1.2 Transformation regulations and oversight in higher education

mr chief mahlubi mabizela

chief director: university Education & development: (dHEST)

The policy proposed by the White Paper outlining “a programme for the transformation of higher education in South africa”, which was issued by the government in 1997, remains in place and is likely to remain relevant for some time. The White Paper set five goals for the education system: • To promote equity of access, eradicate unfair discrimination and provide redress for past inequalities; • To meet national development needs through quality teaching and research; • To support a democratic ethos; • To advance all forms of knowledge, and address the demands of the local context; and • To promote development of a single coordinated higher education system with diverse institutional missions and programmes. although a more integrated approach has been adopted to transform the national education system – the 17 national departments responsible for the sector before 1994 have been replaced by only two now – greater integration within the system itself is still required. The White Paper and the government deliberately provided a loose definition of what is meant by “transformation” on the basis that the higher education institutions themselves possessed the intellectual rigour to define and implement transformation as part of their remit. in this regard, the government’s expectation that universities would be able to take up the issues of what transformation means and how inequity should be redressed – forging their own programmes – has remained largely unmet. The view has been that higher education institutions have tended to wait for a departmental lead rather than taking the initiative themselves.

The closest that the White Paper came to a definition of “transformation” was in its foreword, which noted that the higher education system should be transformed to redress past inequalities, including those based on race, gender and class; to serve a new social order; to meet pressing national needs; and to respond to new realities and opportunities. The White Paper noted that, accordingly, transformation requires: increased, broadened participation; responsiveness to societal interests and needs; and cooperation and partnership in governance.

a Transformation Oversight Committee (Toc) on transformation was established in the wake of the White Paper and a Report of the Ministerial Committee on Transformation and Social Cohesion and the Elimination of Discrimination in Public Higher Education Institutions produced under the leadership of Professor crain Soudien in 2008. The terms of reference for the Toc stated that: “Transformation involves the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning; the elimination of weak administrative systems, especially at historically disadvantaged universities; the elimination of discriminatory practices based on gender, race, class and historical imbalances; the provision of adequate infrastructure so that all universities can adequately meet their fundamental mandates of teaching, learning, research and community engagement in the context of social cohesion; the expansion and improvement of research throughout the system [in line with the principle that research should be part of the mandate of each institution within the system, including among those which are not research-led]; [and] the expansion of access to university education to many more students”.

broadly, South africa aspires to forge a higher education system that: • Is demographically representative. This should entail individual institutions drafting appropriate race and gender equity policies as stipulated by the Higher Education act (HEa) of 1997 and establishing forums to implement them; • Provides students and staff with good opportunities for access and success. This entails ensuring that students have a reasonable chance of obtaining a qualification, which constitutes a substantial challenge when a significant proportion of students – as many as 75% in some cohorts – may fail to graduate, let alone find suitable work;

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• Welcomes and cares for all. The HEa states that institutional culture should promote tolerance and respect for fundamental human rights and “create an appropriate environment for teaching, research and learning”. in this context, the #rhodesmustfall (#rmf) student protest movement, which was launched in 2016, highlighted the importance of forging inclusive cultural spaces on campus, and naming places and the built environment accordingly; • Is diverse, differentiated and articulated. in this regard, a recent success story featured a student who started his tertiary studies at a TVET college before later attaining a Phd; • Is research-productive and drives innovation; and • Produces educated, critical, employable and effective citizens and leaders for the future.

The Transformation oversight committee (Toc) on university transformation was established to advise the minister responsible for higher education on policies to combat racism, sexism and other forms of unfair discrimination, such as against lGbTiQa people, in the wake of an incident in which black employees had been humiliated by racist white students at the university of the free State (ufS), bringing public attention to bear on the topic of untransformed campuses.

The Toc further sought to provide advice on policies to promote social cohesion and an environment in which all students and staff members could live, study, work and flourish free of constraints caused by unfair discrimination; and on the role of universities to promote the development of a free, fair and non-discriminatory society beyond the world of academia. in this regard, the higher education system should do more to provide leadership, including by producing the leaders themselves, to help the country as a whole to address key socio-economic issues such as unemployment, as well as challenges of governance within government and parastatals.

The Toc has undertaken a number of actions to monitor transformation with a view to advising the minister on policy and strategies for accelerating the process. The Toc • Evaluates institutional transformation plans and annual reports; studies universities’ transformation charters with a view to developing a sectoral transformation charter; • Assesses the impact of language policies on institutional cultures and social integration; • Conducts visits and engages on a range of transformation issues, such as, access for people with disabilities; • Advises on the effective handling of complaints in the sector to ensure that they are fairly addressed, balancing the interests and concerns of the individual complainants and the institutions; and • Liaises with the sector in an effort to provide advice on transformation.

To this end, it has convened an academic conference on transformation; established working relations with a range of relevant structures and institutions; provided input into a number of transformation policies; and forged tools to track the qualitative as well as quantitative progress made in implementing transformation in higher education. much of the Toc’s work seeks to address the issue of institutional cultures and how people relate to each other within institutions and forge a sense of place accordingly. in this regard, racism, sexism and class discrimination continue to permeate the core academic activities of teaching, learning and research, as well as the social activities and spaces of many of the country’s higher education institutions. Successive reports have indicated that transformation is taking place at a slow pace, which has been acknowledged as a challenge by a number of universities, such as the university of cape Town (ucT) and ufS, indicating the breadth of the problem faced. a number of the historically white institutions remain inherently conservative and resistant to change, and concerns have mounted that too little progress has been made in promoting transformation across the sector. There is a need for institutions to create enabling environments and institutional cultures that are welcoming to all; embody values of democracy; affirm diversity; and uproot deep-seated racism and sexism that are barriers to meaningful participation in learning and campus life.

in relation to the issue of transforming the language of instruction in the sector, the council on Higher Education (cHE) found that while millions of rand had been spent under the apartheid government for the development of afrikaans, ensuring that it was able to function as the main language of

tuition across multiple disciplines in the academy, far less has been spent in the past 20 years on developing other local languages for this purpose, despite the official recognition of 11 national languages. resistance to language transformation in the sector included a case taken by afriforum to the constitutional court in 2019 seeking, unsuccessfully, to overturn a new policy promoting greater linguistic diversity at universities. meanwhile, pressure for transformation of the curricula and modes of knowledge acquisition at universities has mounted. a number of projects have been launched focusing on african scholarship and what it means to be a university in South africa. Persuasive calls have been made for transformation and decolonisation of the curriculum, including by a rejection of Eurocentricism.

in addition to the work of the Toc, the department of Higher Education and Training (dHET) is seeking to support transformation in the higher education sector through its University Capacity Development Programme (UCDP). The ucdP provides funds to support transformation in a number of areas that the government is seeking to influence. for example: • The Staffing South Africa’s universities’ framework (SSauf) supports programmes to nurture emerging scholars; • Creation of a new generation of academics; • Enhancing the capacity of existing academics; and • Developing administrators, leaders and managements in the sector.

individual institutions are invited to identify key scholars, academics and administrators who may benefit from support to improve their qualifications and gain promotion, which the dHET then agrees to fund. The initiative cuts across core programmes and supports the development of teaching and research, while meeting diversity targets for race and gender.