System-wide collaboration and partnerships are the way to capacitating early career academics

The fourth plenary at Universities South Africa’s Higher Education conference, titled Generating talent: transforming support for the research landscape in South Africa, was different to the others in that it was essentially a feedback session. It was updating the delegates on the outcomes of the USAf-ACU (Association of Commonwealth Universities) symposium of March 2019, that was hosted at the University of Johannesburg on Developing the Capacity of Early Career Researchers.

Dr Joanne Newman, Chief Executive and Secretary General of the ACU, introduced the topic before inviting four people to provide feedback — essentially a critical assessment of key aspects of the report. These were:

• Professor Stephanie Burton, Vice-Principal of Research and Postgraduate Education at the University of Pretoria;
• Dr Aldo Stroebel, Executive Director of International Relations and Cooperation for the National Research Foundation (NRF);
• Ms Mandisa Cakwe, Director of Teaching and Learning Development in Universities at the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET); and
• Dr Sizwe Mabizela, Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University.

The symposium had been convened jointly by Universities South Africa (USAf) and the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), an organisation “dedicated to building a better world through higher education” primarily, through international collaboration. That event was in fact continuing a discussion on emerging researchers, that dated back a few years and which had peaked at USAf’s biennial Research and Innovation Dialogue of 2018. While USAf was already concerned by the ageing professoriate and the slow pace of building up a pool of prospective successors, findings of A Study on Building a Cadre of Emerging Scholars for Higher Education in South Africa revealed the depth and width of this issue. Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) had undertaken a full year (2017) study to:

• establish the profile of lecturers and senior lecturers in South Africa’s university system; to determine what proportion of them were research-active (i.e. publishing); and what proportion were actively applying for research funding;
• identify key research drivers within South Africa’s public university system and
• key enablers for, and impediments to building a pipeline of emerging researchers.

Equipped with a clearer profile, CREST went on to recommend strategic actions to undertake at the systemic, institutional and individual levels to increase the number, diversity and representation of emerging researchers in the university system.

The delegates at the USAf-ACU event then came up with recommendations about capacitating early career academics. These recommendations became the subject of the USAf conference plenary on 3rd October.

The 30 recommendations were encapsulated in nine themes, namely:

• The untapped potential of postdocs: There should be a review of the postdoctoral system in South Africa, as well as an international postdoctoral recruitment campaign;
• Increasing high quality PhD production: The ACU should advocate for more split-site PhDs among international scholarship funders, and all PhD programmes should include the option to incorporate 12 months abroad;
• Supervisory capacity: The ACU and USAf should collaboratively design and trial criteria for good supervision;
• Academic mentoring schemes: Look at the different approaches to academic mentoring across the Commonwealth to share good practice recommendations;
• Research support capacity: Invest in the capacity of research support offices to ensure new schemes are delivered effectively and sustainably;
• Teaching and research: Researcher development and teaching and learning support need to coordinate their activities and pool their resources;
• Involving HR directors: Establish connections between the USAf HR Directors’ Forum and the ACU HR in Higher Education;
• Collaboration for increased efficiency; USAf should map existing training support and capacity gaps across the higher education sector in South Africa and other African countries with a view to a coordinated sharing of resources;
• Building a research culture through pedagogical reform. The NRF should invite a study of the link between teaching practice and research culture.

The first commentator on the report, Prof Stephanie Burton, said she did not believe the problem lay so much in finding enough applicants for postdoctoral fellowships as it was in “finding appropriate mentors”. That was not about putting a bunch of postdoctoral fellows in front of an institution and assigning them to mentors, she said, because mentors want to choose their postdoctoral fellows — what she termed a “matchmaking process”.

The report recommends ACU and USAf partner to build supervisory capacity which she said needed clear definitions, standards and benchmarks: “If we’re going to have a national programme that trains supervisors, we’re going to have to look at how we manage that”. She thought it useful to link with other commonwealth countries but believed it would be far more beneficial to have visiting professors and supervisors come here.

She proposed doctoral training centres with PhD students, supervisors and postdoctoral fellows, so “not only are we supervising our PhDs on a consortium basis, but we are also building a community of scholars”. She envisaged a seamless continuum from PhD training to postdoctoral fellowship and supervision and mentorship. While this could be piloted, she advised beginning with a small focus area or areas.

For his part, Dr Aldo Stroebel said he wanted to highlight that as a funding agency – the NRF funded 13% of all PhD students in South Africa. The fact that there was often an over-expectation of what a small funder in a big system could and should do, made partnerships all the more important. He added that one of the more fundamental changes in SA’s system was the new postgraduate funding framework which had increased the quality but unfortunately decreased the quantity.

He also called for high level coordination among a range of government departments beyond the Department of Higher Education and Training.

He agreed with Prof Burton on the need to focus on attainable levers. “We cannot, in one go, address all the challenges that have been listed in this report. We must be focused”.

Dr Sizwe Mabizela was tasked with commenting on the collaborative aspects of the report and its call to transform teaching in order to build a research culture.

Written by Gillian Anstey, an independent writer commissioned by Universities SA