Five crucial lessons learnt from the last 30 years in higher education

A dark dystopian future awaits our children and grandchildren, said Professor Adam Habib, Director: School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, in the United Kingdom, and former Wits University Vice-Chancellor last week. He was addressing Universities South Africa’s 3rd Higher Education Conference in Pretoria on Reflections on Post-Apartheid Higher Education: “Looking Back, Going Forward.”

Speaking to a roomful of senior university leadership and other higher education stakeholders, Professor Habib continued: “I don’t mean to be hyperbolic but this dark dystopian future awaits our children and grandchildren if we fail (as students in #FeesMustFall put it) in ‘our generational mission’.

“But we won’t even get to this strategic policy and transformative managerial ‘generational mission’ if we do not learn from our recent past.” He said a few public institutions, universities included, have succeeded when all those around them have collapsed or are on their knees.”

He then highlighted five lessons learnt from recent failures.

“Leadership matters,” the professor said, adding that he was referencing leadership in the South African context. “We are not New Zealand or Canada – our society is fractured and is deeply unequal. As a result, we are socially and politically polarised.”

He said leadership in this context needed to be radical, but pragmatic, keeping the social justice agenda in mind, without compromising academic excellence and financial sustainability. In both local and global universities, this meant enabling access, but ensuring the provision of quality education and the building of financially sound institutions – without which social justice cannot be realised in the long term.

Radical pragmatism, Professor Habib said, required “staring down malevolent actors within and outside our political midst. There are some on the right – fascists – and on the far left – anarchists – who view the world in zero sum terms. These are actors who destroy, but can never build institutions. In their view, the victory of one agenda has to result in the defeat of another.”

Social justice need not be zero sum gain, or resort to the lowest common denominator, he said. “In the pandemic, this manifested as an opposition to online provision, because of the socio-economic inequalities in our student community. But we refused collectively to see social justice in terms of the lowest common denominator.

“Neither did we ignore the inequality, recognising it and pragmatically helping those who required it. We purchased and distributed laptops, negotiated data at no cost to students. When lockdown regulations eased, we prioritised the return of students who lived in adverse social circumstances.

“We addressed the inequalities while ensuring the completion of our academic programme, without abandoning the purpose of our institution: the education of students. We maintained focus on our institutional mandate – pragmatically, so those from underprivileged circumstances were not unduly prejudiced.”

Institutional and national citizenship, Professor Habib asserts, cannot simply emerge from education and acculturation; it also requires consequences to be applied for malevolent behaviour. “There is no better case study for this than the issue of violence. Daily I hear citizens (and leaders) bemoan the violence in our society. We lament the violence against women and children.

“Yet when we advance our own sectoral causes – on labour action for better pay, or social mobilisation for free education or service delivery – in violent action; either actively participating in or at least tolerating it within our civic movement.

“Some among us – the fascists and anarchists – even justify it on the grounds that structural violence necessitates personal acts of violence. This nonsensical argument has to be challenged.” He said that stemming this violence required not only acculturation in the form of education and engagement, but also consequences for those who are violent.

“Yet when those who are violent in protests and strikes are held accountable, many among us demand a withdrawal of charges. Even judges, politicians and civic leaders have mobilised to have violent activists released from prison, or have them returned to institutions of learning when they have been expelled.”

Why then, he asked, was there surprise when community protests culminated in the burning of schools, public facilities and police vehicles?

“Why are we surprised that students lobby for free education by burning the very buildings within the university campuses? Why are we surprised when parties that are seated in the democratic parliament regularly organise protests that culminate in assaults on citizens and the petrol bombing of shops and other public facilities?

“We are a violent society because we enable it through our own actions or our attempts to obviate the consequences for it. Let me blunt, we will remain violent, including in the attacks on women and children, until we collectively have the courage to arrest, prosecute and imprison all those who are violent, including the politicians and the leaders who enable it.”

Professor Habib said a central lesson learned from CoViD-19 was that ordinary citizens were the primary victims of a lack of capabilities within the state – no matter how decisive or capable the President and Minister were in managing the pandemic. Their decisions were easily unravelled by the erosion of state capacity evident in:

• Testing and tracking: the inability of laboratories to turn around test results timeously undermined the strategy.
• Fiscal support for citizens: the unemployment insurance fund (UIF) constipated the process.
• Provision of food parcels for the vulnerable: Much of it was stolen by party cadres.

“If CoViD-19 demonstrated anything, it was that citizens are the primary victims of unqualified appointments in state institutions,” the professor said. While cadre deployment had compromised state capabilities, is was not the sole cause of a deficient state and compromised public institutions; a deficient transformation agenda was also to blame.

“Our constitution explicitly stipulates transformation must be simultaneously pursued with capabilities, yet there are many within and outside the ruling party who contest this merit based approach on the grounds that meritocracy is racially coded.” Deracialisation was necessary, Habib said.

“Cities like Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth, and Pretoria, run by completely incompetent officials who lack any sense of integrity, are dying,” he said, adding that no amount of public spin would change that until appropriately qualified people capable of delivering on electricity, water and road infrastructure were employed.

He said citizens get very little for their rates and taxes which could lead to a formal or informal municipal tax revolt, further consolidating the downward spiral of cities.

How we spend is as important as how much we spend, Professor Habib told delegates using the education sector to demonstrate his argument.

He cited the #FeesMustFall protests that culminated in former President Jacob Zuma’s decision to comprehensively fund (tuition, accommodation and subsistence) all post-secondary students with a family income of less than R350 000. “This has led to the fiscal expansion of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) by over an additional R25billion a year (now over R40billion).” He said most of this investment was deployed to historically black universities and universities of technology where the poorest of students are housed.

“Barring the administrative challenges at NSFAS, these universities now have more cash than they have ever had: receiving a cheque from the state for the subsidy, and the other from NSFAS for fees.

“Yet after five years of additional annual expenditure totalling more than a R125billion, can anyone conclude with any level of certainty that these institutions are any better off than they were when the decision was first made? Do they produce better qualified, or more, graduates? Are they better run or better governed?”

He said this sum would be defended in that it helped the most disadvantaged students, and agreed that it did. But the essential purpose of this financial support was the education and training of students.

“If these institutions are no more stable than they were five years ago, and are in effect not producing the quality graduates they are meant to, then we are not getting the outcomes from the investment we are making as a public in these institutions and individuals.”

He also mentioned a cohort of stakeholders – coalesced around unions and management structures – that had a stake in universities’ malfunctioning as it enabled them to appropriate public resources. “Often mobilising on the basis of legitimate concerns – jobs, security, decent pay – and packaging their campaigns around progressive slogans, radical economic transformation, these stakeholders subvert the very essence of the public institutions themselves.”

“This is a distinguishing characteristic of public institutions that work and those that do not,” Professor Habib said. “Despite this, we repeatedly make questionable appointments to governance and stewardship structures of public institutions.”

By way of example, he said the portfolio committee for higher education – an important oversight structure meant to hold the Ministry accountable – regularly became embroiled in intra-institutional battles of stakeholders that are out of its mandate.

Questioning the quality of appointments to the Committee, he said there was “not a single member on the committee with significant academic, research, executive or managerial experience in higher education.” Instead, there were three former Student Representative Council members “whose sole experience of higher education lies in boycotts, disruption of classes and creating instability in universities.”

“We need people with academic research and managerial experience in that portfolio committee.”

These five lessons, he said were intertwined, adding: “We are dying as an accountable society. Political anger stalks our land; political leaders and public officials are deaf to our cries; dubious politicians are stoking popular anger for their own selfish ends.”

He said one of the outcomes was that economic and political elites would escape to privatised housing estates becoming a malevolent sore in the post-apartheid landscape.

“We have become what we most hate: a segregated society, defined not by race, but the informal rule of money.”

According to Professor Habib, the future that universities were aspiring to would not consolidate “unless we demonstrate the courage and the political will to act now, to stop the rot.”

Charmain Naidoo is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.