrating that the institution conducts its core
business consistent with its vision, mission and strategic plan; how it
performs against its key performance targets; its cash flow projections
of revenue and expenditure for the following year; and a register of
identified and assessed risks and measures to mitigate them.
Now, however, universities are required to prepare a five-year
performance plan, and to report to the department twice a year.
Specifically, universities must provide an annual report on the previous
year by the end of June; a mid-term report by July-August; and an
annual update of the performance plan by the end of October.
Regulation won't solve the problems
Is all of this necessary?
Some universities are in serious crisis. In the past few years, six
institutions had, or still have, administrators appointed. However, this
situation is not the norm across all universities.
Clearly, Nzimande believes otherwise and now imposes draconian measures required at those institutions on all universities.
However, the failures in the crisis-ridden institutions are not of
reporting standards, but rather of managerial and governance
capabilities, resulting from the appointments made at the level of the
institutions’ executives and councils. The best reporting standards in
the world are unlikely to change this situation while the government and
universities’ stakeholders continue to make these kinds of
appointments.
But these reporting requirements and amendments are problematic in their
own right too. The new reporting requirements will entail an even
further expansion of the support staff at universities. This involves
the diversion of scarce resources to administrative appointments when
these should be made within the academic project.
Since 1994, student enrolments at universities have almost doubled
without a concomitant increase in the academic staffing establishment.
Instead, the administrative staffing cohort has expanded to enable
universities to manage the reporting requirements imposed by an
increasingly bureaucratised state concerned with administrative rather
than substantive compliance.
Ironically, none of this has improved the state of governance or
management or the curbing of corruption. Eighteen years later, we show
poor progress in these areas. Indeed, if you look at the levels of
corruption, or the number of universities in departmental stewardship,
you would have to conclude that the situation is getting worse.
In this context, one would have imagined that we would look for alternative mechanisms to resolve the crisis.
Instead, administratively fixated state officials are demanding even
more regulations, while government departments have little capacity to
manage their existing commitments, let alone attend to the new deluge of
reports that must flow from these new regulatory provisions.
The net effect is likely to be more administrative burden without better
governance, management or academic performance outcomes.
As worrying is the erosion of the checks on the powers of the minister
to intervene in universities and appoint assessors and administrators.
This erosion undermines the careful balance struck between university
autonomy and public accountability crafted by the constitution and the
initial Higher Education Act.
The minister can now, for instance, declare a university’s action or
regulations – for example, its language policy, or the way it
constitutes the students’ representative council – as discriminatory and
demand they be changed. Should universities refuse to do so, the
minister is authorised to disband the council and impose an
administrator for up to two and a half years.
Not only does it give one individual enormous power over the higher
education system, but it also confuses the ‘public’ with the ‘state’.
The net effect is that universities are transformed into state-owned
enterprises, subject to the control and jurisdiction of the minister and
the department.
This is very different from how our Constitution and the original Higher
Education Act envisaged the cooperative relationship between the state
and universities as autonomous entities that exercise their
responsibility for public accountability through substantive councils
rather than paper councils, and within a framework that is regulated by
law.
A perilous path
The erosion of university autonomy in these new legislative
interventions is downright perilous. Merely cast an eye to the north of
our borders to see what happens when universities are simply subjected
to the dictates of the state.
Currently, few universities north of South Africa can be said to offer
outstanding higher education. This is no fault of their academics. It is
a consequence of universities becoming solely responsible to the state,
and political leaders having the power to intervene at autonomous
public institutions without any checks or balances.
Perhaps Nzimande should reflect on the damaging and ideologically driven
corporatisation of universities under Margaret Thatcher and remember
Karl Marx’s memorable phrase: history repeats itself, first as tragedy,
second as farce.
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