Imperfections in the transformation of South Africa’s higher education – Lis Lange’s perspective

Deviating from what is considered a norm in the South African higher education system requires conviction and an ability to take a risk that very few leadership teams can afford, or are open to.  This is the belief of Professor Lis Lange, Special Advisor to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Learning and Teaching at Stellenbosch University, who addressed the recent Higher Education Conference remotely, on 9 October. 

Professor Lange (below), was one of the two speakers tackling the topic The Future of Transformation in South African Higher Education: Looking Back, Going Forward during a breakaway session of the Transformation Strategy Group (TSG) of Universities South Africa (USAf). This was at the USAf-hosted 3rd Higher Education Conference from 9-11 October under the theme “The Future of the University.” She opened the floor ahead of Professor Nomalanga Mkhize, Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Nelson Mandela University.

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Kicking off, she said in examining transformation from a historical perspective, she did not want to turn her contribution into a catalogue of successes and failures – but to rather focus on transformation as a construct.

She referenced the Times Higher Education and its recent World University Rankings publication featuring 14 South African HE institutions. “The idea that we can only exist in this context, and that we are incapable of saying ‘no’ because we are scared of the consequences that it may have for funding, shows just how trapped we are in a system we are not capable of critiquing and do not know how to get out of.”

“Transformation has been at centre of every policy document in SA HE since 1994. All those who’ve been around for the last 30 years firmly believed that the system was going to deliver development and equity. It would address and undo the social inequality inherited from colonial structures and apartheid, and generate capacity for democracy and debate,” she said.

“Every instrument that was developed to implement the policy as a package — whether it was funding, planning, quality assurance, science and technology policy or the notion of the  innovation system – was built and developed around transformation as a foundational concept.”

She said in 2015, the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements added decolonisation of curriculum and of the university to the transformation debate. “Throughout three decades of fairly decent achievements, we have demanded more and more of ourselves, with less and less resources. In times of crises, be it #FeesMustFall or CoViD, we reinvented ourselves, our policies and governance structures to respond to the emergent areas.” 

Professor Lange said that in the last three decades, universities developed policy and institutionalised change “without really engaging the limits and obstacles to our own conceptualisation and practices of transformation, or, for that matter, the contradictions between our transformation ideas and the instruments we use to implement them.” 

She mentioned, as an example, how the funding of higher education institutions depends on a system of classifications of subject matter that is not nimble to the development of inter and multi-disciplinary degrees. Furthermore, even though programmes accreditation has not changed fundamentally since 2004, “we are now asked to produce ‘future-proof graduates.’

“This is a major problem,” the professor said. 

She also stated that in 2005, when South Africa celebrated the 10th anniversary of higher education democracy, scholar and historian Colin Bundy gave a keynote address in which he warned those in policy making that we were choosing to work with neoliberal tools when trying to effect a change that was supposed to be transformative.

“We thought we could use them productively but we have to recognise that we haven’t done particularly well in this regard. We have bureaucratised the system and in a sense institutionalised change in ways that is no longer transformative, but is conserving the status quo.

“During CoViD, there was a fleeting moment where we changed our view of higher education in relation to society and there was a resurgence of the notion of education as a public good. There was a feeling that openness of the university to the society in which it is located would grow solidarity and possibly transformation.  Yet this has been replaced by a real concern for the sustainability of the university in both financial and institutional terms. 

“In my view, we are not doing enough to respond, from a transformative perspective.  We allowed technology to transform higher education without higher education taming technology,” Professor Lange said.

“The new normal of a university that was in everybody’s discourse  post-CoViD went hand-in-hand with the new normal in the capitalist economy. The analysis of higher education and the future of education post-CoViD was produced by Mackenzie, KPMG, PWC and other international consultancies who told the world – including South Africa – in which direction education needed to move. It was also propelled by the World Economic Forum and we bought into it by participating in endless webinars which helped tech and digital companies make fantastic profits during the pandemic.

“We continue to invent ourselves in ways that are narrower and narrower. Reread the 1997 Goals of Higher Education White Paper and you will see that future-proof graduates don’t feature anywhere.”

Janine Greenleaf Walker  is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.