Between a rock and a hard place: dilemmas regarding the purpose …

High Educ (2019) 77:567?583

Between a rock and a hard place: dilemmas regarding the purpose of public universities in South Africa

Rebecca Swartz1 & Mariya Ivancheva2 & Laura Czerniewicz1 & Neil P. Morris2

Published online: 20 June 2018 # The Author(s) 2018, corrrected publication 2018

Abstract This paper examines the idea of `core business' in contemporary South African public universities. South Africa's public higher education system has global ambitions, but is also highly internally stratified. Drawing on new data from interviews with higher education leaders and government policymakers across a number of South African institutions, we show that while the rhetoric of `core business' of the university has been adopted by higher education leaders, the question of what constitutes the purpose of the university, in South Africa and arguably beyond, is subject to ongoing debate and negotiation. The multiplicity of conflicting but coexisting narratives about what universities should do in South African society--producing excellent research, preparing a labour force, or addressing societal inequalities--exposes a persisting tension surrounding the purpose of a public university. And while this tension has historical origins, we show that responses to addressing these various roles of the institution are not developed organically and in a neutral context. They emerge under conflicts over limited state funding and attendant and opportune market pressure put on public universities in times of crisis, that shape profoundly their framing and outcomes, and the future of the universities.

Keywords South Africa . Core business . Public universities . Purpose of higher education

* Rebecca Swartz Rebecca.swartz@uct.ac.za

1 Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town 7700, South Africa

2 School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

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Introduction

Over the past two decades, the purpose of universities has been under close scrutiny. Their very existence is being widely interrogated as they are referred to as being in a state of crisis (Readings 1999; Washburn 2008). The pressures both upon and within universities have led to serious reflection about the very nature of these institutions (Collini 2017; Marginson 2016a, b; Holmwood 2014 and others) and what should constitute their `core business'. This issue emerged as a dominant consideration in a research project examining the changing nature of higher education in South Africa and England. The project examines the unbundled university--the intersection of increasingly disaggregated curricula and services, the use of digital technologies, the growing marketisation of higher education itself, and the deep inequalities which characterise the sector and the contexts in which they are located. At the heart of this intersection lies the matter of the primary and overriding purpose of the public university. This is the focus of this paper.

The concept of `core business' explored in this paper is a phrase notably used by interviewees in our project when discussing the purpose of universities. The paper reports on interviews with over 30 university leaders, both academic and managerial, government and parastatal officials in South African higher education. The notion of `core business' itself has a history in corporate governance (Wysocki 1999) and has subsequently been applied to higher education. The phrase implies that there should be a single, identifiable, `core business' of a university, eliding the multiple functions that a university might serve, and the many forms of relationships that constitute an institution (including between staff and management, staff and students, research and teaching, and so on). The very question of a `core business' of a `public university' is problematic: it either expresses an oxymoron in that public institutions have not traditionally been associated with business practices, or reveals a new frontier of the interface of public and private at state-subsidised universities. Yet, while much has been written about the commercialisation, corporatisation, commodification, privatisation, and marketisation of the public university as a sad matter of fact (Giroux 2014; Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Marginson 2016a, b; Shore and Wright 2016), our data reveal the ongoing tension these processes introduce into public universities. In South Africa, public universities are internally striving to achieve multiple, sometimes competing, imperatives, while externally presenting a unified and coherent message about what the public university's `core business' entails.

South African universities are a potent ground for such exploration as they grapple with deep local imperatives refracted through powerful global discourses about the changing nature of higher education. While the country is ranked as one of the most unequal societies in the world (World Bank 2018), it is striving to secure a place as a hub of academic excellence. Higher education is, as in the case of many developed nations, predominantly publically funded and since the end of apartheid (the system of racial segregation initiated by imperial powers and inscribed in law by the nationalist government between 1948 and 1994) has been framed as equitable and attempting to redress inequalities. Social justice is a core concern in higher education in South Africa, and that requires redistribution towards parts of the country and social groups that remain economically marginal, and marginalised in terms of access to education. The competing demands on universities to provide a quality education that would be competitive if not only nationally and on the African continent, but also globally, continue to run up against the need for social redress in terms of policies of access and inclusion in the post-apartheid era (Bertelsen 1998: p. 138). At the same time, changes in higher education provision, policy, and practice in South Africa `need to be understood in terms of marketisation

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and quasi-marketisation... and tempered by imperatives of redress and equity' (Ntshoe 2004: p. 137).

While we recognise the unique historical trajectories of higher education in South Africa, it is also essential to acknowledge the ways in which global changes in higher education impact on that context. Over the last decades, scholars have discussed a significant shift in the public/ private divide that has occurred with the advent of neoliberal governance and new public management on the turf of public universities first in the developed world and then worldwide (Ball 2009; Lynch 2014). This has happened through multiple reforms: the introduction of corporate funding, insistence that research and teaching occur at the industry/academia interface (Howells et al. 2012), the focus on employability as a key lens to understand higher education (Boden and Nedeva 2010), the concentration on hard sciences, infrastructural innovation and outsourcing of labour present on campuses (Lynch and Ivancheva 2015), and diversification of actors involved in higher education delivery (Komljenovic and Robertson 2016). This has also come with the standardisation and homogenisation of quality criteria through global and national rankings and the dominance of the Anglo-American research university model, increasingly adopted as an aspiration around the world (Marginson 2008).

There are also political, social, and economic processes which enable the marketisation of the public university. These can be used to explain the dichotomy between public and private in the university sector that can be seen as false in two ways. Firstly, Simon Marginson has shown that contradicting distinctions are made in distinguishing between public-private in relation to knowledge production. He argues the phrasing in economic terms, i.e. as nonmarket and market, or in political terms, i.e. as state-controlled and non-state controlled, is false dichotomies (Marginson 2016a, b). Secondly, the idea that states regulate against market interests has been challenged by numerous scholars, notably in the tradition of Karl Polanyi, who claimed that `laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action' (Polanyi 2001: p. 147). This view of the state requires an examination of the processes at stake which, as Robertson insists (following Jessop's strategic relational approach), looks `into the contingent and tendential nature of structural constraints'... and `the cultural dimension of social life' that produce strategic structural selectivities and privilege certain actors and identities over others (Jessop 2005: p. 48; Robertson 2010: p. 192).

In light of these considerations, this paper reflects on whether there is a consensus around what forms the primary purpose of the public university in South Africa, or, if productive contradictions exist which provide an alternative approach to inform a rich dialogue and nuanced policy in this terrain. We first give a historical background to university education in South Africa, providing context to the current situation. We then move on to a discussion of understandings of the role of public universities as perceived by our informants, examining three competing demands on universities. Firstly, we discuss the financial imperatives of the university in the face of financial pressures; secondly, we examine the universities' need to maintain or enhance status through global ranking systems and promoting the university brand; and finally, we turn to the issue of social justice imperatives and reparations. Threaded through each of these thematic sections is a focus on how these issues relate to teaching and research functions at the university. Our argument is that these imperatives are in conflict with each other, putting immense pressure on universities to perform multiple roles simultaneously. In practice, this leads to certain imperatives being privileged over others, depending on the institution under discussion. We show that while the meaning of `core business' was understood differently by individual interviewees, the current financial constraints have made

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income generation a primary concern across the sector and, effectively, a core business of the otherwise not-for-profit public university.

Historicising `core business' and the purpose of the South African university

It is worth considering the historical trajectory of universities to show how common understandings of the role of public universities have changed. Sam and van der Sijde (2014) discuss four university historical models: the research-oriented Humboldtian model, the trainingoriented Napoleonic model, and the personality-oriented Anglo-Saxon model, which focuses on individual development rather than research and teaching. Today, the dominant `hybrid' Anglo-American model combines some of the features of the older models. While focusing on research and technical training, it puts them to service in a highly competitive system in which governance is decentralised, and the participation of industry as employer is dependent on the individual skills and entrepreneurial ethos of students and the ability of the universities to fit the demands of a growing market (Sam and van der Sijde 2014: 896). This model has become globally accepted and has been adapted throughout the world, with some exceptions (Marginson 2008). The adoption of this model has been accelerated by the advent of the new decentralised governance paradigm of new public management, which has positioned institutional competition, audit, and performance management as central to higher education (see e.g. Lynch 2010; Bradmore and Smyrnios 2009). It has also been impacted by the related introduction of global rankings of higher education (Lynch 2010; Ivancheva 2013).

Alongside the development of these university models, there have also been shifts towards the massification of higher education which gained traction after the Second World War, particularly in postcolonial states (see e.g. Ordorika Sacrist?n 2003; Odhiambo 2014). This development has emphasised social justice and redistribution and widening participation through admitting new types of students including women, minorities, part-time and intermittent learners, and mature students (Gumport et al. 1997: p. 2).

These trends have played out with further complexity in the South African higher education system. South African universities, like those elsewhere, are facing pressures to widen access through making education more affordable to the majority of local students. At the same time, the university system is attempting to overcome and address systemic inequalities. During apartheid, a racially stratified system, enforced by the Extension of University Education Act (1959), provided education at research universities and technical institutions (`technikons') in South Africa. There were different institutions for white and black South Africans, and better resourced institutions generally catered to white populations. In the 1990s, the newly elected democratic government sought to redress inequalities in the public higher education system. At the same time, the African National Congress (ANC) government's commitment to a set of neoliberal economic policies from 1994 did not meet with success and the imagined economic growth for the country did not come to fruition (Marais 2001). In the case of higher education, `Institutional change in post-1994 South African higher education has occurred in an epoch of globalization and in a conjuncture of the dominance of the ideology of neoliberalism' (Badat 2015: p. 79). This was expressed by the economic programme for Growth, Employment and Redistribution from 1996. This national economic plan positioned educational progress as `a key determinant of long-run economic performance and income redistribution' (Treasury of South Africa 1996: p. 15) but also insisted on containing expenditure and reducing subsidies of

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education that amounted to 7% of GDP spent per year (Treasury of South Africa 1996: p. 15). It suggested that an increased reliance on private involvement in higher education would help to enhance `the educational opportunities of historically disadvantaged communities' (Treasury of South Africa 1996: p. 15). The 1997 White Paper on Higher Education made clear the role of universities in South Africa: their responsibilities included `intellectual development' to address social inequalities, `to meet the development needs of society' and prepare students for the labour market, to prepare socially aware and critical citizens, and to contribute to the production of knowledge. Thus, as in other cases globally (see Boden and Nedeva 2010), the education sector underwent cuts while put under an increased pressure to support the private sector and simultaneously address social problems.

Coupled with the new incentives for the massification of higher education, the market liberalisation policies in the early 1990s enabled a huge number of private providers to enter the higher education terrain. Initially encouraged by the government as potentially providing greater access to higher education (Bunting 2004: p. 103), the mushrooming of private higher education providers that attracted as many as 800,000 students was eventually regulated by the Department of Higher Education and Training. Their moratorium from 1998 warranted against private universities which were often not officially registered or accredited (Fehnel 2004: p. 237?238).

Regulation however worked only to put a stop on the proliferation of private providers. It did not deal with inequalities across the sector as a whole. While student numbers rose in historically advantaged institutions (HAIs) until 1997, the same did not occur in the historically disadvantaged institutions (HDIs) (Ntshoe 2004). Indeed, the historically black institutions `felt the impact on enrolments more heavily than other institutions that were more highly regarded given historical status and resourcing' (Bozalek and Boughey 2012: p. 693). Regulatory restrictions were placed on the growth of satellite campuses, which could possibly challenge geographical inequalities (Ballim et al. 2016: p. 78). From 1998, enrolments declined across the sector as fewer matriculants than expected entered the system. In terms of funding, this meant that expected state subsidies to universities for first year enrolments did not come to fruition (Bunting 2004: p. 100). However, between 2007 and 2011, enrolment rates increased by 4.3% per year across the sector and 8.4% per year at the University of South Africa (UNISA), the large distance education provider in South Africa (Simkins et al. 2016: p. 342).

Between 2000 and 2013, the percentage of university income coming directly from government subsidy decreased from 49 to 40%, sometimes falling even lower to 30% (Cloete 2016: p. 3). Third-stream income, i.e. income not drawn from government subsidies or student fees, while increasing in nominal terms, has remained constant in real terms over the same period (Cloete 2016: p. 3). While there have certainly been some major strides in massifying the higher education system, and particular universities have dramatically changed their demographic makeup, the system as a whole has been unable to cope with the lack of funding and pressures to widen access. To make up for the decreased government income and the lack of increased third-stream income, student fees have increased by 9% annually between 2010 and 2014 (Cloete 2016: p. 3), making higher education unaffordable to the general South African population. In response, the government has committed to providing more financial aid to students through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). At the end of 2017, President Zuma announced that higher education would be free for poor and working-class students--those with a combined family income of less than R350 000 per year (about $28,406 US) (Davis 2017).

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