Bounds of Democracy: Epistemological Access in Higher Education

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Author: Wally Morrow

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Published by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published 2009 ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2271-7 ISBN (pdf) 978-0-7969-2272-4 © 2009 Human Sciences Research Council The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’) or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council. Copyedited by Peter Lague Typeset by Baseline Publishing Services Cover by Fuel Design Printed by Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302 www.oneworldbooks.com Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Tel: +44 (0) 20 7240 0856; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7379 0609 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in North America by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985 www.ipgbook.com

Contents


Foreword iv Abbreviations viii 1

Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world 1

2

Varieties of educational tragedy 13

3

Epistemic values in curriculum transformation 28

4

Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education 40

5

Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom? 55

6

Entitlement and achievement in education 69

7 Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions in South Africa 87 8

Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education 113

9

Learning delivery models in Higher Education in South Africa 138

Bibliography 169 Index 172

Foreword


Since the 1970s Wally Morrow’s voice has provided a vigorous and independent commentary on educational policy and practice in South Africa. In this collection of essays, which spans a period from the late 1980s to the early years of the new century, he turns his attention to teaching in higher education in South Africa.1 The central focus of Morrow’s critical examination of key issues before, during and since the transition in 1994 to a democratic order is the conflict between strong populist views of democracy and the nature of Higher Education, and consequent necessary conditions for it to flourish. Its main theme is a concern that the understandable enthusiasm for democracy in South Africa in the 1990s has undermined the idea of expertise in Higher Education. Higher Education, Morrow argues, cannot be democratic. Framing the defence of academic practice in the essays in this collection is the metaphor of bounds, a concept that reflects an ambiguity that Morrow sets out to illuminate. On the one hand, our thinking about Higher Education is bounded in the sense of being limited by certain kinds of corrupting assumptions about the relationship between education and democracy. On the other hand, the defence of academic practice demands that bounds be set against the intrusion of assumptions and practices that threaten to undermine it. Deliberation about education is both inevitably bounded by its past and present contexts, and in need of a capacity to resist elements of that context that set boundaries on imagining new ways to conduct academic practice in the future. Each essay in the collection reflects these concerns. Essay 1, ‘Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world’, responds to the idea that values education is about the development of character, understood as a ‘stable disposition of individuals’. Prioritising character in our understanding of education, it argues, threatens to bind us to a form of individualism that is integral to instrumental rationality, making it difficult for us to retain a sense of the communal ideals that shaped our transition to democracy, and to talk of other goals – like patriotism. Instead, Morrow urges us to focus on the educative practice of discussion in thinking about values in education. Essay 2, ‘Varieties of educational tragedy’, discusses the bounds placed on Higher Education by simplistic thinking about equity. Concentrating

iv


attention on liberation, understood as the elimination of poverty, distracts us from paying proper attention to the need for economic development. Instead of being correlative, equity and development are in tension and need to be balanced. Yet educational policy in South Africa is driven by considerations of equity and redress, which tend to be privileged above other considerations. If we lose sight of the values of Higher Education, Morrow warns, we will be left only with post-secondary education. Educational tragedy looms when simplifying choices are made. The potential for tragedy lurks in other educational fashions and fads. Essay 3, ‘Epistemic values in curriculum transformation’, takes the reader closer to the argumentative heart of the collection. While curricular content does need to be modified, our debates about this process tend to be bounded by the rhetoric of transformation and reform, often premised on the assumption that any change must be good. But only some kinds of curriculum change would represent an improvement and they should be grounded on epistemic values, which constitute the grammar of academic practice as disinterested inquiry. Essay 4, ‘Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education’, turns the argument to ways in which reflection on Higher Education is bounded not only by new fads, but by aspects of the traditional culture of Higher Education as well. Depending on a situation of co-presence,2 as well as the assumption that Higher Education institutions can only be competitively independent, this traditional model is enormously expensive. Massification of Higher Education requires thinking in different ways about how to provide it. Breaking down these boundaries leads towards open learning, to teaching as resource-based learning. Essay 5, ‘Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom?’, was a response to the O’Brien Affair3 but now stands as a response to the threat to academic freedom from the ‘marketisation’ of Higher Education. While one possible understanding of academic freedom might cast it as in conflict with democratic principles, Morrow’s argument is that a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom. Drawing on an intricate discussion of ‘truth’ and its significance in educational practice, he shows that what is constitutive of academic practice must be distinguished from what is instrumentally valuable. There follow two essays widely read and hopefully influential since their earlier publication. Essay 6, ‘Entitlement and achievement in education’, can

v

bounds of democracy

be read as a comment on the bounds set by protest politics on the possibilities for moving beyond the conditions that provoked struggle politics. While it has become popular to think that Higher Education is simply obtainable by the demands of agents, such demands misunderstand the role of agency in achievement. Epistemological as against formal access depends not only on teaching but also on the efforts of the learner. Too strong an emphasis on entitlement undermines academic values and the achievement of becoming a participant in academic practices. ‘In the same way’, writes the author, ‘as no one else can do my running for me, no one else can do my learning for me.’


In ‘Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions in South Africa’ (Essay 7), Morrow defends higher education institutions against the ambiguous democratic demands of stakeholder politics for the transformation of universities. Academic practices cannot be egalitarian; they are not transparent and senates are the appropriate governing bodies of universities. In a warning that might equally be directed at the reduced power of senates that has accompanied the growth of corporate, executive university management, Morrow observes that if we lose a sense of the role of senates then we will lose our sense of higher knowledge and Higher Education. Essay 8, ‘Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education’, poses the question: what is Higher Education for? This essay warns that modern societies depend on Higher Education and, if we lose our understanding of higher knowledge, South Africa’s aspirations to become a modern society will not come to pass; such knowledge cannot be bought off the shelf. To deny the distinction between higher and other kinds of knowledge undermines Higher Education, which must be distinguished from post-secondary education. Morrow’s argument is that the function of Higher Education is to constitute, distribute and generate higher knowledge. The collection concludes with a final essay on provision: ‘Learning delivery models in Higher Education in South Africa’. While different ways of delivering Higher Education have become commonplace, we need to think more clearly about how we are to deliver Higher Education, to rethink teaching itself. This requires liberating ourselves from the assumption that it must include face-toface contact. But in South Africa our interpretation of the distinction between distance and contact provision, as well as competition between universities, inhibits our understanding of possible future models.

vi


foreword

Morrow’s exploration of the transformation of Higher Education in South Africa – the social forces driving it, and the demands and conceptual limits of change in education – demonstrates the profoundly practical nature of philosophical treatment at its best. By focusing on key concepts like transformation, democracy, stakeholders, character and open learning, Morrow probes the theoretical foundations and dogmas that either bound or could enable the liberation that the passing of Apartheid promised. His analysis deploys among its tools careful treatment of essential distinctions: between warrant and acceptability (Essays 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7), discussion and conversation (Essays 1 and 5), knowledge, propaganda and power (Essays 2 and 5), rejection and refutation (Essays 7 and 8), rights and privileges (Essays 5 and 6), academic work and ideology (Essays 5 and 7), Higher Education and Further Education (Essay 8) and contact and distance education (Essays 4 and 9). There are, Morrow shows, no comfortable certainties, except perhaps the inevitability of shallow thinking. This leading commentator on South African education has again illustrated the urgent need for systematic philosophical inquiry into educational questions, especially teaching. His probing examination of the presuppositions that underpin our educational discourse exemplifies the very academic practice that this collection so resolutely defends. Penny Enslin Glasgow October 2008 Notes 1

His previous collections are Chains of Thought (1989) and Learning to Teach in South Africa (2007).

2

Co-presence refers to teaching situations in which the teacher and learners are present in the same place and at the same time.

3

During a visit to the Political Science Department at the University of Cape Town in 1986 the Irish politician, writer and academic, Conor Cruise O’Brien, criticised the academic boycott. The student protests that followed led the university to suspend his lectures and he was asked to leave. There followed intense debate about the nature and place of academic freedom.

vii


Abbreviations

viii

ACU Association of Commonwealth Universities BSc Bachelor of Science CHE Council on Higher Education DoE Department of Education ICT Information and communication technology NCHE National Commission on Higher Education NEPI National Education Policy Investigation NOLA National Open Learning Agency NPHE National Plan for Higher Education NQF National Qualifications Framework ODL Open/Distance Learning RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme SAIDE South African Institute for Distance Education SAUVCA South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association SRC Students’ Representative Council UCT University of Cape Town Unisa University of South Africa Wits University of the Witwatersrand

1

Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world (First presented at the Department of Education conference: ‘Values, Education


and Democracy in the 21st Century’, Kirstenbosch, 22–24 February 2001)1

… while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our humanity.2

Background to the ‘Values, Education and Democracy in the 21st Century’ debate A good reason to launch the public debate ‘Values, Education and Democracy in the 21st Century’ at this time in our national history is the pervasive sense of an as yet unfulfilled hope that the transition in South Africa would lead to the growth of a new patriotism. This hope has as one of its sources the struggle against despotism in South Africa and the civic–republican conception of democracy embedded in the Freedom Charter. It was also vividly expressed in the extraordinarily sweeping shared optimism that characterised the first general election on 27 April 1994. But now, nearly seven years down the path, we find ourselves in a society drifting towards greed and competitive individualism, where market forces seem to override all other social ties, a society incrementally characterised by the selfish pursuit of individual or sectional interests and worrying signs of the perpetuation of the historical divisions which we hoped would have been overcome in a democratic society. In spite of gargantuan efforts to transform what is a key public institution in any democracy, education, and in spite of the generation of educational policies which are internationally admired, many of our educational institutions remain in the doldrums, with deep demoralisation among teachers, and pupils and students who seem to be motivated more by a sense of entitlement than by a commitment to the ideals of education.

1

B ounds of democracy

In the light of these disappointments the Values in Education Initiative is particularly welcome. This initiative is an attempt to foster a public debate about our shared values – values that should bind us together as a particular historical community and shape our individual and collective identities. Values with this kind of potency are not founded by coercion or legislative fiat; they emerge gradually, if at all, out of community life. But ongoing discussion amongst morally responsible agents, who share a sense of a common history and a common fate in an uncompromisingly competitive globalising world, can serve as a catalyst. The current conference is one moment in that discussion and, arrogantly assuming that I am a ‘morally responsible agent’, this essay is conceived as a contribution to that discussion. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

It begins by drawing attention to two significant features of the definition of values that we find in the Report of the Working Group on Values in Education.3 It then picks up on some attractive thoughts from Gandhi about the relation between education and character-building and claims that – appealing as these ways of talking might be – they do not enable us to confront the main enemy, which in this essay I shall call instrumental rationality. The essay concludes with a few comments about teacher education in relation to competences and commitments, and discussion and epistemic values.

Character-building The Report states that, ‘By values we mean desirable qualities of character such as honesty, integrity, tolerance, diligence, responsibility, compassion, altruism, justice and respect.’4 There can be little dispute that honesty, integrity and so on are ‘desirable qualities of character’ and that they are qualities which we should try to foster in our schools and other institutions. But what I want to draw attention to here is the eccentric idea that ‘values’ are ‘qualities of character’. It is clear that this is an exceedingly limited definition of ‘values’, one that leaves no logical space for most of the significant uses we have for this word. How, for example, could we in these terms explain our thinking of the value of, say, education itself, or mathematics or music, or the value of shelter, food and drinking water to those mired in spirals of poverty. It cannot help to say that this definition is offered only for the purposes of this Report. The Report is a public document that is supposed to launch a public debate about values, education and democracy,

2

cultivating humanity in the contemporary world


and a restricted definition of this kind is likely to skew that debate in an unsatisfactory and, perhaps, self-undermining direction. But there is a related issue here, one that will shape the remainder of this essay. If we prioritise ‘character’ and ‘character-building’ in our debate about values and education, in the context of a democracy in the contemporary world, we are likely to provide a hostage to what is arguably the main corrupting force in education at this time. The problem is that ‘character’ is naturally conceived of as a stable disposition of individuals. To highlight the development of ‘character’ in a discussion of values in education is, thus, implicitly to reinforce a particular social ontology; one that is based on the idea that a society is a contingent collection of human individuals who happen to find themselves living in the same geographical space. By a social ontology I mean a map of the possibilities for social policy.5 To prioritise ‘character’ is to exclude a range of possibilities of how we might address the issues that face us, especially those possibilities harbingered in the civic–republican conception of democracy we find expressed in the Freedom Charter. Before I develop this central point further, I want to take a detour via the thoughts of one of the early heroes in the struggle against the colonial oppression that was the precursor to Apartheid. Gandhi is an example of a thinker who forges an indissoluble link between education and the development of character. And although his voice comes from a historical and cultural context that is in some ways radically different from ours, he was concerned with some problems that remain familiar to us in our world, and his thoughts are, for this reason, likely to remain relevant for us. He was concerned, for example, with how to achieve social cohesion in a diverse society characterised by deep historical divisions, with how to protest effectively without using violence, with how to escape the debilitating tentacles of colonialism, and with how to alleviate poverty and foster development in the increasingly borderless modernising world. We can accept that problems of this kind provide the frame in which we need to think about education in our context. Gandhi says, ‘There is something radically wrong in the system of education that fails to arm boys and girls to fight against social and other evils.’6 We might be envious of the moral boldness of this claim, a boldness that is difficult for us to retrieve after a century of horrors perpetrated by regimes, some of which, it must be said, were driven by strong moral convictions. We

3


find ourselves in a world in which difference is celebrated, and the relativist moral and political theories that support this stance have generated doubt about traditional moral certainties. Persistently over a period of three decades, Gandhi conceived of ‘arming’ boys and girls for the ‘fight’ against social and other evils by ‘building character’. We can note that he seems to take for granted that ‘character’ is always positive – he does not seem to acknowledge that there can be bad character as well as good.


In 1909 we find him saying that while he was in prison he read a great deal – from Emerson and Mazzini to the Upanishads – and discovered that they ‘all confirm the view that education does not mean knowledge of letters but it means character-building’.7 He says, in 1917, that ‘all education must aim at building character’,8 in 1924 that ‘the formation of character would have priority over knowledge of the alphabet’,9 and in 1933 that ‘the primary aim of all education is, or should be, the moulding of the character of pupils’.10 The confidence and lucidity of these sentiments probably have considerable appeal to us in our situation as we consider the state of our society and hover uncomfortably between the two poles of shallow thoughts about child-centred education, and the distressing persistence of discipline by violence and authoritarian modes of teaching. To reorientate ourselves towards character-building might seem to offer us a way of navigating between these two poles. However, without digging further into Gandhi’s thinking, one comment we might make about his emphasis on character-building as the primary aim of all education, is that it has a tendency to undermine the centrality of the development of knowledge in our conception of education. It thus has a tendency to make it difficult to maintain a conception of education as something different from ‘the prescription of a worthy set of homilies about what is good or bad, positive or negative’,11 or to sustain a distinction between missionaries and teachers, advocacy and education. We might be concerned about the ways in which such a view, in the wrong hands, can itself be an open sesame to some of the worst abuses of schooling: self-righteous moralising, indoctrination, corporal punishment and authoritarian forms of imposition. But despite these caveats many of us, like the Report, no doubt find some comfort in the idea that re-emphasising character-building as a central aim

4



of education might be a way of countering the drift away from the hoped-for new patriotism. Part of the appeal of this idea is that it resonates with the common-sense view that intellect and character are two of the central features of human beings, features that can come into conflict with each other. The leaders of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany were not, in general, lacking in intellectual abilities; nor was Wouter Basson.12 A highly developed intellect is compatible with a morally degenerate character. But the deeper problem, as I previously said, is that to prioritise character in this way in our understanding of education can commit us to a form of individualism that is itself integral to the way of thinking which makes it so difficult to articulate a defensible view of patriotism in the contemporary world. We can call this way of thinking ‘instrumental rationality’. Gandhi was also concerned with instrumental rationality and the ways in which it undermines the value of education. The following quotation from his book True Education might almost have been written as a comment about the current situation in education in South Africa: The real difficulty is the people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of character of the educated. The girls, we say, do not have to earn, so why should they be educated? As long as such ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education.13 Instrumental rationality is a tightly knit web of beliefs, conceptions and practices and there can, of course, be various ways of characterising it. One way would be to show, as Gandhi does above, the ways in which instrumental rationality is the guiding philosophy of markets, and that one of its symptoms is rampant consumerism and an obsession with measuring the value of anything – from art to sport and entertainment – in terms of money. But another way, and one that is more fruitful for our purposes here, would be to say that at the root of instrumental rationality stands the assumption that the appropriate way to analyse actions is as means to some end. This assumption

5


can, then, be extended into the view that the value of actions is to be assessed in terms of their consequences, the ends to which they are directed.

Instrumental rationality


The story is somewhat crudely outlined here, but it provides us with enough of a framework to understand how – if we prioritise character-building in our account of education – we provide a hostage to a way of thinking that makes it difficult for us to talk of patriotism. In briefly elaborating this theme, I shall make three comments that might serve to enrich our understanding of instrumental rationality. The first is the ways in which instrumental rationality was a principal driving force of the scientific revolutions of 17th- and 18th-century Europe, which still shape our high opinion of the importance of science in society and our educational curricula. There is a widespread conviction that science is ‘useful’ – that is, that it will enable us to overcome problems with which we are confronted. The value of science, in short, is popularly conceived of as instrumental rather than intrinsic. In the light of the overwhelming success of science and its technological applications in addressing the practical problems of how to improve human life on this planet, and the ways in which the scientific enterprise is shaped in the form of instrumental rationality, it would be simply naive to repudiate instrumental rationality. The problem, as has been frequently enough pointed out by, for example, Greenpeace and the ecological movement in our own day, is how to prevent the spread of instrumental rationality beyond its appropriate sphere, how to fight against the powerful tendency to think that instrumental rationality is the paradigm for all rationality and the master ruler for the measurement of all value. The problem can be expressed as that of how to prevent the inclusion of the word ‘all’ in the basic assumption that the way to analyse and evaluate actions is as means to some end. As soon as instrumental rationality becomes imperialistic, it can drain our lives of significance, as the earlier quotation from Gandhi indicates, and shut out the conceptual space in which we can make sense of some of our crucial values, especially those constitutive of our democracy. A main source of this problem is that instrumental rationality can be, and typically is, presented as valueneutral, and this takes me to my second comment.

6



Instrumental rationality can be presented as value-neutral because in starting from the distinction between means and ends, it can claim that all values or value judgements are ultimately evaluations of the desirability of the ends. The value of the means is derivative from that, and can be assessed according to how effectively the means achieve the end. The next step is, then, fairly obvious. We assess the value of the ends or the consequences themselves in terms of the extent to which they satisfy the desires of human beings. But the desires of human beings are essentially the desires of individual human beings, which might sometimes contingently overlap. Thus we discover two of the deeply embedded bulwarks of instrumental rationality: individualism and subjectivism, or (if we take into view the possibility of contingently overlapping individual desires) relativism. Far from being value-neutral, instrumental rationality is itself an expression of a particular theory of values, one which claims that all values are ultimately the subjective preferences of individuals; whatever people de facto desire is desirable. In the contemporary world this theory of values is so deeply entrenched that it seems self-evident. And this leads to a third comment. Contemporary forms of globalisation are saturated with instrumental rationality that insidiously seeps into every aspect of our private and public lives, from the most intimate to the most communal, and prompts us into seeing everything in terms of instrumental values. Underwritten by this enveloping influence, instrumental rationality and its assumption of individualism and subjectivism becomes a social ontology, stipulating the range of possibilities for social policy, including education. The supposed value-neutrality of instrumental rationality makes it especially seductive in a diverse world dominated by value-skepticism. To prioritise character development in our discussion about values and education is to risk falling into this trap, making it difficult either to retain a sense of the communal ideals that shaped our transition to democracy, or to talk about patriotism without sounding merely romantic and self-righteous. Promoting character development comes across as a faint-hearted rearguard action after the high ground has been conceded to instrumental rationality, and in this way it risks merely reinforcing the imperialistic pretensions of instrumental rationality.

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L earning B ounds ofto democracy T each in S outh A frica

Attempts to counter instrumental rationality Faced with the same kind of problem, the National Council for Teacher Education in India has recently published an ‘Initiation Document’ that has interesting implications for the ways we think about teacher education in our context. The document is called Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School Education,14 and the title itself gives a clue to what its main thrust will be. To think of teacher education in terms merely of teacher competence, as is currently internationally fashionable and as is deeply embedded in recent education policy in South Africa, is to lose sight of the essential template for any professional education. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

The document outlines ‘ten competency areas’ and ‘five commitment areas’. These ‘commitments’ are definitively conceived of not as a supplement to the main work of teacher education, but as its very rationale: ‘It is this commitment component that plays a decisive role in effective teacher education … fostering professional commitment among teachers must become an integral component of pre-service and in-service teacher education.’15 One way of interpreting the shift that is made here is to say that while the concept of competence can harmonise neatly with instrumental rationality, the concept of commitment pulls away from that framework. Two of the commitment areas are especially relevant to our concerns here: (4) Commitment to achieve excellence – that is, care and concern for doing everything in the classroom, in the school and community in the best possible manner and in the spirit of ‘whatever you do, do it well’ or the do-itwell attitude; and (5) Commitment to basic human values – including the role model aspect comprising genuine practice of professional values such as impartiality, objectivity, intellectual honesty, national loyalty, etc. with consistency.16 These views can encourage us to step out of instrumental rationality but, like character development, they also risk trapping us in the form of individualism integral to instrumental rationality. Commitments are ordinarily understood as individual rather than social. The irreducibly social dimensions of our problem get swallowed into the dominant social ontology in which society is conceived of as nothing more than a collection of individuals driven by instrumental values.

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cultivating T eaching humanity large classes in the contemporary in higher education world

Discussion: A way to think about values, education and democracy in a globalising world


To bring this essay to some kind of conclusion (the issues raised here are profound and cannot be solved in a few words), I shall make a few comments about our loss of a sense of the value of education and its replacement by an impoverished and short-sighted view in which its only value is instrumental. I want to make the strong claim that the practice of discussion, as a specialised form of conversation, should serve as the centre of gravity in our thinking about values, education and democracy in a globalising world in which we would like to give impetus to the emergence of a new patriotism. The practice of discussion is strongly opposed to instrumental rationality and its theory of values. Discussion shares some of the features and conditions of conversation. Conversation is a definitive way in which human beings relate to one another and make a human life together. One of the conditions for conversation is an absence of systematically antagonistic or unequal relationships between the participants. Conversation presupposes a participatory relationship between those who are party to the conversation; they acknowledge one another as fellow human beings sharing common human feelings, vulnerabilities, sympathies and hopes. A conversation is characterised by mutual ties of recognition and concern and, at least temporarily, a shared interest. Conversations and discussions are not sharply distinguishable from each other, but in a discussion there is a stronger sense of discipline, and this provides the key to the conceptual relationships between discussion and education and discussion and democracy. Discussions have a much more definite subject matter, a much clearer purpose and, thus, stronger principles of relevance, than other kinds of conversation. And it is such characteristics that illuminate the conceptual link between discussion and discipline. Currently in South Africa, perhaps because of the priority of negotiation in our recent history, but perhaps as a subliminal trace of communal ideals, there are frequently references to dialogue and debate. The view I am putting forward here is not unsympathetic to these ways of talking. Dialogue and debate are themselves two specialised forms of discussion, but they have shortcomings in the light of the strong claims I want to make for the practices

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of discussion. Dialogue still seems to presuppose (at least two) preformed individuals (or parties) interacting with each other; debate assumes prior rival or conflicting views about some matter. In appealing to the more generic concept of discussion, I want to emphasise a critical characteristic of discussion that might be occluded in these other ways of talking. Discussion has a seminal role in human life; it constitutes a human world, and is itself educative. For these reasons discussion, is a central concept in both a civic–republican conception of democracy, and to a proper understanding of education and the development and acquisition of knowledge. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

Central to a civic–republican conception of democracy is the principle that disagreements and conflicts in the society will be solved by discussion rather than by dogma, violence, propaganda or other forms of manipulation or sheer power. Education for citizenship in such a democracy must have as one of its primary aims the development of the capacities, including the virtues, to participate in discussion. Paulo Freire’s dialogical conception of education points in an appropriate direction. Dialogical education is contrasted with traditional education, which is characterised as ‘monological’. But both dialogical and monological seem to presuppose that the voices are expressing the views of individuals, or categories of individuals. In terms of the view I am attempting to articulate here, this presupposition is not sufficiently social. The problem is not so much with Freire’s thesis, but with popular interpretations of that thesis. Discussion is essentially social, and is in strong opposition to an instrumental conception of human life and education. Discussion is educative in the sense that it has the potential to transform our prior opinions and, over time, to reconstitute not only our opinions, but our very identities as well. Discussion is the principal way in which humanity is cultivated. Knowledge itself is an outcome of a kind of discussion called inquiry. This kind of discussion includes not only contemporary or local participants and is characterised by specialised forms of discipline shaped by the definitive goal of finding the truth about some matter. This is why the distinction between warrant (or evidence) and acceptability (or mere agreement) is so central to the disciplines of inquiry. Like other forms of discussion, inquiry is irreducibly social – it is possible only in communities of inquiry. Its general disciplines are familiar enough: tolerance,

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respect, impartiality, diligence, openness, justice and courage. Values such as these are constitutive of the practice of inquiry; they are internal to that practice, and are distorted if we try to force them into the frame of instrumental values.


The intrinsic values which make inquiry the practice that it is can be called epistemic values. They are the shared values of communities of inquiry, and are misunderstood if interpreted as merely subjective or relativist. In practice, different fields of inquiry and different communities of inquirers embody epistemic values somewhat differently (the disciplines of history are different from the disciplines of physics), but any field of inquiry, by definition, is constituted by epistemic values. The ideals of education are necessarily tied up with epistemic values, and this must be a key dimension of any debate about values and education. Of course, we must acknowledge that education also has important contingent effects such as the empowerment of learners, the amelioration of social and political problems (e.g. the spread of HIV/AIDS), or the fostering of a new patriotism, but we lose a sense of the value of education or inquiry if we confuse their contingent effects with their constitutive values. Learning how to be a participant in communities of inquiry is at the heart of what we understand by education, and in education we can have no higher goal than to try to improve the success of our formal institutions of learning in enabling learners to develop the sense of the values that guide the practices of inquiry. Such values are not merely an add on, an optional extra, to the practices of education and inquiry; they are at their core. It is not merely intellectual abilities that are involved here; it is the full humanity of learners, a humanity that links them to other human beings and not only those in their local surroundings. And these provide good reasons for saying that if we are concerned with the fate of our country in the contemporary world, we will do well to emphasise discussion in our public life, and to foster and nurture the disciplines of discussion in education and, because of its seminal role in shaping our future, in the education of school teachers. Unlike character development or commitments, important as these are, this cannot be interpreted as merely a sentimental supplement to the main business – it is the main business itself. And it has more promise in fostering a spirit of social solidarity and, perhaps, even a new civic pride and patriotism that can resist being interpreted as instrumental values.

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Notes 1

This essay was published in Spirit of the Nation: Reflections on South Africa’s Educational Ethos, edited by Kader Asmal and Wilmot James, published in 2002 by New Africa Education and the Human Sciences Research Council for the Ministry of Education. Reprinted with permission.

2

Seneca, On Anger, quoted in M.C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. xiii.

3

The Department of Education of South Africa, Values, Education and Democracy in the 21st century, report of the Working Group on Values in Education, 2000. Subsequently referred to as the Report.

4

The Report, p. 10.

5

See ‘Irreducibly social goods’ in C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995.

6

M. Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, New Delhi: National Council for Teacher Education, 1998, p. 18.

7

Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 2.

8


9


10 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 17. 11 The Department of Education of South Africa, Report of the History/Archaeology Panel, 2nd edition, January 2001b, p. 6. 12 Wouter Basson, allegedly, was an apartheid-era germ warfare expert. 13 In Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 1. 14 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School Education, ed. D.N. Khosla, New Delhi: National Council for Teacher Education, 1998. 15 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School Education, p. xii. 16 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School Education, pp. xii–xiii.

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2

Varieties of educational tragedy (Prepared for the Inaugural Conference of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust: ‘The Political Economy of Social Change in South Africa’, 1–2 April 1997)


A classical view of tragedy The conventional classical (Aristotelian) theory of tragedy is (crudely) as follows: the hero – conceived of as a good person of strong character – is faced in a particular situation with a cruel choice between two actions that are in conflict with each other. To choose one is to repudiate the other. The hero finds herself, for example, in a situation in which she has either to defile the statues of the gods or kill her child; there is no escape from this dilemma, and whichever she chooses is not only, in effect, a rejection of the other, but in itself an evil. It is a terrible thing either to defile the statues or to kill her child, but circumstances force her to do one or the other. We need to notice that this view of tragedy presupposes a moral order; a background of shared goods that makes it understandable why the choice is tragic. Furthermore, that moral order, if it is coherent, does not consist in a set of logically incompatible goods; the hero is faced with not a theoretical but a practical dilemma, one that has direct consequences in the real world. The real world is itself complex, and human beings are neither angels nor beasts; they are moved by both principles and passions. The tragic conflict arises in a particular historical situation, as an outcome of the unfolding of a contingent set of human and natural circumstances. But, as Martha Nussbaum1 reminds us in her discussion of Euripides’ Hecuba, there is also a different understanding of tragedy in the classical tradition. Here the tragedy consists not in an inescapable clash between accepted goods, but in the breakdown of moral order as such. The deeply shared agreements and practices that provide the framework for all our moral judgements and moral principles, and even our human character, no longer hold and, ‘There

13


is simply nowhere to turn. The foundation has undergone corruption … We are confronted here with the total disintegration of a moral community, the slippage and corruption of an entire moral language.’ The play itself depicts some horrifying acts of cruelty and revenge, and concludes with the actors crawling about on the stage naked and on all fours (i.e. no longer human). This play has had, according to Nussbaum, a mixed reception in the tradition, partly because it does not conform to the classical view of the structure of a tragedy. But, as Nussbaum remarks, ‘This alarming story of metamorphosis arouses and explores some of our deepest fears about the fragility of humanness …’ Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

Moral dilemmas and their relationship to tragedy In the post-Kantian world, morality is widely understood as a set of universal moral principles such as freedom, respect for persons, equality and truthtelling. Such principles are conceived of as quite different from scientific laws. Both moral principles and scientific laws might explain events, but moral principles not only explain human action, they also guide and shape it. Moral principles are thought of as providing the foundation for our moral judgements of the actions of others and ourselves, as well as for guiding our moral conduct and shaping the practices and relationships in which this conduct is embedded. But, because there is more than one moral principle, they can clash. This possibility, familiar in our everyday lives, was fruitfully exploited by Lawrence Kohlberg2 in his studies of the moral development of children. Children were told stories in which an agent is faced with a conflict between two moral principles and then asked what the agent should do. For example, a poor man’s wife is dying but there is a medicine that can save her life. Unfortunately, he does not have the money to buy the medicine, he has no friends or family who can lend him the money, the pharmacist refuses to give him credit, and so on, but he can steal the medicine. What should he do? We can see a formal similarity between this kind of everyday dilemma and the conventional classical theory of tragedy. Kohlberg used the responses children made to this and similar stories to work out which of the conflicting principles they see as more important. He discovered some interesting, if highly contested, norms that show how

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varieties of educational tragedy

at different stages in their moral development, children assess the priorities between various principles differently.


As soon as we acknowledge that there is more than one moral principle – for instance, the three principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of the French Revolutionaries – then it is highly likely that situations will arise in our individual and collective lives in which we will be confronted with conflicts between our principles. Such conflicts give rise to moral and political dilemmas and, sometimes, the need for agonising, or even tragic, choices. Some such choices will shape the future course of our individual or collective lives. This is especially striking in the political realm, including education. The view that the principles of Liberty and Equality can come into conflict with each other has been at the root of some of the bitterest political disagreements since at least the time at which they were highlighted in the French Revolutionary war cry (echoing many theorists, we might note, with regret, the way in which the prioritising of the conflict between Liberty and Equality has pushed Fraternity to the margins). It is commonly argued that Liberty and Equality are in serious tension with each other so that, to the extent that either principle is prioritised in political policy, the other will suffer. Debates about this tension are legion, with some participants denying the tension and claiming that Liberty and Equality are two sides of a single coin, but others insisting that these principles inevitably conflict with each other and that prioritising one or the other has shaped whole world orders in the forms of Liberalism and Socialism. There are others who argue that the distinction between Liberalism and Socialism has become anachronistic in the late-20th-century world. Whatever we make of these debates, what has been, and is, perceived as a conflict between these two principles has deeply structured the political worlds in which we now find ourselves and, by some accounts, underlies major political tragedies. The constant possibility of conflicts, some of them with tragic consequences, between moral principles can explain the repeated attempts to avoid moral dilemmas by simplifying the moral world. There are, abstractly, three possible manoeuvres here. One is to refuse or simply fail to acknowledge the complexity of the world and its human inhabitants – a form of moral blindness. Another is to claim that morality consists of a single overriding principle, with all other so-called principles relegated to the status of contingent rules to be accepted

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or rejected in the light of the single fundamental principle. And the third is to claim that we can rank various moral principles in advance so that whenever there is a conflict between any two principles, one of them will always take precedence.


Moral blindness might, in some situations, have tragic consequences. The accusation of moral complacency, the standard fare of religious and political revolutionaries, is a call for us not to avoid moral dilemmas by refusing to recognise them as such. But it is nevertheless true that for much of our time we participate in the traditions, shared practices, and human and other relationships which constitute our lives with little need for a vivid awareness of the possibility of moral conflict. Indeed, too vivid and constant an awareness of this possibility might not only disrupt the normal flow of our lives, but also cripple our actions with constant guilt, self-doubt and moral agony, and mire us in political paralysis. We cannot lead our ordinary lives in a neurotic state of constant moral mobilisation. Utilitarianism is an example of an attempt to avoid moral dilemmas by claiming that there is a single overriding moral principle – ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (in its Benthamite version) – which is the supreme principle in terms of which to assess not only particular choices but all policies and action-guiding rules. This simplifying strategy was taken by its committed proponents into the world of political policy and it profoundly shaped the subsequent course of political developments, not only in 19th-century England, but also in the many parts of the world influenced by the British Empire. In our own day, more or less sophisticated versions of Utilitarianism still flourish in the decisions and actions of vast numbers of ordinary people and in the pages of popular magazines and academic journals. This is a symptom of a deep longing for a simpler, purer, moral universe, one that is not vulnerable to potentially tragic choices between conflicting principles. Although there are other possible cases, the most familiar example of the simplifying manoeuvre of ranking principles in advance of a consideration of the details of actual situations is that of privileging equality over freedom or vice versa. What is distinctive of the ranking manoeuvre is that it acknowledges the separate significance of the conflicting principles. This manoeuvre simplifies our moral and political choices, and thus enables us to avoid dilemmas with tragic proportions, but at the possible cost of blunting

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our perception of the consequences of our choices and, as the disputes between Liberalism and Socialism signal, being the cause of tragedies of a different kind.


Indeed, such simplifying manoeuvres can all potentially lead to tragedy. Moral blindness in political leaders has characterised some of the most terrible political regimes, as the example of Hitler might illustrate. The conviction that some single moral principle that can purify the world has, at last, been discovered, has given rise to some of the most horrifying and tragic episodes in history, as the examples of Robespierre and Stalin might illustrate. Attempts to refashion the world so that its inhabitants become angels, who face no moral conflicts and tragic choices, are more likely to turn them into beasts. Simplifying manoeuvres are more prone to undermine than to transform the moral world they are so earnestly bent on purifying. And in the field of educational policy, the myopic pursuit of a single goal can contribute to the disintegration of the educational world. Simplifying manoeuvres have a questionable history as effective ways of avoiding tragedy.

Harold Wolpe on equity and development Apartheid was an oppressive political regime rooted in inequality. In the struggle against it, the elimination of inequality understandably became the overriding and unifying goal of the liberation movement. Liberation itself was largely understood in terms of the elimination of inequality. ‘Development’ was not prominent on the agenda, appearing, perhaps, in demands for ‘redistribution’, ‘redress’ or ‘transformation’ – all understood predominantly in terms of greater equality. Perhaps an explanation for this lacuna is the ways in which the movement nurtured exaggerated visions of South Africa’s material riches and, thus, underestimated the need for economic development. This is, of course, an instance of what I have called a simplifying manoeuvre. Given the historical context and lack of an expectation that a dramatic transition was imminent, it is understandable. The movement was driven by a single, overriding and apparently transparent principle of equality. The success of a popular resistance movement rests not on its recognition of the complexities of the political world, but on its intense concentration on what is widely understood as the main issue.

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But when liberation movements attain political power, the need for economic development comes insistently onto the agenda, and this has become obvious in our situation. Wallerstein3 articulates this problem when he writes that: … political movements, liberal and socialist, coming to power in the post-1945 period shared the following in common: ‘they set themselves the double policy objective of economic growth and greater internal equality’.


In such liberation movements the ‘organisational cement’ was ‘the notion that the twin objectives of economic growth and greater equality were correlative’. And the ideological statements of both liberals and Marxists asserted that ‘growth leading to catching up and an increase in egalitarian distribution are parallel vectors, if not obverse sides of the same coin, over the long run’. Development was ‘supposed to mean greater internal equality, that is, fundamental social (or socialist) transformation’. Wallerstein goes on to argue against this understanding of the relation between equality and development: They are not necessarily correlative with each other. They may even be in contradiction with each other. And this contradiction: … is deep and enduring. What has happened since 1945 and especially since the 1970s is that this contradiction is now a glaring one, and we are collectively being required to make political choices that are quite difficult and quite large. In the context of education policy debate in South Africa, early signs of doubt about ‘history’s smooth and liberal path’ began to emerge in the National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI) reports of late 1995; and it is here that Harold Wolpe4 begins to disrupt the simplifying manoeuvre of the liberation movement. In Chapter 2 of the Framework Report 5 there are some sympathetically critical comments about the work of the NEPI research groups. These comments revolve around two main issues. One is the way in which equality tends to be treated as a largely quantitative notion, with the consequent underplaying of its qualitative aspects (equity replaces equality, and is ‘defined as improved

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distribution of educational resources to disadvantaged communities’ [p. 11]). Another is that, when equality is understood in this undifferentiated way, the relationships between equality and development cannot be adequately taken on board: ‘Which social inequalities are to be targeted and with what goal will depend on the path of development adopted’ (p. 13).


For such reasons,‘… in many cases the research groups’ assessments of alternative education policies accept “equality” and “redress” without qualification, implying a simple progress towards equality’ (p. 14). The challenge is issued in the following stark terms, courageous in that historical context: The tension between ‘equity’ and ‘development’ goals was brought to the notice of the research groups by the Editorial Group in February 1992. The essential point made was that policies aimed at meeting popular demands for equality in some spheres tended, given scarce resources, to contradict policies geared towards economic development or growth, even when the latter were aimed at producing the means to achieve equality in the future. (p. 14, author’s emphasis) The various research groups responded differently to this challenge. Some ‘contested the distinction’, ‘others acknowledged it but concentrated on “equity” ’, and yet ‘others tried to transcend the distinction’. What we can see here is the research groups hanging on to the ‘organisational cement’ referred to by Wallerstein: the notion that the twin objectives of equity and development are correlative, perhaps interdefinable. The thesis that equality and development cannot be collapsed into each other and are in inevitable tension is more fully elaborated in the seminal paper by Badat, Wolpe and Barends, ‘The post-secondary education system: Towards policy formation for equality and development’.6 The paper argues strongly for a proper recognition of the unavoidable tension between the goals of equality and development, and proposes that a balance will have to be sought between these two kinds of goals. In effect, this is an argument against the simplifying manoeuvre that unified the liberation struggle: treating the principle of equality as the single overriding principle, in terms of which to define or assess development or any other objectives. In developing its main argument, the paper offers a critique of various proposals that privilege either equality or development over the other, or suggest that

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they should be historically sequenced (first equity then development, or first development then equity). In the terms used earlier in the current essay, these are arguments against attempts to rank these two objectives in relation to each other.


On the one hand it is imperative to accept that equality demands in terms of access and institutions cannot be relegated to some future period when development has, so to speak, occurred. There are two reasons for this: the goal of equality motivated the struggle against apartheid and continues to be an extremely persistent and pervasive demand; and there is no guarantee, given the circumstances under which transition is occurring in South Africa, that ‘development’ will also entail redistribution and a secular trend towards ‘general’ equality. The paper reminds us, however, that we cannot ignore the need for human resource development, even where this results in privilege for some, because in both the short and longer term, economic development creates conditions providing for ‘the possible enhancement of the conditions of the people even if this does not also generate greater equality’ (p. 11, author’s emphasis). The paper warns us that: … a failure to recognise that equality and development, as simultaneous social objectives of the PSE [post secondary education] system, stand in a relationship of permanent tension, has the potential to result in purely populist or pragmatist positions which ultimately may advance neither social equality nor economic, social, political and cultural development. (p. 2) The paper also recommends that a ‘balance’ needs to be found between the two objectives: … it must be understood that in so far as both equality and development are prized, but also exist in a relationship of permanent tension, the challenge … is clear: ‘to find a path which to some extent satisfies both demands as far as existing conditions permit’ (Wolpe, 1992). That is to say, a viable policy for the post secondary education system has to balance equality policies with development policies. To the extent that such an approach is the outcome of a democratic policy process, enjoys broad legitimacy and contributes effectively and simultaneously, to equality and

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development, the consequence of this which is a relative slowing of the process of equalisation as well as a relative slowing of the processes of development would appear to be a small price to pay. (pp. 13–14) The paper forces us to acknowledge that equity and development are independent and equally important objectives of the education system, but that they inevitably come into conflict with each other and so confront us with policy dilemmas. It forces us, in other words, to recognise that we are in a complex field, which we simplify at the risk of achieving neither equality nor development. To regard either as overriding is more likely to undermine than to transform the educational system. This complexity is acknowledged as follows: Clearly then, a range of tensions exist between the equity– development objective and within equality and development goals; trade-offs are implied, and difficult political choices entailed. (p. 13) Although we can see here much that echoes, at least in formal terms, what I argued in my discussion of moral dilemmas, there is also a noteworthy difference. Moral dilemmas are conflicts between moral principles, but ‘development’ does not immediately strike the ear as an example of a moral principle. We can note that in the documents discussed above, ‘equality’ and ‘development’ are referred to not as ‘principles’ but as ‘objectives’ or ‘goals’. This difference signals the different kind of discourse Harold Wolpe brought into the debate; a discourse constructed around a conflict theory of history. Harold Wolpe was seminally involved in challenging the simplifying manoeuvre of the liberation movement, the heady and fundamentally romantic rhetoric that became prevalent in the discourse of resistance and critique in education. That this challenge was timely can be seen in the educational dilemmas and tensions that have emerged over the past year or two. And that this challenge was well grounded can be seen by briefly considering Marx’s ‘tragic view of historical progress’.7

Marxist roots: The tragedy of history Jeffrey Vogel’s paper ‘The tragedy of history’8 begins with the following paragraph, which picks up on a number of issues already raised in the

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current essay and enables us to glimpse the deeper roots of Harold Wolpe’s analysis, and his insistence on the inevitable tension between equity and development:


Modern social and political thought has inherited two fundamental values from the Enlightenment: a belief in human rights and human dignity, and a belief in human progress or human destiny. Marx’s theory of history emphasizes that these fundamental values of modern political consciousness historically have been and still are in irreconcilable conflict. Marxism is noted among Enlightenment theories of human progress for emphasizing that this progress is unavoidably painful and conflictridden. (p. 36, author’s emphasis) In passing, we can note the difference between understanding the complex legacy of the Enlightenment as having given rise to a conception of morality as a set of (potentially conflicting) fundamental principles, and understanding it in terms of having given birth to two fundamental values that are in irreconcilable conflict. ‘Human progress’ is not a principle, but a belief that is embedded in a theory of history. One of the purposes of Vogel’s paper is to ‘… examine Marx’s complex attitudes towards ancient Greek slavery and early capitalist accumulation and conquest …’ (p. 36). We find here some surprises, some might even say paradoxes. ‘The writings of Marx and Engels on ancient slavery and early capitalism are very difficult to interpret consistently’ (p. 37). On the one hand, they devoted their lives and work to the liberation of the working class, as the oppressed and exploited class in industrial society but, on the other hand, they ‘emphasize both the necessity and desirability of even human slavery in promoting human progress’ (p. 37). Engels claims that in ancient Greece the ‘introduction of slavery under the conditions prevailing at the time was a great step forward’ because ‘Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery no Roman Empire’ (p. 37). Echoing Engels’s style, Vogel says that for Marx and Engels, ‘Without ancient slavery no Plato, no Praxiteles, no Parthenon’ (p. 39), ‘Without ancient slavery no Aristotle, no Assembly, no Academy’ (p. 41), and notes that ‘paradoxically, one of the achievements that (ancient) slavery supported was the democratic Athenian Assembly’ (p. 39).

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The underlying view here is that significant human progress, which fosters the conditions for the extension of human rights and human dignity, is achieved precisely in contexts in which human dignity and human rights for the many are overridden. In the modern world all of us are beneficiaries of systems of exploitation that we condemn, but we would not have those benefits unless those systems of exploitation had existed in the past.9 And this is the tragedy of history. Human progress and development have depended on ‘the extorted labour of the many’ (p. 41) and oppressively non-egalitarian systems. Marx displays both ‘horror at the vast suffering involved and wonder at the potentialities for human development that resulted’ (p. 39). … without the development of modern industry, which crushes children ‘beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital’ we would lack the material basis and social agent able to achieve a fully human social order … and this, for Marx, is the tragedy of history. (p. 40) It is part of Marx’s tragic understanding of history that human development cannot be furthered without the sacrifice of innocent people who can never be given the reason why. All such actions are both ‘sickening to human feeling’ and ‘necessary if mankind is to fulfil its destiny.’ (p. 47) This poses the moral dilemma (which Vogel discusses) of what our attitude should be to the irreconcilable conflicts between human rights (like equality) and human progress (development) in a contemporary situation. What should we do ‘if placed in the middle of certain tragic events in human history’? (p. 55) Should we be prepared to sacrifice some human rights in favour of human progress, which, in the longer term, will create conditions for the fuller realisation of human rights? The South East Asian ‘Tigers’ provide an illuminating test case for reflection about this moral dilemma. In effect, Harold Wolpe recommends a solution to this dilemma. He is opposed to any manoeuvres that simply avoid it, and recommends that we should seek, and maintain, a balance between equity and development. As the arguments in the seminal paper already cited bring out clearly, he is opposed to the idea that we can solve the dilemma by privileging either objective (i.e. by treating one or the other as overriding) or by sequencing them in time. We must pursue both simultaneously, even if a consequence of this is ‘… a

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relative slowing of the process of equalisation as well as a relative slowing of the processes of development …’.


For Harold Wolpe, equality and development are two fundamental objectives jointly important in developing morally and politically justifiable educational policy. But they are in tension with each other, and this generates the dilemma that forces difficult political choices on us. It would be a serious misunderstanding to read his thesis as merely pragmatic – a concession to populist political pressures. In the conclusion to the paper cited we find an acknowledgement of politics as the art of the possible, but his main recommendation is highly principled, with deep theoretical roots in the ‘tragic theory of history’. It is to Harold Wolpe’s enduring credit that he articulates the dilemma in such a way that we can appreciate its force without having to have a deep understanding of the theory of history in which it is rooted, and the continuing relevance of his argument about the independence of – but inevitable tension between – equality and development is amply demonstrated in some aspects of contemporary South African education.

Equity, scarce resources and the fragility of the practices and institutions of education As a way of drawing this essay to a conclusion, I shall briefly reflect on some aspects of contemporary South African education in the light of the previous discussions. In broad terms, the main thrust of education policy has been driven by considerations of equity, as well as ‘redress’ and ‘redistribution’. There are many examples of this tendency, but I shall mention three, by way of illustration. • The agreement of teacher : pupil ratios of 1 : 40 and 1 : 35 for primary and secondary schooling respectively, as national norms, to which provincial governments need to conform by 2000. • The prominence of ‘redress funding’ in higher education funding. • The dominant view about the governance of both the system and the institutions of higher education. Given the limitations on the availability of state finance for schooling, the high proportion of the education budget spent on teachers’ salaries, and the

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blatant disparities in teacher–pupil ratios between the schooling systems we have inherited, it seems transparently obvious that we needed to achieve some kind of parity of ratios in a unified system. This has led to the need for ‘rationalisation’, especially in Gauteng and the Western Cape, and many thousands of teachers have ‘taken the package’. While understandable, this has dealt a serious blow to the project of the reconstruction and development of education. For example, it is widely reported that many of the teachers who have left the system are those with the most experience and we need to press the question of whether it was indeed rational for us to adopt a policy of ‘rationalisation’ based on an arithmetical conception of educational equality, rather than to try to find a way of balancing equality and development, which would have required mutual compromises. Again, given our history, it is understandable why ‘redress’ is seen to apply to historically black institutions, but it is a serious error to see equitable financing as the sufficient condition for achieving equality between such institutions. Institutions are complex entities, held in place not merely by material resources, important as those might be, but also by dynamic traditions of practice and shared understanding built up over long periods of time. The dangers are made clear in this observation: It has been repeatedly pointed out by foreign observers that once the institutions of quality education have been undermined it is very difficult, if not impossible to rebuild them. A key question here is whether a modern economy such as ours can afford to follow the path indicated without compromising the whole fabric of education.10 The National Commission on Higher Education tried patiently to construct a system of governance for higher education and its institutions that balanced the demands of stakeholders with the recognition of special professional expertise. The 1996 Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation rejects the balanced compromise recommended and swings definitively towards more egalitarian systems of governance that effectively sideline professional expertise. This is merely one instance of the ways in which, across the realm of education, from the development of the new curriculum to the South African Schools Act (No. 84 of 1996), professional teachers and academics are treated, at best, as equal stakeholders amongst a range of others. It is clear that these are symptoms of the prioritising of equality above other considerations, and

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the question needs to be pressed, again, about whether this can indeed be in our longer-term collective interest in development. The central problem in all these cases is the way in which the privileging of equity – regarding the principle of equality (understood, unfortunately, in myopic arithmetical terms) as overriding – threatens to undermine the basis of the possibilities of development. The narrow path followed leads us towards the breakdown of the educational order as such, and arouses some of our deepest fears about the fragility of education. In their different ways, each of these cases raises the spectre of educational tragedy. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

It is at our collective peril that we fail to understand that educational resources and goods cannot be conceived of as commodities which, like cash or food, for instance, can be simply redistributed by political fiat or market forces. The most crucial educational resources and goods we have at our disposal are competent and committed teachers and stable and successful institutions. Such resources and goods are much more fragile than is commonly imagined, and if we lose them they cannot be replaced, at least not in the short term. To the extent that current policies eliminate or destroy good teachers and institutions, we would have ignored the warnings given to us by Harold Wolpe and decreased our chances of developing into a country in which the quality of life of the majority of our people can be improved. It is a shallow and myopic educational policy that proceeds as if the simplifying manoeuvre of distributing the material resources for education more equitably will accomplish either equality or development. Harold Wolpe’s view is a bitter pill we need to swallow: … human resource development, even where this entails the privileging of a certain layer of the educational and occupational structure, cannot be neglected because in both the short term and in the long run, economic development constitutes a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for the possible enhancement of the conditions of the people …11 In the undiluted pursuit of equity we might squander the very goods we seek to redistribute, and an educational tragedy looms. Equality of educational poverty is quintessentially equitable, but it is hardly a future we should wish on our people.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Johan Muller in the preparation of this paper. In addition, and especially, I acknowledge Roy Crowder for reworking the concluding section.


Notes 1

M.C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 397–421 (the specific quotations come from p. 404).

2

See, for example, L. Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

3

I. Wallerstein,‘Development: lodestar or illusion’ in Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, Cambridge: Policy Press, 1991. As quoted and discussed in pp. 6 and 7 in the paper cited in Note 6 below.

4

In emphasising the role of Harold Wolpe in this paper, I have no intention of underplaying the contribution of those who worked with him.

5

National Education Policy Investigation, The Framework Report, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 12–15.

6

Saleem Badat, Harold Wolpe & Zenariah Barends, ‘The post-secondary education system: Towards policy formulation for equality and development’, Education Policy Unit, University of the Western Cape, May 1993.

7

Jeffrey Vogel, ‘The tragedy of history’ in New Left Review, 220: 42, 1996.

8

See note 7.

9

Vogel, in a comment on Derrida or Rorty as critics of the Enlightenment value of progress, says that they:

… might find it ironic that human history is full of suffering, but since they claim that they do not care about human progress – or find it unintelligible, or think it a reflection of ‘logocentric’ thinking – they are in no tensionfilled or inconsistent position when presented with these facts. Of course, it is something of a charge against such thinkers that they are all very happy beneficiaries of the material development of France and North America while denying that such benefits should be brought to other countries in India and South America – that would be an imposition of our values on others. (p. 52)

10 Peter Kallaway, ‘Reconstruction, reconciliation and rationalisation in South African politics of education’, unpublished paper, 18 February 1997, p. 16. 11 In Badat et al., ‘The post-secondary education system’, p. 11.

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3

Epistemic values in curriculum transformation (First published in 2003)1

The meaning of cemeteries Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

During a recent job interview one of the applicants, when asked about curriculum change, said that, ‘Trying to change a curriculum is like trying to move a cemetery.’ This marvellous analogy, intuitively plausible and illuminating, is worth a pause as we launch into yet another discussion about social science curriculum reform. For many people cemeteries have special significance: they are sacred, not merely places in which we deposit the physical remains of the dead, and humility and reverence are the proper attitudes to adopt when we enter them. For some people a cemetery is holy ground, and the desecration of graves or gravestones is a most serious violation, much more serious than, for instance, drawing graffiti on the walls of a university. Cemeteries are the repositories of precious traditions and memories, some personal some communal, and they are links not only to past relationships and shared lives, but also, for some people, to life hereafter. Cemeteries are historical, memorials of human lives once lived, places in which to reflect on the brutal fact that human beings have limited lifespans, but also to wonder at the fragility and preciousness of human lives and the achievements of departed heroes. If we think of cemeteries in Belgium and Flanders, with thousands of identical white crosses in impeccable neat rows, each standing for the life of a healthy young person cut short by conflicts not of their own making, then we might reflect on the ways in which cemeteries can be texts from which we might learn the harsh lessons of history. But even ordinary cemeteries are symbols of the pervasive power of history in human life and the importance of the sacred to us, even if we left religion behind in our rebellious adolescence. When I lived in London during the 1960s, one obligatory pilgrimage was to Karl Marx’s grave in

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Highgate Cemetery. Perhaps in times to come Zwide Cemetery will achieve a similar status, with people visiting Govan Mbeki’s grave as a way of honouring one of the pre-eminent heroes of the victorious struggle against Apartheid.


Moving a cemetery is always difficult and problematic – always characterised by passionate conflict, anxiety and resistance. Even in cases in which there are what appear to be overwhelming practical reasons to do so, it is always contentious. Why is this? The explanation lies in what I have already said about cemeteries and the place they hold in our lives. Cemeteries are sacred – they are one of our most potent symbolic bridges between the past and the present – and to move them is to dishonour the dead. The interesting thing about this is that reasons of this kind cannot be weighed in the same scales as the reasons we might have for wanting to build a new road or a housing estate for the poor. Building a new road or a housing estate might be pragmatically incompatible, and could be in direct competition with each other for, say, money or land. But, although building a new road and moving a cemetery might be pragmatically incompatible with each other, there is nothing like direct competition between them. A competition presupposes some neutral rules or criteria in terms of which the competition can be adjudicated. But there are no such common rules or criteria in the case of trying to decide whether to move a cemetery to build a new road. Those who want to preserve the cemetery probably see the road builders as basing their view on a shallow and short-sighted form of instrumental reasoning which, although fashionable, ignores a precious dimension of our conception of human life; but those who want to build the new road are inclined to see those who want to preserve the cemetery as irrational. The two sets of reasons are incompatible with each other; they are ‘incommensurable’ in the sense that there is no higher principle – of, say, finance, rationality or justice – in terms of which we could weigh them in the same scales.

The difficulties of changing a curriculum Let’s now turn our attention to the analogy with curriculum and changing a curriculum. For some people a traditional curriculum is indeed held as sacred, with humility and reverence as the proper attitudes when we enter them. Curricula, at least some of them, are also seen by some acolytes as repositories of precious memories and traditions, as texts from which we can learn the

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lessons of history. Curricula, especially but not only in the social sciences, are bridges between the past and the future. And any traditional curriculum will be, in some measure, a celebration of the work of what are currently understood as the heroines and heroes in the relevant field. Opponents of a curriculum are likely to say it is little more than the storehouse of dead texts, or of the work of dead white males – such as Emile Durkheim or Max Weber – whose power is to thereby extended beyond their graves.


Changing a curriculum is always a difficult and problematic project – one likely to arouse conflict, passion, anxiety and resistance. And this is likely to be the case even when there appear to be overwhelming practical reasons to do so. The endless debate about curriculum change is a symptom that we are here faced with conflicts in which the contending parties are appealing to incommensurable sets of reasons, which make it impossible to reach a conclusive decision; there is no win–win solution: at least one of the rival parties will have to abandon its principles. There are additional considerations that we can add here for why curriculum change is difficult. One of these is that any current curriculum embodies a set of intellectual habits and routines that has become comfortable for those who teach that curriculum. At a deeper psychological level, committed teachers’ self-images and professional identities, and their fundamental convictions about the values and standards of academic practice, are likely to be deeply embrangled with the curriculum they teach. To ask them to change the curriculum is, in effect, to ask them to develop a new professional identity and probably also, in their eyes, fatally to compromise their standards, and to abandon their arduously acquired understanding of the disciplines and significance of the academic practice they teach. Unlike simply changing one’s clothes, these are far from easy kinds of change to accomplish, and the more so if the reasons offered for change seem to be irrelevant to what they understand to be the purpose of academic work and the defining mission in their professional lives. As Thomas Khun once remarked, a paradigm shift sometimes has to await the death of the old professors. But not all curriculum change is as traumatic as this implies. As in the case of any changes, there are many degrees and speeds of change. Some changes are merely cosmetic, others are more radical; some changes are accomplished gradually, and others more swiftly. These variations apply, too, in the case of curriculum change. Those who call for ‘curriculum transformation’ usually

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epistemic values in curriculum transformation


have in mind a profound and abrupt change of the curriculum – perhaps analogous to a political revolution. In a sense, it is not that they aim to move the cemetery, but to eliminate it; not to reform the curriculum, but to replace it with something completely different. There are three comments we can make about such a radical suggestion. First, the radical change of a curriculum is much more difficult to accomplish than might be imagined by the revolutionaries. One reason for this can be found in debates about what has been called ‘the hidden curriculum’. Over the past decades, curriculum theory, influenced by a theory of ideology,2 has been shaped by a well-known distinction between the explicit and the ‘hidden curriculum’. The explicit (or official) curriculum is constructed around formally stated content or outcomes, such as the ‘knowledge, skills and attitudes’ of the National Qualifications Framework. What learners actually learn, however, includes much more than that. It also includes ‘… the unstated norms, values, and beliefs that are transmitted to students through the underlying structure of meaning …’.3 A curriculum, in other words, embodies a tacit framework of meaning, a grammar seldom explicitly spelt out, which is below the level of articulated consciousness, but which shapes what is learnt in far more profound ways than the explicitly formulated outcomes or content. There is a clear analogy with learning a language. When we learn a language, we learn its vocabulary and rules of syntax, but we also learn its grammar which, although it might not be formally spelt out in the contexts of acquisition, provides the generative frame for being able to speak and understand the language. To change the grammar of a curriculum is far more difficult than merely changing the titles, topics, content or internal sequence of our learning programmes. Second, except at a rhetorical or polemical level, there is no direct link between the degree and speed of curriculum change and its significance or importance. It is possible that gradual changes, each relatively minor, could be at least as significant as some major and rapid transformation. Indeed, ‘curriculum transformation’ always runs the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Part of the reason for this lies in the inherent conservatism of practices, and the extent to which our current practices are the ground for intelligibility. It is far from clear that the dramatic introduction of vaunted transformative Curriculum 2005 into the South African schooling system has achieved any improvement in schooling for the majority of learners.

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Third, and this follows from the previous comment, curriculum change is not by definition beneficial and, as social scientists, we need to be wary of the rhetorical force of words such as ‘reform’ and ‘transformation’. The tendency to think that any change must be good no doubt arises out of bitter experiences of colonialism and Apartheid, and the liberation struggles against those forms of oppression. During those struggles the view flourished, understandably, that any change was better than what we then had. This view tended to be transferred into the sphere of curriculum change, perhaps because of the significant role played by students in that struggle. But, on sober reflection, it is clear that only some kinds of curriculum change represent an improvement. The climate of the times inclines us to be blind to the principle: if it ain’t broke,4 don’t fix it. But whatever we mean by ‘curriculum change’, do we in reality have any choice about whether or not to change our Higher Education social science curricula?

Pressures to change Higher Education social science curricula There is an important sense in which we do not have a choice; the whole terrain has shifted and bulldozers have already moved in and are busy obliterating the cemetery. There are forces abroad, especially in our postcolonial, post-Apartheid, post-modern historical situation, which make it at least extremely difficult to resist the demand to change our curricula. Anyone tempted to resist is digging their own grave, or is likely to be seen as dead wood that needs to be cleared to allow the new growth to flourish. We can classify the bulldozers into three broad categories: the market, political pressure and epistemological change. The first two have their source outside of the academy, and the third, at least to some degree, from inside. Bulldozers are immensely powerful machines and, in the words of an erstwhile South African president, we seem to be faced with a Hobson’s choice: ‘adapt or die’. If we ignore these forces, we may well find ourselves rotting away in an abandoned cemetery. Vast literatures, familiar to this audience, cluster around debates about these three kinds of forces, and their impact on the academy and its curricula. Here we can very briefly remind ourselves of some of the outlines of these bitter debates.

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Higher Education is enormously expensive; it takes a significant slice of the education budgets of all societies, and this is especially acute in societies such as ours still struggling with trying to keep poverty and destitution at bay and to get on to a productive development path. Even within state education budgets, the slice for Higher Education has to compete with the slices for basic and secondary education. State funding for Higher Education has shrunk significantly over the past few decades, and higher education institutions, in order to survive, are increasingly being forced into competing in the marketplace. Students get redescribed as ‘consumers’, the ‘knowledge’ which it is the job of Higher Education to ‘distribute’ becomes a ‘product’ that can be bought and sold, and we need to ‘package’ our programmes in attractive ways. In the words of Professor Muller, tertiary education institutions are forced into developing ‘… market responsive curricula, which are “targeted” and “niched” to capture some or other “market segment” and to respond to some or other market need …’.5 But we can notice here how the deeper conflicts about curriculum change are neatly sidelined by the presupposition that financial considerations override all others. The ‘bottom line’ is treated as the final court of appeal, rather than merely a boundary of possibility, and other kinds of considerations are not even allowed a hearing. Any cemetery is movable or removable if there are strong enough financial reasons to do so! However, the model of ‘the market’, which is the anchor for this kind of argument, is naïve. In particular, the assumption that ‘the market’ satisfies the pre-existing desires of consumers completely ignores the obvious ways in which markets manufacture needs and desires as opposed to merely responding to them. In addition, students are not ‘customers’ and the goods of education cannot be ‘bought’; real customers buy already manufactured goods and, apart from the effort of shopping, they do not have to work to produce them. And yet our brave new democracies generate enormous political pressure for the transformation of our societies to be underwritten by the transformation of education and its curricula. Participatory democracy is the fashion of the day, uncomfortably harnessed to stakeholder politics. Higher education institutions must now be publicly accountable, accountable to their stakeholders – which includes all interest groups that might conceivably be affected by what those institutions do. The ‘governance structures’ – such as Institutional Forums and Councils – must be representative of all stakeholders, and must be

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conceived of as the chief governing bodies of the institutions. But changing the governance structures is not enough.


The actual substance of the teaching and research programmes of Higher Education needs to change or be changed to reflect our new political reality. Teaching and research activities need to be demystified and made transparent to all stakeholders, the Eurocentric curriculum needs to be got rid of and we need to acknowledge that we are in Africa with its own alternative forms of knowledge. Academic freedom might have been available in the cemetery, but there are now economic and political reasons why we can no longer afford it. The political reasons revolve around the ways in which the so-called ‘academic freedom’ of the past simply reinforced and perpetuated the systems of oppression of colonialism and its virulent offspring – Apartheid. Academics need to understand that whatever their intentions and self-images, they were the ideological props of oppression, the reproductive organs of nondemocratic regimes. Education, including Higher Education – and especially its social sciences branch – needs to be democratised. We need to accept that the state cannot afford to fund irrelevant teaching programmes and research projects. Access, transparency, relevance and accountability will become the watchwords of Higher Education, and its curricula will be forced to change to accommodate this new political reality. Well, yes. But if the kind of knowledge in which higher education institutions deal could be made transparent, then there would be no need for threeand four-year degree programmes, except perhaps for the incredibly stupid and dull. And ‘access’ would be a merely formal matter of changing our admissions policies and getting rid of all the bureaucratic barriers to access. And well, yes. But the forces that demand popular accountability are making the empiricist assumption that spontaneously expressed preferences are the rock bottom of political legitimacy. And knowledge, it is said, itself 6 has changed; there is, again in the words of Professor Muller, a ‘… global trend against certainty in the social sciences …’.7 Old certainties have been eroded, and in the post-modern world we are adrift in a wild relativist ocean in which it has been revealed that knowledge claims are nothing more than the play of power and interests. The fraudulent claims of traditional academics have been unmasked, and we need to accept that knowledge is nothing other than a personal or social construct that serves to defend our interests. The traditional claims of the academy have been revealed as nothing but the claims of a

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particular interest group in society, bent on defending their particular status, power and position. And seeing that we now, at last, have a grip on this truth, we can understand that constructed knowledge can be deconstructed and reconstructed to serve different sets of interests.


However, this stance digs its own grave. And yes, if this is all true, how can we explain the manifest technological success which is an outgrowth of the growth of knowledge and which, over the past three centuries, has utterly transformed human life? And also, if all this is true, why bother to have educational institutions at all? One way to try to eliminate a disease is to kill the patient. Such, in crude outline, is the shape of some of these debates, the trajectories of the bulldozers reconfiguring the landscape of Higher Education and the ducking and weaving of those trying to halt the bulldozers in their tracks. These are forces that powerfully incline us to suppose that we do not have a choice – that we will simply have to transform our curricula to conform to these forces. But let’s be at least a little wary of this fatalistic position. It is clear that there can be no argument with a bulldozer, but bulldozers have drivers, and perhaps we can at least try to argue with the drivers. There is some room, small as it might be, for manoeuvre and argument, and let’s try to locate it.

Negotiating change in Higher Education social science curricula We can begin with a truism: if we are thinking about curriculum change, then we need to think about knowledge and the practice of inquiry. This threatens to open a very ancient can of worms, as ancient at least as Plato. But let’s take a line that can yield some results without digging down to the bottom of the can. A conviction that is shared by the drivers of all three bulldozers is deep skepticism about the kind of knowledge characteristic of Higher Education. Let’s think about this. Skepticism about claims to knowledge is not a new phenomenon, although it might have attained more visible, and perhaps virulent, forms in a borderless world which has been transformed by the development of new information and communication technologies, released from the traditional restraints of academic communities. But skepticism is the twin of claims to knowledge wherever the suffocating marriage between knowledge and religious certainty has been broken. Knowledge claims are always provisional and are essentially

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open to challenge – but not any kind of challenge. And this latter phrase opens up the way to think about curriculum transformation, and how to argue with the bulldozer drivers.


The bulldozer drivers have a tendency to deny that there is any significant distinction between different kinds of challenge, and in this sense their challenge is shallow. There are various versions of this position. Sometimes the implicit claim is that no challenge to a knowledge claim can be disconnected from the personal or sectional interests that are the driving forces of successful markets, and all challenges are to be understood in these terms, with only the cosmetic difference that sometimes this is acknowledged while at others it is obscured in talk about ‘disinterested’ inquiry. And sometimes the assumption is made that knowledge and power are so intimately embrangled with each other that all knowledge claims are simply the expressions of power, so any challenges to a knowledge claim are more properly understood as simply power struggles. At other times, driven by a self-defeating assumption of universal relativism, it is assumed that a challenge to a knowledge claim is to be understood as nothing more than the expression of a different point of view. But, as social scientists, we should not be taken in by any of these versions of the denial that there are significantly different kinds of challenge to a knowledge claim. To challenge a claim to knowledge is not merely to reject it. Rejection is easy; challenge is more arduous. Rejection might be based on mere ignorance or prejudice; challenge itself requires disciplined thinking based on relevant knowledge.8 It is easy enough, for example, merely to ‘reject’ a theory in advanced nuclear physics, but to ‘challenge’ it I need both to understand that theory – itself unlikely without some education in the relevant fields – and to be able to appeal to some evidence that is relevant in assessing the warrant for that theory. A challenge must rest on some evidence which shows that the initial claim is false or fraudulent, and this implies that a challenge to a knowledge claim must itself be based on some notion of evidence, and stronger or weaker evidence for the kind of claim in question. The challenge consists in saying that the evidence, which is supposed to support the claim, is either suspect or that it is weaker than the evidence against the claim. We are here talking about epistemic values, and what the argument shows is that challenges to knowledge claims are themselves committed to epistemic values.

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Epistemic values are those values that shape and guide inquiry, which has as its regulative goal to discover the truth about some matter, irrespective of whether that truth is convenient or inconvenient, supports or does not support any particular personal predilections or sectional interests. Epistemic values are the grammar of the practices of disinterested inquiry; the ‘hidden curriculum’ of academic study. Any ‘curriculum transformation’ which does not embody these epistemic values, which fails to respect the distinctions between knowledge and propaganda, and the normative notion of warrant and the descriptive notion of acceptability,9 cannot be a benefit either to society or to the students who follow that curriculum. We can add three notes to this conclusion. The first is that the epistemic values I have gestured towards in the previous paragraph are formal and content-neutral; they guide disinterested inquiry in relation to any topic to be investigated. Sometimes when people advocate ‘curriculum transformation’ – especially in the social sciences – they have in mind simply changing the content of the curriculum. Instead of learning about Bismarck and the unification of Germany during the 19th century, we should concentrate on historical events in our local region. To say that any ‘curriculum transformation’, if it is not to betray students and society, needs to respect epistemic values, is compatible with major changes of content. The vocabulary can change, what we talk about can change, but the grammar of inquiry, although not cast in stone, provides the sheet anchor for our own research and our teaching of students. Resistance to curriculum transformation can very often reside in the inability of academics to disconnect the relevant epistemic values from the particular content in terms of which they gained an understanding of those values. The second is that these epistemic values cannot be reinvented at will, or modified without good reason accepted by the relevant academic community. They are products of traditions of inquiry that stretch over many generations, during which they were refined and modified. These values are not sacred and can themselves be challenged and, clearly, they can come into conflict with other values, such as the value of a peaceful and secure society, but anyone who merely rejects or abandons these values – perhaps under the aegis of ‘curriculum transformation’ – can no longer be regarded as engaging in academic work, including teaching. The third is that in teaching, one of our primary tasks is to enable our students to achieve a rich operational understanding of and commitment to the

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relevant epistemic values. We are trying to teach our students how to become participants in disciplined inquiry. This involves their learning and becoming committed to the grammar of inquiry in some field – epistemological access requires that they come to understand and care about the relevant epistemic values. Unless we in our practices as social scientists maintain and demonstrate our own commitment to epistemic values, we are frauds in institutions of Higher Education. One of the primary functions of such institutions in society is to constitute and maintain the vitality of epistemic values. And to the extent that we are diverted from this task by the insistent threats of the bulldozer drivers, we betray the societies and the students we are committed to serving. In transforming our curricula we need to be vigilant in the protection of the epistemic values, which are our vital contribution to the development of our societies.

Revisiting the meaning of cemeteries Let us, finally, return to the analogy between changing a curriculum and moving a cemetery. The position we have now reached is, in effect, a rejection of one element of the analogy. A cemetery is a place of the dead – and there are indeed some curricula that fit this description – but other curricula, and those we aspire to achieve in ‘transforming’ our curricula are of this other kind, are full of vitality, energy and promise. Their embodiment of strongly articulated epistemic values opens up lines of inquiry, previously unenvisaged, which can serve our societies in profound ways unimagined in the populist and shallow rhetoric of the bulldozer drivers. Notes

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1

This essay was originally published in Piet Naude and Nico Cloete (eds) (2003) A Tale of Three Countries. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Juta & Co. Ltd.

2

‘To study ideology … is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.’ J.B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984, p. 4.

3

Giroux as quoted in Johan Muller, Reclaiming Knowledge: Social Theory, Curriculum and Education Policy, London: Routledge Falmer, 2000, p. 18.

4

The ambiguity of the word ‘broke’ is appropriate in this case.

5

Muller, Reclaiming Knowledge, p. 105.


I must confess that I find it extremely difficult to understand what it could mean to say that knowledge has changed, rather than that the content, the generation, the distribution, etc. of knowledge has changed.

7

Muller, Reclaiming Knowledge, p. 126.

8

In South Africa there is a constant tendency for people to use the word ‘refute’ when they mean ‘reject’ – as in: ‘The Minister refuted suggestions that there had been anything underhand in the deal.’ ‘Refutation’, like ‘warrant’, is a normative notion which implies that the appropriate standards of evidence or argument have been used to show that some claim is false.

9

Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays, London: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 92.


6

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4

Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education (Presented at a workshop of the South African Institute for Distance Education, 15 November 1996)


Introductory comment The main line of argument put forward in this essay will already be almost boringly familiar to most of the participants in this workshop. It is a line of argument that has been persistently pursued in earlier South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) submissions to the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE), and by others as well, and it is, in many ways, already reflected in the final NCHE report, A Framework for Transformation1 (which from here on will be referred to simply as the Report). Our task in this workshop must be to try to develop a response to the Report that gives critical encouragement to the framers of any new policies and legislation that flow out of the Report; to encourage them to emphasise those proposals that presage a changed culture of Higher Education; and to come to appreciate their practical incompatibility with proposals that pull in contrary directions. This task involves using the opportunity provided by this workshop collectively to sort the various significant aspects of the Report into those that further embed the traditional culture of Higher Education and those that can be understood as paving the way for a new culture. The distinction between these two is not clear-cut (and we might during the workshop, by trying to sort various aspects of the Report, be involved in trying to clarify what the dimensions of this distinction are), but this essay will try to set the ball rolling by offering an initial characterisation of this central distinction, and a few pointers to how the Report can be read through these spectacles.

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I shall try to articulate a conceptual framework for the work of this workshop, and then, in terms of the themes of ‘learner centredness’ and ‘opening the curriculum’, provide some illustration of the kinds of practical implementations the main line of argument implies. The success of the workshop will depend on whether or not we can arrive at a theoretically consistent response that is not merely rhetorical and formal, but expressed in the substantive language of hard-nosed policy formulation and legislation. We should try to arrive at a lucid, persuasive and serviceable response that will give an additional spin to the process of disembedding the traditional culture of Higher Education in South Africa.

The main line of argument The traditional culture of Higher Education developed in particular historical circumstances and in a world characterised by particular information and communication technologies. Two central features of that culture are: • a picture of teaching2 which centres around situations of co-presence, and • an idea of higher education institutions as competitively independent. Other features of the traditional culture of Higher Education, such as its high costs, its elitism, and so on, flow out of these central features. In Chapter 5 of the Report we find a statement of four elements of a vision for a transformed higher education system (pp. 70–71), of six principles that should guide the restructuring of the current system (pp. 71–74), and of nine goals at the national level (pp. 74–75) and four at the institutional level (pp. 75–76). An unsympathetically close analysis of this part of the Report might give rise to critical questions such as why there is a slight conceptual wobble on the principles of democratisation (pp. 71–72) and academic freedom and institutional autonomy (p. 73), and what the rationale might be for the distinction between goals at the national and institutional levels (pp. 74–76). One might also be a little worried by the reference to ‘autonomous … stakeholders’ (p. 75), even if that is qualified by the phrase ‘functionally interdependent’ and the subsequent distinctions between the roles of the Higher Education Forum and the Higher Education Council (pp. 185–193) and the councils, senates and forums of institutions (pp. 201–205).3

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Nonetheless, the superbly succinct statement of our common aspirations, which we find in pages 70–76, is likely to be broadly endorsed by anyone who has the future of our country and its higher education system near to their hearts. The problem (which stands at the centre of the main line of argument) is that, given the resources available in and to the higher education system, these aspirations are unattainable within the framework of the traditional culture of Higher Education. This problem can be expressed in terms of a practical dilemma: either we modify and slim down our aspirations, or we shift away from the traditional culture of Higher Education. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

The Report is not unaware of this problem, and we might cite various details that can support this view. We might think, for example, of the three ‘Central features of the new framework’ that are mentioned at the very start of the Report: [The Report] envisages a new system of higher education characterised by increased participation by all sectors of society; by greater institutional responsiveness to policy imperatives, and by a new set of co-operative relations and partnerships between higher education and the broader society. (p. 1) These are more fully developed in Section 5.4: • I ncreased participation in the system by a diverse range of constituencies. • Increased co-operation and more partnerships between higher education and other social actors and institutions. • Greater responsiveness to a wide range of social and economic needs. (p. 76) (Author’s emphases) The detail we find on pages 76–80 confirms the view that the Report recognises that the aspirations spelt out earlier in Chapter 5 will require a changed culture of Higher Education if they are to be practically realisable. We might also think of the references to ‘Distance education’ and ‘Resourcebased learning’ scattered throughout the Report, and the five subpoints (a to e) in Proposal 6 to be found on pages 123 and 124.

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shifting the embedded culture of higher education

The central question, however, is whether the Report remains consistent in underwriting a changed culture of Higher Education. This is the question that I think might fruitfully structure the activities of this workshop.

A changed culture of Higher Education


In finding a response to this central question, a key issue is what we mean by ‘a changed culture of Higher Education’. What we mean will be expressed in the details of our response, provided they are relatively mutually supporting. But it would be helpful if we had an initial signpost. So far, I have simply opposed whatever it is we are talking about to ‘the traditional culture of Higher Education’, characterised in terms of (a) a particular conception of teaching (‘modes of delivery’?), and (b) a particular conception of the independence (‘sovereignty’?) of higher education institutions. But this can be taken further. The phrase ‘open learning’ has become something of a multi-purpose cliché as it has circulated into fashionable educational discourse, and clichés can seriously hinder our thinking. Their familiarity gives an illusion of transparency, which can obscure the tensions they embody and can lead to stumbling, self-defeating and muddled practices. Nonetheless, it will be convenient to use this label to refer to ‘the changed culture of Higher Education’. But, in order to make it into a sharp and useful tool in our thinking, we need to spell out clearly what we mean. For a start, consider the definition of open learning provided in the (very useful) glossary in the Report: Open learning: A flexible, learner-centred approach to education, seeking to increase access to educational opportunities by removing all unnecessary barriers to learning. This involves using the full spectrum of available resources to ensure quality and costeffectiveness in meeting diverse educational needs, including preparation of the widest possible range of learners for the process of lifelong learning. (p. 272) We can treat this definition as an attempt to formulate what is meant by the changed culture of [Higher] Education. The various parts of this definition

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are closely interdependent, and there is some artificiality in separating them out. Nevertheless, in order to try to get hold of what is being said, there is some profit in identifying the key elements. We might say that the 10 key elements of this definition are:


List A (the Report) 1 A flexible approach to education. 2 A learner-centred approach to education. 3 Increased access to educational opportunities. 4 Removing all unnecessary barriers to learning. 5 Using the full spectrum of available resources. 6 Ensuring quality, and 7 cost-effectiveness. 8 Meeting diverse educational needs. 9 Preparing the widest possible range of learners, 10 for a process of lifelong learning. Each of the words (phrases) I have italicised can be seen as a possible line of critique against the traditional culture of Higher Education. Of course, a defender of the traditional culture of Higher Education can (and does) contest much of what is stated in the definition. In debates about standards, for example, it is often said, or implied, that quality Higher Education, if it really is Higher Education we are talking about, is unachievable if we try at the same time to pursue ‘flexibility’, ‘increased access’, ‘costeffectiveness’, and so on. In our enthusiasm for open learning we should not lose sight of the serious and well-intentioned argument that these fashionable ways of talking might lead to our losing our grip on the very idea of Higher Education. It is not within the scope of this essay to respond to such arguments although, at the end of the day, they are often the implicit source of ‘resistance’ to a changed culture of Higher Education. In the following two sections of this essay I shall obliquely revisit this issue. In this section I shall, first, put up for comparison a summary of the ‘principles’ of open learning, which we find in a SAIDE document,4 and then, in convergent mode, identify what I think is the seminal criterion of the changed culture of Higher Education.

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We need to avoid becoming entangled in superficial and barren linguistic issues but, prior to agreeing to an initial formulation that can guide our thinking, it is not going to be fruitful for us to think divergently in terms of the ‘spirit’ of the changed culture of Higher Education. This would be to retreat to the kind of looseness which has an important place in political rhetoric,5 but will not help us to do the real work we need to do here.


My purpose is, preliminarily at least, to sharpen our focus on what we understand the changed culture of Higher Education to be. The SAIDE document referred to above reminds us that open learning is based on various educational principles, categorised as follows: List B (SAIDE) (The numbers in parentheses refer to the numbering in List A.) (2) Learner centredness (10) Lifelong learning (1) Flexibility in learning (4) The removal of all unnecessary barriers to access • Recognition of prior learning experiences • Accumulation of credits within and across different learning contexts • Expectations of success (6) Quality learning (7) Cost effectiveness Four items in List A (numbers 3, 5, 8 and 9) do not appear in List B; and three items in List B (bulleted) do not appear in List A. But this might be merely accidental and of no particular significance. List A item (3) ‘Increased access to educational opportunities’, might for instance, be understood to be implied in the phrase ‘The removal of all unnecessary barriers to access’ in List B. I think that analysing the discrepancies between the two lists in this kind of way is a clarifying exercise, although not one I shall engage in here. I would like to suggest that the two central features of the traditional culture of Higher Education which I previously cited, namely (a) a picture of teaching which centres around situations of co-presence, and (b) an idea of higher education institutions as competitively independent, give us a clue to what we might regard as the heart of the contrast between the two cultures of Higher Education, and provide us with a beacon in terms of which to orientate our

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response to the Report. The changed culture is founded on a changed picture of teaching (‘pedagogy’?), and a changed view of the relationships between the institutions that carry Higher Education. Suitably richly interpreted – in other words, interpreted in a way which shows its ramifying consequences for practice – there is one element of the accounts of open learning we have considered that might be treated as the seminal criterion to distinguish between the two cultures of Higher Education. This is that open learning (4) Removes all unnecessary barriers to learning.


The phrase that carries the main weight here is ‘unnecessary barriers’, and this workshop might contribute fruitfully to policy for Higher Education in our country by spelling out, in an educationally informed way, what those ‘unnecessary barriers’ are in the case of Higher Education. The problem is that this phrase is the soft underbelly at which a populist interpretation can undermine the definitive purposes, the very significance, of Higher Education itself. Let us take this point slightly further by considering the extraordinarily interesting discussion we find in Section 6.2 (pp. 83–88) of the Report: ‘The boundaries of higher education’. In this section we find the key idea that Higher Education should be (re)defined in terms of ‘the nature of programmes offered’ as opposed to ‘types of institutions’ (p. 83). And, as important for our purposes in this workshop, this section revolves around the idea of ‘the realm of higher knowledge’ (p. 83) which, although part of a ‘continuum of learning’ (p. 85) is, nevertheless, distinct: Higher education simply requires more detail, greater depth of insight and more intellectual mastery than do other levels of education. (p 84) Whatever we might think of this as an account of ‘higher knowledge’, we can go along with the idea that we are talking about a particular ‘level of learning’ that might, although with considerable risk,6 be explicated in terms of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) (p. 86). On page 86 there is a comment about the way in which the 1996 Constitution refers not to ‘higher education’ but to ‘tertiary education’, and the Commission would have preferred the former because:

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In many countries, and in the current South African distinction between tertiary and other forms of post-secondary education, there is provision for a form of post school education that is prehigher education. (p. 87)


Such delicate linguistic footwork is understandable in a world in which there is a widespread misunderstanding of Higher Education as any kind of postschool education, and there is a tendency in any case to fail to distinguish between cultures and conceptions of Higher Education, but this essay is not the occasion on which definitively to clarify the important issue of what we mean by Higher Education. We can accept that ‘The wide array of higher education programmes makes the boundaries of higher education difficult to define’ (p. 85); nevertheless, I think we should support the Report in its statement that: Despite these difficulties the Commission wishes to preserve the distinctiveness of higher learning, without suggesting that it has, or should have, an impermeable boundary around it. (p. 85) Preserving ‘the distinctiveness of higher learning’ is especially important in the light of the ‘dual demands’ (p. 2) that need to be met by a higher education system in the contemporary world. On the one hand, there is the demand for ‘increased participation’, but on the other, there is the demand for ‘highly trained personpower’, and: South African higher education, emerging from a period of relative isolation, now confronts the reality of multiform and accelerating changes in culture, communications and production – changes characterised as ‘globalisation’. Knowledge, information and culture increasingly inhabit a borderless world … (p. 3) The trick is to develop a system that can satisfy both of these demands without betraying either, and our position is that the changed culture of Higher Education can accomplish this trick. The changed culture of Higher Education must indeed become more ‘learner centred’, and it must indeed also ‘open the curriculum’, but not at the cost of falling into populist parochialism and, thus, failing to achieve the essential purposes of Higher Education.

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In order to try to hold onto this point, which I think is crucial, I would like to recommend that we add the word ‘higher’ to the seminal criterion for the changed culture of Higher Education, so that it now becomes: Open learning removes all unnecessary barriers to higher learning.


We now need to think about what the ‘unnecessary barriers to higher learning’ are in the traditional culture of Higher Education. We might, of course, be able to generate a diverging and proliferating list of such ‘barriers’, beginning with geographical, temporal, financial and other structural factors, and moving on to such things as an inflexible curriculum, lack of good (higher education) teachers, lack of interest, lack of prior learning, and lack of (system or learner) capacity. All such ‘barriers’ might be significant in one or other way, and thoroughly changing the culture of Higher Education will, no doubt, eventually remove many such barriers. But change has to begin somewhere; a policy which overambitiously tries to accomplish a major cultural change by recommending the removal of all the barriers in one revolutionary sweep is likely simply to lead to deep confusion. A policy of disembedding the traditional culture of Higher Education needs to play the decisive card, one that is most likely to change the whole subsequent course of the game. The traditional culture of Higher Education is based on a picture of teaching and an idea of higher education institutions which, in combination with each other, constitute a (perhaps the) major barrier to the accessibility and availability of Higher Education, and the attainment of our aspirations. In my view the principle recommendation that can contribute to the dismantling of this barrier is that we should think of teaching in terms of resource-based learning. The definition of ‘resource-based learning’ provided in the glossary in the Report reads as follows: Resource-based learning: The increasing use of a variety of media, methods and mechanisms to meet the different and divergent needs of learners in a rapidly changing educational situation, with diminishing dependence on face-to-face communication, and growing reliance on well-designed interactive study material, the implementation of computer-based and audio-visual instruments and programmes, and diversification in the manner and location of educational

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guidance and support offered to learners by teachers. (A notion signalling the increasing collapse of the traditional sharp distinction between contact and distance education.) (p. 273)


These matters are numbingly familiar to participants in this workshop, and perhaps all we need to say is that a shortcoming of this definition is that it fails to mention teaching – to emphasise that ‘resource-based learning’ is teaching and not a cheap substitute for the genuine article. Resource-based learning is not a supplement to ‘real’ teaching; it is a form of (real) teaching, as has been argued repeatedly. In some situations (and Higher Education provides a prime example of a realm in which we will find such situations), it is a superior form of teaching to contact-based teaching. If we think of teaching as the practice of organising systematic learning, then we can see that given a basic level of learner literacy, resource-based learning is a way of teaching much more open to continuous improvement through shared experience and the collective exercise of reflective professional judgement, and can open up the curriculum in the ways we need to in order to step confidently into the next century. In addition, resource-based learning cracks open the closed institutional boundaries of the traditional culture of Higher Education. A move into this mode of teaching opens up a Pandora’s box of possibilities, such as the most effective possible use of the full spectrum of available educational resources, substantive cross-institutional (system-wide) co-operation, and the accessibility of the professional and academic skills of the most talented higher education teachers,7 to any students in the whole system of Higher Education. My claim is, thus, that open learning, understood as the removal of all unnecessary barriers to higher learning, provides the key to what we mean by a changed culture of Higher Education, and that the idea of resourcebased learning is the key to open learning. In converging, in this way, on these particular items in the flood of debate about these matters, I do not intend to deny the importance of the other concepts linked to the idea of open education. My claim is merely that from a pragmatic point of view these elements are what we should now concentrate on, and that the other things mentioned, from flexibility to lifelong learning, and from learner centredness to cost-effectiveness, can be pulled along by the main current.

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In summary, my proposals in this section have been: • that we understand what we mean by ‘the changed culture of Higher Education’ in terms of open learning, • that we understand open learning centrally in terms of the criterion of removing all unnecessary barriers to higher learning, and • that a consistent reinforcement of a conception of teaching as ‘resourcebased learning’ will make the seminal contribution to the task of removing unnecessary barriers to higher learning; of disembedding the traditional culture of Higher Education.


‘Paradigm shifts’ and how they might be accomplished The Report says of its own proposals: The proposals for transforming the higher education system … require a series of paradigm shifts. Such shifts mean radically new ways of conceptualising and conducting higher education in South Africa. (p. 23) ‘Paradigm shift’ is another phrase that has become a multi-purpose cliché in our context, and what might be meant by a ‘series of paradigm shifts’ is difficult to tell. Nevertheless, a way of describing what disembedding the traditional culture of Higher Education and replacing it with a changed culture will involve, is to say that it will require a change of paradigm. But changing a paradigm, although easy to announce, is not so easy to accomplish. Changing a paradigm involves changing a vast interlinking set of practices together with the self-understandings that hold them in place. And practices themselves are embedded in a consolidated web of institutional appointments, reward systems, relationships, individual careers, self-images and long-established habits, networks of power, and so on. As Kuhn pointed out a long time ago, a paradigm shift might sometimes have to await the retirement of the old professors.8 Less depressingly, for some of us at least, the historical moment is ripe for the possibility of a paradigm shift in Higher Education. Our higher education system is at a crossroads in its history, it is extremely fluid and in some ways in deep disarray, and whole sectors of it are nothing more than a hollow charade of the traditional culture of Higher Education. Although it lives on as an ideal

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in the thoughts and aspirations of many people both inside and outside of our higher education system, the embedded culture of Higher Education is not widely consolidated in our practices and institutions of Higher Education. In addition, there are many people (especially, but not only, in historically black universities) who are ready for some kind of dramatic change and who know, from practical struggles, that without a change of this order we will be unable to achieve our collective aspirations for Higher Education in our country. There is a growing realisation that while we have been obsessed with our inward-looking struggles to achieve a more just social order, the international world of Higher Education has moved on, driven by a combination of shrinking public resources for Higher Education and the globalising impact of borderless new information and communication technologies. Quite independently of the Report, we might say, a paradigm shift is already under way across many of our higher education institutions (we can think of the many institutions involved in some or other form of ‘distance education’), but in an independent and uncoordinated way. The Report can serve either to reinforce, consolidate and coordinate this shift, or to pull us back into what is still, nevertheless, the embedded culture of Higher Education. As Kuhn pointed out, a paradigm shift is like a change in one’s spectacles or one’s point of view on a landscape; different aspects of the view are highlighted or fall into the background; what previously looked like problems cease to be problems, and new problems emerge; and the very criteria for what counts as internal consistency might change. A paradigm shift involves a changed conception of what the ‘problems’ are, a changed way of talking and thinking and, thus, a changed set of practices. But a changed way of talking and thinking cannot be called a ‘changed paradigm’ unless it has its own conceptual consistency and coherence. And this is where this workshop can help the Report to disembed the traditional culture of Higher Education. We need to generate a reading of the Report that tries to help it to avoid being self-defeating; one which highlights those of its aspects that pave the way for a new culture of Higher Education, and point to those aspects that inadvertently perpetuate the traditional culture. We need to ask, for instance, whether its proposals about ‘redress’, ‘earmarked funding’, ‘academic development’ and so on are perhaps addressing problems that arise within the traditional culture of Higher Education, but that would

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look very different if we changed that culture. In our response we can help the Report to accomplish the paradigm shift we need if we are to meet our aspirations by helping it to be more conceptually consistent, at least in its language and proposals.

Arguments, polemics and other persuasive devices


To recommend that we need to shift away from the embedded culture of Higher Education is not to recommend the abandonment of the essential purposes9 of Higher Education: the constitutive goals that make it Higher Education and not something else. Cultures of Higher Education are contingent products of particular historical circumstances, and in that sense they are ‘accidents’ – simply particular ways in which the essential purposes of Higher Education have been pursued. The main line of argument of this essay (and this workshop?) is that the culture of Higher Education will have to change, but that such a change is not a repudiation of the constitutive goals of Higher Education, but simply a more feasible way of achieving them. This might be glaringly obvious to the participants in this workshop, but we would be unwise not to acknowledge that for many people, including many intelligent people of goodwill, to recommend that we need to change the culture of Higher Education is ipso facto to recommend that we replace the essential purposes of Higher Education with a new set of purposes that will change it into something altogether different, something that should not properly be called ‘Higher Education’ at all. Kuhn was at pains to emphasise that a paradigm shift cannot be accomplished by argument alone. There is a sense in which one has to wait for the penny to drop, for an increasing number of people to come to see matters from a different point of view. Argument is supposed to be persuasive to rational people of goodwill, but even good arguments in a sphere so rooted in vast networks of practices underwritten by self-definitions and consolidated webs of power might fail to persuade. In my view the practical dilemma of either we modify or slim down our aspirations, or we shift away from the traditional culture of Higher Education leaves us with only one option, and that is to shift the embedded culture of Higher Education. I think the arguments in favour of this conclusion are conclusive.

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However, given the urgency of the crises we face in Higher Education, and the window of opportunity that has briefly opened up, we cannot simply wait for the penny to drop. In this kind of situation we should employ whatever persuasive devices are at hand, from leveraging the funding for Higher Education to polemically contrasting the two cultures of Higher Education, as Don Swift does in his reference to the ideology of ‘institutionalized people processing’.


I trust that we in this workshop will be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, and give an additional spin to the project of disembedding the traditional culture of Higher Education. Notes 1

National Commission on Higher Education report, A Framework for Transformation, South Africa, October 1996.

2

See ‘A picture holds us captive’, paper read at the Kenton Conference, 1992, published in Wally Morrow, Learning to Teach in South Africa, Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007.

3

See ‘Stakeholders and senates: The governance of Higher Education institutions in South Africa’, Essay 7 in this book.

4

SAIDE, ‘Open learning: A perspective from the White Paper’, date unknown.

5

Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, expressed the distinction between political rhetoric and theoretical work as follows:

Political slogans have the task of indicating an overall direction in which to progress, and it matters little if they are expressed in ambiguous and vague terms which are more liable to arouse certain emotions than to make certain realities concrete … It is the task of theoretical criticism to identify and denounce solutions which can only exist on paper, to translate impressive formulas into feasible proposals, to distinguish the solid content in emotive rhetoric. (p. 45)

6

The risks I am referring to here revolve around two matters: (a) the way in which to define Higher Education in terms of NQF levels simply defers the problem; it traps us in an interpretive circle from which we need at some point to break out; (b) the ways in which NQF-speak encourages the idea of a monolithic, vertical hierarchy of competences and fudges the issue about the horizontal diversity of competences.

7

I am not, here, losing sight of the fact that a defining feature of Higher Education is that it brings research and teaching into symbiotic relationship with each other.

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But unless we conceive of teaching as resource-based learning, with researchers being involved in the design and generation of the resources, this feature of Higher Education will limit it to what can only be a small cadre of students.

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8

T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

9

I think the Report is right in the striking comment that ‘Higher education has traditionally been defined by its role in the constitution, generation and dissemination of higher knowledge’ (p. 83). And this looks like a promising candidate as a succinct expression of the essential purposes of Higher Education.

5

Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom? (First presented at the Union of Democratic University Staff Associations


conference, University of Pretoria, 28 July 1989)

In a repressive society, the intellectual vitality of a university is perhaps best measured by the degree to which its members are in conflict with the authorities.1

I There are many who might think that the answer to the question (Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom?) is obvious, and obviously ‘yes’. But this obvious answer fails to take into view how horribly slippery the key concepts in the question are, and how they are at the heart of cleavages that construct our world in South Africa. The concepts of ‘democracy’ and ‘academic freedom’ are not impartial instruments in terms of which we might dissect the problems of politics and universities; they constitute our understanding of politics and universities. They are not weapons we might deploy in ideological struggle; they are themselves a site of ideological struggle. The point I am making here is an echo of one elegantly made by André du Toit2 in his observation that virtually no political grouping in South Africa today, from the far right to the far left, does not claim to be in favour of democracy. Thus one can win no arguments by claiming to be in favour of democracy; it is the very definition of democracy that is in dispute. There are powerful and convincing arguments to support both a positive and a negative answer to the question. Nevertheless, I want to claim that, at the end of the day, a democrat must support a positive answer. In order to be able to give this answer some substance, we need to travel some way; we need to accomplish some understandings.

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For a start, let me try to persuade you that there are indeed problems in answering the question, that I am not simply kicking up the dust and then complaining that I cannot see. Consider the following paradox: 1. An essential feature of democracy is that it protects academic freedom. 2. Academic freedom violates some of the central principles of democracy.


What is curious about these two statements is that although there are strong and convincing arguments that can be brought to defend each of them, they are incompatible with each other. The truth of either seems to rule out the truth of the other. We can see this if we note that someone who holds (1) must answer ‘yes’ to the question of whether a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom, whereas someone who holds (2) must answer ‘no’. Let us consider how each of these statements might be defended. A defence of statement (1) could run along the following lines: the essence of democracy is independence of thought and opinion, and academic freedom is simply a special case of the independence of thought and opinion; thus, the protection of academic freedom is essential in a democracy. A democratic society aims to improve the lot of all of its members. The probability is that innovations and improvements of many kinds will arise out of the unregulated exercise of thought, and such innovations and improvements are likely to improve the lot of everyone in society. This defence can be further reinforced by a reference to the historical record. Totalitarian or oppressive regimes have everywhere tried to suppress academic freedom because they rightly see it as more likely to undermine than to legitimate their power. But if oppressive (that is, non-democratic) regimes see academic freedom as a threat to their power, this tends to show that academic freedom is, in some way, essential to democracy. Socrates, Galileo and Lysenko are classic examples here. But this line of argument will raise the hackles of the defenders of statement (2). They can begin by pointing out that academic freedom has its central institutional location in universities, but universities are essentially elitist institutions. Access is always limited, and the knowledge that universities transmit is some of the most highly valued knowledge in society. But amongst the founding principles of democracy is the principle that all people should have equal access to power, including that kind of power that we call knowledge; democracy is opposed to elites and elitist institutions. Thus, academic freedom and the institutions founded in its name are violations of some of the central principles of democracy.

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should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom ?

But this result is paradoxical. Here we have two lines of argument, each of which, if developed adequately, can convincingly demonstrate the truth of the statement it sets out to defend. But the two statements are incompatible, or so it seems, and they lead to incompatible answers to the question of whether or not a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom. The answer, it seems, should be ‘Ja–nee’.3


Let us now try to think ourselves further into the issue by considering not Socrates, Galileo or Lysenko, nor even the South African Socrates, Johann Degenaar,4 but the O’Brien affair at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

II The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and UCT have seen themselves as the citadels of academic freedom in South Africa. In 1957 they produced a document called The Open Universities in South Africa5 in which they vigorously protested the government’s plan to prevent ‘white’ universities from admitting so-called ‘non-white’ students, and forcefully stated the case for academic freedom. Seventeen years later, in 1974, these universities reissued the original document and supplemented it with a further document called The Open Universities in South Africa and Academic Freedom.6 The latter document set out to reaffirm the principle of academic freedom, and ‘… reflect the current state of opinion and be helpful to the open universities in their approach to the problems which lie ahead’. In this document there is a revealing statement: ‘At this time it appears to many of us that the university is called upon to undertake an increased social role, in the defence of its own academic freedom and in defence of social and personal freedom outside the university.’ In both documents the universities see themselves as defending academic freedom against a totalitarian menace; indeed, one might say that their definition of academic freedom was constructed around their perceptions of this menace: ‘Restrictions on freedom of speech, movement, political expression and association have increased, and these restrictions have, in turn, gravely affected the freedoms of staff and students and hence the freedom of the university.’ Although it is not explicitly stated in either of the two documents, they no doubt saw themselves as defending democracy against forces in the process of corrupting it. Against this historically constructed

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self-interpretation one can begin to understand why the O’Brien affair was so traumatic to UCT, and almost tore it apart. The facts of the case, in impressionistic outline, are as follows: the Department of Political Science invited an eminent international academic to visit the university. In spite of the academic boycott, the invitation seemed unproblematic. O’Brien had a reputation for being an outspoken and forthright critic of Apartheid and if opposition to his visit was to be expected from anywhere, it seemed most likely from the government. Contrary to this expectation, opposition to the visit arose from within UCT itself. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

During one of his lectures O’Brien made what were seen by some members of his audience as disparaging remarks about the academic boycott. (I think he referred to it as a ‘Mickey Mouse affair’.) He expressed skepticism about its possible effectiveness as a strategy, and doubt about its desirability. His lectures were violently disrupted and threats were made that if they continued, reprisals would follow. The university decided to suspend the lectures and asked O’Brien to leave. Some members of the university saw this as a defeat for academic freedom; others saw it as a success for the liberation movement. Those defending the visit spoke as champions of academic freedom. They saw themselves as protecting the right of the university to allow any competent person to speak on its platforms, as rejecting an attempt to restrict the free marketplace of ideas, and as giving embodiment to the view that democracy is promoted by vigorous critical debate amongst those of divergent opinion. They had always understood their defence of academic freedom to be also in the interests of the oppressed in this country. Opposition to O’Brien’s visit, not from the traditional totalitarian menace, but from those very persons in whose interests they had always seen themselves as acting, was unnerving. Instead of appreciating that academic freedom was in everybody’s interests, the opponents seemed to pose a new totalitarian menace, a new attempt to restrict the university’s essential functions, to bind its practices to a political agenda. But any such attempt is an assault on academic freedom, and this principle holds no matter what the content of the agenda. Opponents of the visit attacked this position along a number of fronts. The reference to the free marketplace of ideas is thoroughly phoney – and this is especially the case in the South African context. It is never true that simply any

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opinion can be expressed on university platforms. In the case of South Africa at the time, arrests, detentions, bannings and other restrictions and brutal modes of repression had silenced the most effective critics of the government. Such spokespersons could not speak on university platforms, or anywhere else for that matter. In any case, universities always have their own rules of inclusion and exclusion, and the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is structurally constructed and constricted in ways that give the lie to the suggestion that it is free. So-called academic freedom is merely a private playground in which a few privileged intellectuals can dispute with each other under the illusion that they are contributing to the dismantling of current power structures. Whatever the self-interpretations of those who take part, these activities tend to reproduce and reinforce the current power structures rather than to undermine them. Underlying this line of argument might be the claim that it is impossible for universities to be ideologically neutral. Currently7 in South Africa we have obvious examples of universities, which in all the details of their practices and relationships, as well as in their public stances, support and reinforce the dominant ideology. Those universities which claim to be opposed to the dominant ideology while adopting a neutral stance, suffer from a fond illusion. A neutral stance serves the dominant ideology by default. Neutrality is simply a smokescreen behind which universities hide while, in fact, serving the interests of the rich and powerful of society. Using the vocabulary of the critique of capitalism, the argument might be given an epistemological twist. Here it can be claimed that all knowledge is ideological, that there is not only capitalist economics, history and sociology, but also capitalist art, capitalist philosophy, capitalist physics, and so on. The entire realm of intellectual discourse is ideologically infested and made to order in the interests of capital. As Strike puts it: The very standards of truth and rationality which universities struggle to adhere to do not serve truth and rationality but class interests. Indeed the very notion of academic freedom, because it permits and legitimates the enforcement of these corrupt intellectual standards, turns out to be nothing more than a subterfuge cloaking bourgeois interests with the language of liberty.8

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Faced with this twist to the argument, defenders of academic freedom might fall back on the view that this argument in fact undermines democracy and rationality. But the opposition will not disperse at the mention of these precious words. They can claim, and rightly, that Marx was a thorough democrat, at least this is clear in the earlier period of his thought, and that precisely what Marx did was to reveal the fatal inabilities of bourgeois democracy to live up to its promises. But Marx pointed the way to an alternative type of democracy, a true democracy, which will genuinely give power to the people; it will empower them to implement their will. In a true democracy people will be able to recover their true humanity in the community of their comrades, there will be solidarity and officials will be genuinely accountable to the mass of the people. In this form of democracy mandates will be more typical than votes, and the will of the people will be articulated in its mandates. These considerations apply also to universities, which, along with all other institutions, should be democratised. So-called academic freedom is nothing but an attempt to act outside of the forces of democracy; it is the attempt by academics to carve out an unjustifiable and privileged status for themselves, to avoid being accountable for their activities and to fail to meet their obligations to serve the people. Even from this impressionistic account of the O’Brien affair, we can, I hope, get some feel for the way it turned out to be a radical and dramatic challenge to the concept of academic freedom which UCT had seen itself as upholding over the years. To cope with this challenge, UCT had to admit that the precious concepts in terms of which they had constructed their self-understandings were put under severe pressure. At least this is my understanding, as an outsider, of the issue.

III Let us now return to a consideration of the question of whether or not a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom. The opposition to the O’Brien visit was based on a powerful and influential position in South African politics. If we are democrats, then we need to allow our judgements to be educated by that position. If we simply try to ignore, suppress or domesticate it, we can no longer claim to be democrats.

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My basic claim is that academic freedom is not a right but a privilege extended to particular people for a particular purpose. I shall proceed by spelling out some of the consequences of this claim and some of the ways I will try to defend it. To say that academic freedom is a privilege as opposed to a right is to claim that its value is instrumental, not constitutive. Its value is subservient to other values, and academic freedom can legitimately be challenged to the extent that it fails to serve these other values. This point is crucial; someone who opposes a particular claim to academic freedom does not thereby show himself to be anti-democratic. The other values to which academic freedom is subservient are truth and justice. The discussion that follows revolves around issues to do with truth and justice. Seeing that it is not a right, academic freedom should not be conceived of as simply one amongst other civil rights. Academic freedom is not a special case of, for example, the general rights of free speech and publication, which are constitutive of a democratic political system. I am here expressing disagreement with a view taken in the ‘Open University’ documents I mentioned previously – to think of academic freedom as a right is to make it difficult to develop an adequate conception of the social and political responsibilities of universities. The right to free speech and publication is linked to a conviction basic to democracy; the conviction that there can be no blueprint for a perfectly just society. For a democrat, the goal of a just society is an ideal that should shape and guide our political judgements, not a destination we might reach. I take it that something like this point underlies the ideas of permanent revolution or permanent struggle. The right to free speech and publication is a formal acknowledgement that persons are the sources of legitimate claims. What distinguishes academic freedom is that it is conceptually linked to the idea of the search for truth. We need now to say something about the search for truth, and then about why particular people should be accorded privileges in relation to the search for truth. As soon as we ask questions about ‘the search for truth’, we enter territory constructed by epistemological problems of great complexity and subtlety. Still, we can progress via a simple contrast that can set up the arguments. Truth might be conceptualised in terms of certainty or in terms of the dynamic flux of individual experience.

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There are many who have taken, and take, the first path. Truth is here conceived of as something that is there to be discovered or revealed, something that can be disclosed, but that might be hidden or obscured. In the natural sciences such a view would understand Newton’s theory, for instance, as revealing the fundamental truths about the universe once and for all, truths which were hidden to previous generations of thinkers but have been revealed for all subsequent generations. Similarly, in the social sciences, such a view might be taken of, for example, Marx’s theory.


The corresponding view in the political sphere has a long and bloody history. Countless tyrannies have been founded on the conviction that the blueprint for a perfectly just society has, at last, been revealed, and indeed revealed uniquely to some particular group that now has the right, indeed maybe the divine duty, to improve the lot of their benighted fellow human beings by imposing the revealed truth on them. Any resistance on their part can be taken as proof of their ignorance, of their failure to realise the ways in which the revealed truth will enable them to become more fully human. If force is necessary, so be it; it is justified because it will help people to discover what their real interests are. In South Africa, unfortunately, we do not have to seek far for examples of this tendency in our schools and universities as well as in other aspects of our political life. But for anyone who thinks along these lines, academic freedom is both pointless and dangerous. It is pointless because if truth is revealed, there is no need to search for it, and it is dangerous because it might foster the false idea that truth is not yet revealed. Those who take the second path see truth in terms of the dynamic flux of experience. Here the basic idea is that each individual can discover truth in their own experience, and experience is the foundation of all true knowledge and the source of all reliable ideas. Along this path we can see the radical democratisation of knowledge – no one needs the mediation of an authority in the search for truth; truth is available unadorned in the experience of every normal person. Academic authority can be nothing but a disguise for political power; those who claim academic authority are as much in the business of political control as are the police and the army and, to make matters worse, they are inclined to deny it. They suffer a serious misunderstanding of their role in society. For the second conception of truth, any restriction of access to educational institutions becomes essentially arbitrary, and we need to find

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some special explanation for the privilege of academic freedom – maybe it is sheer prejudice or class interests that underlies the granting of this privilege. I have provided here merely a caricature of a view, which – in its more sophisticated versions – circulates in our educational and political institutions. In the political sphere, for example, it generates a view of democracy as the arena in which competing interests are reconciled or adjudicated. In politics and education each person is entitled to their own opinion and any attempt to deny this is a restriction of that person’s freedom. If one thinks in these terms, then a demand that academics be accountable for the opinions they hold, the theories they espouse or the research they undertake, will be seen by academics as an illegitimate constraint on their academic freedom. This conception of truth does have a kind of democratic appeal; it is egalitarian and libertarian and, perhaps, lends support to the idea that academic freedom violates some of the central principles of democracy. Let us now move towards a more adequate conception of the search for truth via some standard objections to the view of truth that links it to the dynamic flux of individual experience. We can note, first, that the latter conception of truth atomises the search for truth. Each person becomes an essentially isolated searcher after truth. But in this case we can make no sense of the growth of knowledge, we can give no explanation for why we should ever teach someone, say, the theories of Newton or Marx, or anything else for that matter. In case we think this utterly bizarre, we can note that there are theories abroad in education which recommend precisely this course; we should substitute for teaching the facilitation of learning, encourage learners to pursue their own path of discovery, and so on. Furthermore, this conception of truth cannot give us an adequate account even of individual experience; it ignores the necessarily social dimensions of experience, learning and knowledge. There can be no experience unmediated by conceptual schemes; any experience is an experience of something as something, and conceptual schemes are necessarily shared. Partly as a consequence of these tendencies, this conception of truth cannot provide us with an adequate conception of the social conditions necessary for the search for truth, or even of ‘the social’; instead, it generates the idea of society as a mere collection of individuals. The alternative conception of truth implied in the previous remarks is that truth is constructed in and by human practices, and I shall proceed by pointing out the consequences of this view for the ideas of academic freedom

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and of democracy, and indicating how it might underwrite an affirmative answer to the question of whether or not a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom.


This view of truth implies that the search for truth is necessarily a shared practice. It is not that it is merely convenient that those searching for truth work in collaboration with one another – such collaboration is essential to the search for truth; we can make no sense of the idea of the search for truth as an isolated project. Truth is neither revealed in the intuitions of some great theorist, nor is it discovered in the individual experience of each of us; it is the provisional outcomes of the ongoing shared practices of investigation, shaped and guided by dynamic traditions and disciplines of rigorous inquiry, and by constant critical discussion. This account of the search for truth shows the sense of one aspect of the rejection of the view that universities are free markets of ideas. In some universities there might be all kinds of ideas and opinions floating around, but the university operates as a kind of sieve that selects certain of those ideas for further development. But it is not true to say that this sieve is ideological. Let us try to see why not. We can begin by conceding that the practices of critical inquiry – of which critical discussion is an essential aspect – are located, as are all human practices, in institutional and historical contexts, created and sustained by power, which bear in on them in crucial ways. Such contexts can, and frequently do, distort and corrupt the practices of critical inquiry, and possibly even divert them entirely from their constitutive goal – the search for truth. But this is not necessarily the case, and we can show this by a consideration of ideology. The claim that all academic work is ideological suffers from a curious problem. The force of this claim depends on its own status as true. But the claim itself seems to imply that there can be no true claims. I shall try to cope with this in terms of a few comments about ideology. Usually the word ‘ideology’ is used to refer to any system of ideas or beliefs, or conceptual schemes, frames of meaning, systems of thought and so on, and to imply an explanation of them in terms of some underlying reality, such as economic structure or class interests. In terms of this account, to say of anything that it is ideological is to say that its claim to be an expression of truth or to be impartial is always

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phoney; such claims are always deceptions, and usually self-deceptions as well; they simply conceal the interests that are being served.


We can refer to this as the ‘neutral’ conception of ideology; here ideological struggle is a conflict between competing ideologies. What is curious is that the critical thrust of the concept of ideology, such as we find, for instance, in Marx’s own brief comments about it, is lost. To describe some institution, practice or way of thinking as ideological becomes simply to point to its roots elsewhere. But there is a different conception of ideology, one which retains its original critical thrust, and one for which ideological struggle is a struggle against ideology. Following John Thompson9 we can call this a ‘critical’ conception of ideology. Here ideology is not any framework of meaning or system of thought, but only those that serve to sustain domination or asymmetrical relations of power. This implies that there can be systems of thought or frameworks of meaning that are non-ideological and, depending on their content, even anti-ideological. This readjustment opens the space for a more adequate account of the relations between truth and justice. The search for truth and the striving for justice are not merely contingently connected to each other, as is implied in the view that the discovery of truths contributes generally to the knowledge in society, and that the availability of knowledge contributes generally to justice in society by, for example, enabling us to overcome the problems which beset us, and becoming apprised of the unintended consequences of our projects and policies. The alternative account of truth shows the ways in which there is a conceptual relationship between the search for truth and the striving for justice. Underlying both are a principle of impartiality and the view that neither truth nor justice can be definitively attained; both require constant vigilance. Frequently, the search for truth is not merely non-ideological, but actually anti-ideological in the sense of dismantling frameworks of meaning that sustain domination. Rigorous academic work, properly understood, is the only escape from ideology. But domination is a potent source of injustice; thus, in dismantling ideologies, the search for truth is a contribution to the striving for justice. We need to acknowledge that the processes I have described above are difficult and hazardous, permanently open to themselves becoming ideological. We need constantly to reflect on whether the practices of

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critical inquiry we are engaging in are, inadvertently perhaps, serving to create or sustain frameworks of meaning that legitimate domination. A potent stimulus for such reflection can be challenges to particular claims to academic freedom; such challenges might be understood as a contribution to the critical discussion that is so central to critical inquiry. That dimension of theories of ideology that emphasises how insidious, pervasive and subtle the operations of ideology or regimes of power are, should prevent us from becoming arrogant about what it is possible to achieve, and alert us to how vulnerable the practices of critical inquiry are to becoming ideological. What I am rejecting is the suggestion that such vulnerability is fatal to the practices of critical inquiry, and that non-ideological critical inquiry is in principle impossible. If critical inquiry were necessarily ideological, then general skepticism about academic work and academic freedom would be appropriate. The claim that emerges from the line of thought I am pursuing is that, no matter how vulnerable it may itself be to becoming ideological, rigorous academic work is not necessarily ideological. Let me now draw some consequences for neutrality and accountability. Based on the argument I have developed, we must concede that some academic work is unlikely to be ideologically neutral, but this is a virtue, not a deficiency. What needs to be said here is that there are some kinds of academic work that have no direct relation to ideology, and here the issue of ideological neutrality simply does not arise. But there are other kinds of academic work, maybe especially in the humanities and social sciences, in which frameworks of meaning are the direct object of study. In these cases the search for truth requires ideological non-neutrality; in these cases one is either reinforcing a framework of meaning, which maintains relations of domination, or one is disarticulating it. But we need to say different things if it is political neutrality that is being spoken about. Any intellectual work has political consequences and effects. Thus no university can be politically neutral. But to use this as a way of insisting on a political orthodoxy in a university is to distort its constitutive principles as a university. Unless a university retains its capacity to be a source for the critique of current structures of power, whatever they may be, it cannot fulfil its obligations to justice. If the demands that universities be accountable are a way of insisting that universities have an obligation to serve justice as well as truth, then they

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are a timely reminder to universities of their inevitable role in the political life of society. However, if accountability is used as a way of insisting that academics be accountable to the authority of some bodies or people outside of universities, then this becomes an attack on academic freedom, which constitutes the idea of a university, and a hindrance to their performing their particular role in undermining injustice. This view can be supported by a consideration of the social conditions required for the search for truth. The view I am defending is that truth is constructed in and by the practices of critical inquiry. But in order for critical inquiry to be sustained and effective, in other words, likely to be able to achieve its objects, it needs to be guided and regulated by the disciplines and traditions of critical inquiry. But this cannot happen magically; the processes involved here are that those who understand those traditions and disciplines constantly make fallible, but not arbitrary, judgements that shape and sustain the practices of critical inquiry. This implies that there is a kind of authority that is different from political authority. If one rejects this claim, then it is difficult to see what could shape and regulate the necessarily social practices of critical inquiry. Either one will be left with an anarchic babble of competing claims and counter-claims with no rational way of discriminating between them, or critical inquiry will become subservient to some other source of authority, maybe a particular church or political group, which might have its own ideological programme. Even if that source of authority is a majority, such as the mass democratic movement, critical inquiry effectively becomes impossible, and its potential to challenge injustice is lost. In spite of the corruptions to which it is vulnerable, I can see no other way in which the practices of critical inquiry could be sustained, guided and regulated, except by acknowledging the collective authority, and academic freedom, of the community of academics in relation to the practices of critical inquiry. If by ‘democratic’ we mean ‘governed by the mass of the people’, then academic freedom is a violation of democratic principles. However, it would be a short-sighted democrat who opposed academic freedom on such grounds. Academic freedom is essential to universities being able to contribute to the permanent struggle against injustice; the constant vigilance that such a struggle requires is institutionalised in universities. Academic freedom, and the institutions that embody it, can contribute – in a way in which no other

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authority seems able to – to the maintenance of a just and democratic society. And I think this provides good reason to say that a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom. Notes


We have been unable to trace the journal in which this essay was originally published (1989). If notified, we will be pleased to include the omitted acknowledgement at the earliest opportunity.

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1

Kenneth Strike, Liberty and Learning, Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982, p. 100.

2

Emeritus Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Cape Town.

3

A literal translation from the Afrikaans would be ‘yes–no’, indicating that there is no clear-cut answer.

4

Emeritus Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Stellenbosch, retired 1991.

5

UCT & Wits, The Open Universities in South Africa, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1957.

6

UCT & Wits, The Open Universities in South Africa and Academic Freedom 1957–1974, Cape Town: Juta & Co. Ltd, 1974.

7

‘Currently’ refers to 1989, when this essay was written.

8

Strike, Liberty and Learning, p. 117.

9

John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984. See especially the introduction.

6

Entitlement and achievement in education (First published in 1994)1


All human beings by nature reach out for understanding.2 But the pursuit of entitlement needs to be handled in such a way that it does not make worthless the achievement of what was previously unobtainable.3

Breakdown in the culture of learning The distortions and injustices of Apartheid education have thrown our concepts of educational success and failure into disarray. This disarray is a serious matter – it induces confusion and misdirection in many of the practices of teachers and learners, and threatens to undermine the very value and values of education. There are many aspects to what has been called ‘a breakdown in the culture of learning’ but somewhere near the heart of this phenomenon stands the loss, amongst both teachers and learners, of a sense of the significance of systematic learning, of what its point or purpose might be, and how it contributes to human flourishing. Explanations for the breakdown in a culture of learning in terms of political oppression obviously have some substance. However, they can all too easily be woven into popular political rhetoric in such a way as to provide a gloss of respectability to what, on closer investigation, turn out to be little more than evasions of responsibility. This is an aspect of the ‘victim syndrome’, in which those who see themselves as oppressed come to develop self-images of themselves as the victims of forces that they cannot control but, at best, can only resist, if need be heroically. Such self-images are at the root of protest politics which, in spite of strident claims about ‘taking control of our own history’, typically has little sense of constructive and creative historical agency. Protest politics is driven by the logic of moral and political indignation, but

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it generates self-perceptions of victimisation and tends to be located in the culture of complaint. At the bottom of this track stands a paralysing confusion between dissatisfaction, pathology and oppression, and the projection of ‘the other’ as the source of all problems.


Protest politics and its psychological penumbra are frequently reinforced by well-meaning (but often subliminally paternalistic) sympathy for the victims, and further entrenched by unreflective policies of affirmative action and a discourse at the heart of which stands words like ‘deprived’ and ‘disadvantaged’. Such responses and ways of thinking, benevolent as their motives might be, can simply serve to perpetuate social relations of dependency – which are not too different from relations of domination. We might think here of teachers, sympathetic towards learners betrayed by their background, betraying them yet further by depriving them of the opportunity to face the challenges of sustained learning. The plot thickens when we mix facile relativism into the brew. Given our history of political exclusion and the strong need to expunge that history, redress must be high on our agenda in the years ahead. We cannot now simply dismantle the formal barriers of Apartheid and colonialism and expect our world to fall into a ‘normal’ pattern. The scars are too deep and we all carry the burden of a manifestly unjust past. It is not merely guilt, but a pragmatic sense of how we might survive as a society, which underlies the conviction that we need to take positive steps to redress the imbalances which have been created in our society.

The culture of entitlement These traditions are some of the sources of the culture of entitlement, a culture that is putting increasingly severe pressure on many orthodox policies and practices in formal institutions of learning. There are many students who demand access to these institutions, and who see themselves as entitled to such access whether or not they satisfy entry requirements or the institutions can accommodate them. Such demands frequently strike a sympathetic chord with teachers and institutions sensitive to the political and historical conditions that are their source. Entry requirements come to be understood as merely one aspect of the legacy of the exclusionary policies of the past,

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entitlement and achievement in education


and lack of institutional resources or capacity as simply a more subtle form of exclusion. For my purposes here I shall note three closely connected characteristics of the culture of entitlement. First, in harmony with its source in protest politics, this culture assumes an unproblematic identification between education and politics. This might be seen, after all, as one of the lessons of the success of student protests over the years. In many cases boycotts and other forms of political pressure have proved more efficient than academic effort in gaining the formal rewards (such as certificates) for success. This lesson might be justified by those forms of radical sociology and critical pedagogy that teach that education and politics are, in some sense, synonymous, and that knowledge and power are so entangled with each other that we should stop confusing the issue by talking about knowledge. Second, this culture inverts the normal burden of responsibility for progress and success in education, as noted by Kenneth King,4 with the uncluttered vision of an informed and sympathetic outsider. The logic of entitlement can yield the conclusion that if a student fails, the fault cannot lie in the student – it must lie in the teachers, the curriculum, the institution or, more vaguely, the ‘system’. Entitlement to access can easily slide over into entitlement to succeed. It was not students who failed Bantu Education, but Bantu Education that failed students. Third, the culture of entitlement has a strong tendency either to occlude achievement entirely or, especially in the field of education, to delegitimise it by inducing radical skepticism about its point or purpose. In more articulated versions, this culture will construe educational achievement as simply an aspect of the ideological structure we need to dismantle if we are to achieve the genuine transformation for which we have struggled all these years. My central claim in this essay will be that in the field of education, entitlement presupposes achievement, so that to the extent that the culture of entitlement undermines, delegitimises or excludes the concept of educational achievement, it becomes incoherent. In what follows I shall do something by way of explicating what I mean by this claim, and this will at the same time be to defend it. I shall first discuss some conceptual features of achievement and educational achievement.

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Achievement and agency When we talk of achievement we are invoking a web of concepts such as merit, quality, excellence, winning, passing, distinction and, of course, their opposites. The defining use of these concepts is in judgements of success in participating in activities and, where success is possible, so also is lack of success. We can classify different kinds of achievements according to a classification of the kinds of activities in relation to which they are achievements. In general terms, concepts of achievement have fallen into disrepute in education in South Africa; for some they have come to be identified as part of the ideology which sustains relations of domination. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

Achievements are possible, as a matter of logic, only in relation to activities in which some combination of effort or skill is required and, in general terms, the more effort or skill required, the greater the achievement. Beyond the first few years for a person in normal health, being able to walk or put on their own clothes is not an achievement; similarly, where every person is issued with a birth certificate, getting a birth certificate cannot count as an achievement. Winning a competition whose outcome is simply a matter of chance cannot be an achievement, but winning a competition that involves some skill or effort is an achievement. The link between achievements and activities which involve some skill or effort can explain the close connection between achievement and agency. Only agents are capable of achievements; and we can add, to avoid a possible misunderstanding, agents can, of course, be individual or collective. Depending on the nature of the activity, an individual, a team, an institution, or even, say, a whole nation, can notch up achievements. Some kinds of achievements, such as winning the team prize, maintaining a primary healthcare programme, or establishing a peaceful society, are not possible for individuals, no matter how much individuals might contribute to them. I can be proud of my achievements, but I can also be proud of the achievements of my team, my country, or even, perhaps, all women. Judgements of achievement are (in principle) necessarily interpersonal judgements, and are open to disagreement and discussion. A particular judgement of achievement can be contested either because it is based on inappropriate standards or because the standards were incorrectly applied. What the appropriate standards are depends both on the nature of the

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activity in question and, in some cases, on some characteristics of the agent participating in the activity. Judgements of achievement in mountain climbing must in every case express some features of the activity of mountain climbing, but what might be an achievement for a five or an 85 year old might be, for an experienced 35 year old, not an achievement at all, because it no longer requires any particular effort. An example of disagreement about the application of standards in a particular case might be where someone agrees that the team which scores the most goals has won the match, but claims that the disallowed goal was an error of judgement on the part of the referee. The public achievements available in any cultural setting play a key role in structuring the motivations, aspirations and ambitions of those in that setting. To give a straightforward example, where a netball league has been established and the winning team is to be awarded a cup, any team in that league is likely to have their collective individual motivations, aspirations and ambitions structured around an effort to win the cup. Their striving to play better netball and their own and others’ views about whether or not they are doing so, are likely to be shaped by the very existence of the league, with a cup for the winning team. As Kenneth King5 astutely notes, a university access policy that is skeptical about the value of achieving a matriculation certificate (even where there are good grounds for such skepticism) can seriously undermine the aspirations and ambitions of both teachers and learners in the schooling system (and thus, paradoxically, contribute to the decay of a culture of learning in schools). Some activities, and the significance of their related achievements, are essentially competitive in the sense that they are structured around goals that are in short supply. Only one horse can win the Durban July6 in any year (ignoring, for the moment, the remote possibility of a dead heat), and only one runner can win the Comrades Marathon. It would be a fanatical egalitarian indeed who complained that this restriction is ‘unjust’ to the 16 or 13 000 ‘losers’ in these activities. But examples of achievements in essentially competitive activities do not provide the paradigm for achievements in general. This is because the intrinsic goals of most activities in which we talk of achievement are not in short supply. Although artists, athletes or physicists might ‘compete’ with each other, perhaps even harbour deep antagonism towards their ‘rivals’ in the field, the achievements they strive for are essentially co-operative as opposed

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to competitive. Even if we, or they, construe such striving in competitive terms, as there is a strong tendency to do in our society, achievements in these fields depend on and contribute to the flourishing of the community of participants, which is a condition for the possibility of the achievement. Such a community is needed for the discovery, maintenance and articulation of the interpersonal standards of achievement that give shape to such activities. When Newton said (if he did) that he had ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ he was acknowledging this point. Newton was not the ‘winner’ in some kind of individualistic competition, and we do not assess his achievements in these terms. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

Furthermore, a critical mass of participants in any field is likely to increase both the quality and the availability of achievements in that field. We can think here, for example, of the extraordinary way in which athletics records (except in the Comrades Marathon) are continually being broken; the mediocre athletes of today regularly produce performances that would have been exceptional achievements a decade or two ago. This is to be explained, at least in part, by the flourishing of a community of participants jointly contributing to the raising of the levels of achievement possible in the activity. The public recognition of achievements opens up the temptation of various forms of corruption and fraudulent ways of getting the recognition without engaging properly in the appropriate activity. Public recognition might be symbolised in the award of a gold medal or some kind of certificate (such as a university degree) of achievement. And these artefacts are typically linked not only to such things as an enhanced reputation or an increase in visibility in our mediated society, but also in more material benefits, such as sponsorships or more lucrative employment. As a spectacular example of such corruption, we might think of a person who takes a taxi to the 70 km mark in the Comrades Marathon, and ‘comes 7th’ after having run only the last 20 km. He does not deserve a gold medal because he did not properly engage in the activity for which the medal is a recognition of achievement. But there are many other possible examples of deceptions to get public recognition for fraudulent ‘achievements’. Elementary examples can be found of runners who take short cuts in cross-country races, or learners who take crib notes into examination rooms, or the widespread practice of plagiarism (‘reproductive learning’ with a vengeance) in some

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institutions. But there are also many other examples in the educational field, such as commercial organisations which sell ‘university degrees’ (R500 for a BA, R1 000 for an MA and R5 000 for a PhD!), or entrepreneurial students in some universities who ‘recycle’ assignments from previous years, or offer their services to ‘help’ other students by writing essays or practicals for them (haven’t I already claimed that academic work is essentially ‘co-operative’?). In general terms, the deceptions involved in these cases involve a claim to authorship (which is, of course, a paradigm form of agency) for work that is not one’s own; they betray one of the virtues constitutive of the activities in question. Counterfeit coins and forged banknotes are parasites on the existence of official coins and banknotes. The deception, which we call lying, can work only against the backdrop of the prevalent practice of telling the truth; lying would cease to be effective if it became so commonplace that it replaced truth-telling as the accepted norm. Similarly, academic deceptions can work only against the backdrop of the accepted connection between academic achievement and authorship; the possibility of corrupt forms depends on the existence of non-corrupt forms. An increase in the practices of academic deception would increasingly undermine a very condition for its effectiveness. A cynic might remark that as in the case of the poor stealing from the rich, to call such practices ‘corrupt’ is merely to underwrite the prevailing corruptions of the status quo. Before I provide a response to the cynic, let us focus more closely on educational achievement.

Educational achievement I have already taken a step into this territory in linking achievement with agency, and in the remarks I have made above about communities of participants and academic authorship. I shall try to unravel some of the strands here. Educational achievement is achievement in relation to educational activities. In general terms, educational activities are activities that contribute to learning how to participate in some socially constructed practice that is regarded as valuable. Although there is a wide diversity of practices in relation to which we might think of education, academic practices play a central role. Academic achievement and educational achievement are not equivalent to

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each other; nonetheless, academic achievement is a beacon around which our conceptions of educational achievement circle. One way of distinguishing between them is to note that judgements of educational achievement essentially involve a developmental dimension, a consideration of ‘level’ of participation already achieved by the learner (in relation to the practice in question). An educational achievement for a promising 10-year-old piano player might be child’s play for an 18-year-old aspirant concert pianist.


But any judgements of educational achievement are also necessarily within the framework of criteria for success in the shared practice in question. Judgements of educational achievement, even in non-academic practices such as how to eat in the company of others, necessarily involve some reference, however implicit, to what it is to participate well in that practice. Even in the case of a six year old, for instance, judgements about her educational achievements in the field of arithmetic cannot be independent of a view about what it is to do arithmetic well. Judgements of academic achievement, by contrast, are judgements about how well someone has engaged in an academic practice as such, without reference to their development as learners of the practice. What might be even a striking educational achievement – for instance, someone earning six distinctions in the matriculation examination – might not, as such, be an academic achievement. Academic achievements contribute to the maintenance and, potentially, even the reshaping of the academic practice of which they are an expression. Some academic papers or books, and some master’s or doctoral theses are paradigm cases of academic achievements; they are the work of authors who demonstrate an assured understanding of the academic practice in question. Academic practices have developed around the search for systematically articulated forms of knowledge and understanding, and they are, for good reasons, sometimes called disciplines. Intrinsic to academic practices are standards of achievement that are constitutive of those practices. Although academic practices and their constitutive standards are not immutable, they have histories (not mere pasts) and have developed over long periods of time under the continuing pressure collectively to discover ways of avoiding obstructions to finding out what is true. These features of academic practices

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explain why they are essentially co-operative and depend for their continued flourishing on being maintained in and by communities of participants.


To learn how to become a participant in an academic practice is to learn the intrinsic disciplines and constitutive standards of the practice. That this is normally a reasonably long-term project, which involves both systematic learning and, perhaps, the sympathetic assistance of those who already understand the practice, is not merely a malevolent ploy to exclude new participants. The same kind of thing is true of learning how to become a participant in any reasonably complex practice. We might think here of what is involved in learning how to become a participant in the practices of reading or writing, or playing tennis, soccer, chess or a musical instrument. Learning how to become a participant in an academic practice might also be described in terms of ‘gaining access’ to the practice in question. Although this phrase risks obscuring the essential dynamism of academic practices, it can help us to avoid bland descriptions that might obscure how contested the field is in which we are moving here, and what is at stake. The demand for ‘access’ is at the centre of the culture of entitlement in the field of education. Seeing that academic practices have developed around the search for knowledge, we might say that what we have in view here is ‘epistemological access’. It is obvious that mere formal access to the institutions that distribute knowledge is different from, and not a sufficient condition for, epistemological access. To register as a student at a university is not yet to have gained access to the knowledge that the university distributes. One way of focusing a discussion of educational achievement is to pose the question of who the agent of epistemological access is. (We can note that, as a matter of logic, this agent is the one to whom educational achievement can be ascribed.)

Epistemological access The ambivalent use of the word ‘education’ (as the name for both the system of institutions which have the distribution of knowledge as their formal aim and the actual process of acquiring knowledge) has a tendency to collapse the distinction between formal and epistemological access. To say that someone is entitled to education obscures this distinction. Because what is required for access is very different in these two cases; we cannot talk in the same way about entitlement to formal access and entitlement to epistemological access.

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Furthermore, the phrase ‘entitlement to epistemological access’ has a strange ring to it. Entitlements assume that someone other than the potential beneficiary must supply whatever is needed for the fulfilment of the entitlement. It is relatively clear what is needed for the fulfilment of my entitlement to, for example, free medical attention, but it is at least odd to talk about my entitlement to live a healthy life. I could, of course, be using the latter phrase as a summary for those things that others can supply to enable me to live a healthy life, but my actually living a healthy life is crucially dependent on what I do. Similarly, my epistemological access in some academic practice is essentially dependent on what I do. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

Epistemological access is not a product that could be bought or sold, given to someone or stolen; nor is it some kind of natural growth, such as the growth of plants or bodies. Epistemological access cannot be supplied or ‘delivered’ or ‘done’ to the learner; nor can it be ‘automatically’ transmitted to those who pay their fees, or even to those who also collect the handouts and attend classes regularly. The reason for this is that epistemological access is learning how to become a successful participant in an academic practice. In the same way in which no one else can do my running for me, no one else can do my learning for me. There are, of course, many things that might help me to do it, or to do it more effectively. We might think here of historical and institutional conditions, various kinds of facilities and resources (a library, for instance), particular levels of physical and mental health, natural talent, access to good textbooks, the company of other serious learners and the sympathetic assistance of teachers. But all of these things can, at best, only facilitate, and never guarantee, my epistemological access; I must be trying to learn. The situation here is analogous to that of learning to be a successful athlete. Such privileges as conducive facilities, high-quality equipment, the company of other athletes, superb coaching and natural talent can, at best, help me to become a successful athlete; however, none of these things can guarantee success, none of them can even help me unless I myself am trying to become an athlete. In my speech, after winning an important athletics prize, I might thank the donors who provided the facilities, the sponsors who provided the prizes and the resources to organise the event, the voluntary organisers of the event, and I might modestly add that without the companionship and sympathetic encouragement of my fellow athletes and the critical advice of

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my wonderful coach, I could never have done it. But, nevertheless, at the bottom of all this stands the fact that it was my achievement.


The traditions of protest in education have had a tendency to exaggerate the agency of learners. In rejecting the victim status projected on the oppressed by the forces of domination, protest politics has a strong tendency to leap to the other extreme of imagining an untrammelled agency that might remake the world at will. In the sphere of education, this way of thinking might be underwritten by empiricist or subjectivist epistemologies, which are radically skeptical about any established forms of knowledge and imply that knowledge is transparently available to any learner. But that the learner is necessarily an agent in her own epistemological access does not imply that she could ‘invent’ knowledge de novo, design her own curricula, or reliably judge her own academic achievements. The kind of agency appropriate to learners is different from mere self-assertion. The agency of a learner is ‘compromised’ by the nature of the practice in which she is trying to become a participant. That attempt will fail to the extent that the learner is ignorant of or refuses to acknowledge the requirements of the practice, or arrogantly rejects the authority of the current standards of achievement in the practice. The learner needs to have a certain kind of humility and respect for the practice in which she is trying to become a participant; if that practice is an academic practice, then epistemological access will depend on the learner acknowledging the authority of the practice and its outstanding participants. For epistemological access to be on the cards, the learner needs to have a particular kind of self-understanding in relation to the practice in question. To the extent that a learner sees herself as a victim, a consumer or an exploited worker, rather than as a novice participant in the practice in question, it is unlikely that she will achieve epistemological access. The appropriate kind of learner self-understanding carries over to the kind of relationship needed between learners and their teachers, if it is going to be possible for teaching to contribute to learners’ epistemological access. For example, if teachers and learners are seen as being on the same footing in the teaching situation, then teaching loses its point. Teaching similarly loses its point if the teaching situation is seen as a ‘circle of affection’ – if the relation between teachers and learners is sentimentalised in such a way that it excludes

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attention to the requirements of the practice in which the learners are trying to become participants, or fails to acknowledge that standards of achievement in the practice are independent of the decisions, even joint decisions, of the teacher and the learners. Judgements of educational achievement are, as I have argued, necessarily within the framework of criteria for success in the shared practice in question.


The teachers of an academic practice at any level carry the responsibility to distinguish from amongst the range of hesitant and tentative moves made by learners: those which, no matter how remotely, are ‘on the right track’ and might lead to more adequate participation in the practice in question, and those which are completely ‘off beam’. Teachers who are reluctant to ‘upset’ or ‘insult’ their learners by making critical remarks about their efforts, who (perhaps under pressure from learners) misleadingly simplify the practice to which the learners are trying to gain access, who think that it is their job to relieve learners of having to face the difficulties and challenges of systematic learning, are not fulfilling their responsibilities as teachers. Perhaps they see themselves as ‘the learners’ friend’, but this is an illusion. They are betraying the learners by betraying the standards of achievement in the practice in which the learners are trying to become participants; they are failing to respect the learners’ efforts to achieve epistemological access. The benevolence of the teacher must be shaped by standards of achievement in the relevant practice. But teaching cannot be successful unless the learners see teaching as a co-operative task and have the appropriate self-understanding of themselves in relation to the practice in which they are trying to become participants. If learners simply refuse to participate (in other words, refuse to play their necessary role in achieving their own epistemological access), there is little a teacher can do. Learners who are suspicious of their teachers, who think that the teacher who makes critical comments about their work is simply being antagonistic, who themselves adopt hostile or antagonistic attitudes towards their teachers, or who think that teachers are simply being spiteful or expressing their personal prejudices when they give students a low mark, are blocking the possibility that that teaching could contribute to their epistemological access. The picture of learners as ‘exploited workers’ generates the idea that (like workers?) learners can never be wrong in their fundamental intuitions, that those intuitions are in good order as they are, and that any suggestion that they might not be is nothing but a form of domination. This idea is linked to

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Tentitlement eaching large and classes achievement in higher in education


that feature of the culture of entitlement that implies that if a student fails, the fault cannot lie in the student, it must lie in her teachers, or the curriculum, the institution or ‘the system’. But there is another aspect of this picture that also undermines the essentially co-operative nature of teaching. This picture assumes structurally opposed interest groups, so that, like workers and management, learners and their teachers (and the institutions in which they work) inevitably belong to rival interest groups. If it is epistemological access that we have in view, this idea is fatally misleading; it distorts the teaching relationship by losing sight of the practice that is the horizon of significance, which provides the essential rationale for such a relationship. Teaching presupposes that the teachers and the learners share an interest in an academic practice that is not ‘owned’ by anyone.

The politics of academic practices In previous sections of this essay I have been assuming that the culture of entitlement has a tendency to reject the value of educational or academic achievement. But a more revolutionary way of interpreting this culture is to say that it rejects not achievement as such, but the value of the practices, especially academic practices, in relation to which we understand educational achievement. At an extreme, this culture might say that it intends to replace academic practices with other practices, perhaps political practices. Academic practices, it might be said, are themselves aspects of the framework that serves to maintain relations and structures of oppression and domination in our society. This is another version of the objection raised by the cynic mentioned earlier: to refer to academic deceptions as corrupt is merely to underwrite the prevailing corruptions of the status quo. An ad hominem response to this line of thinking is to say: if you are not interested in playing soccer, why have you joined the soccer club? If you don’t accept the value of academic practices, why have you gone to the expense and the trouble of registering as a student at a university? A revolutionary might reply to this that educational institutions (unlike mere soccer clubs?) are ‘sites of struggle’, and to achieve social transformation we need to use these institutions as sites of political struggle. Academic practices play a crucial role in constituting an oppressive society, and we need to throw them out if we want to reconstitute society.

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There are half-truths here which we need to acknowledge, but in the end this line of thinking is self-defeating. It is true that universities, for instance, are ‘sites of struggle’ (as anyone who has experienced the internal politics of universities knows all too well), but the struggle involved here is no ordinary political struggle; it is a struggle driven by the attempt to refine and improve academic practice. It is also true that educational institutions, and especially universities, are constitutive rather than service institutions. Their founding rationale is not to supply the economy with person power, to shore up or undermine a particular political dispensation or to supply protected employment to people who find it difficult to hold jobs in other markets, no matter how much these are some of the effects that universities have. The guiding ideal of universities is to constitute the realm of academic learning; to provide an institutional home for academic practices and access to them. It is also true that educational institutions, such as universities, can become corrupt. But the explanation for this is not that they maintain academic practices, but that they have lost a sense of the nature and significance of academic practices. It is also true that academic practices can themselves become corrupt; however, this is not because they are academic practices but because they have lost their way as academic practices. That such corruptions occur is not itself a reason to reject the practice; on the contrary, such corruptions should themselves be rejected in the name of the practice. We might have a project of turning a university into some other kind of institution, a political party, for instance, a marriage bureau or a sports club, but if we want to transform it as a university then we cannot, on pain of simple incoherence, deny the intrinsic value of academic practices. Like all shared practices, academic practices have histories, and they were humanly constructed in the course of those histories. From this premise it is sometimes concluded that academic practices are therefore arbitrary, that we could change them at will to suit our purposes, that they are relative to a particular cultural grouping and serve sectional interests, and that they are expressions of, and maintain asymmetrical relations of, power. None of these conclusions follows from that premise. As I have already said, academic practices have developed over time in the ongoing activities of communities of inquirers under continuing pressure collectively to discover ways of avoiding obstructions to finding out what is true. There is no certainty here, and academic practices are always open to

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refinement and revision as new standards of rigour are invented or discovered. Academic practices change over time, but not arbitrarily. And they do not change as a result of a decision by any individual or local group of participants. Any refinement or revision would have to be justifiable in terms of the intrinsic standards of the practice, and the relevant academic community would have to come to acknowledge that the proposed refinement or revision is indeed an improvement of the academic practice in question. Here the relevant academic community cannot be limited to, or identified with, a cultural or interest group defined in some other terms. It is a kind of facile relativism to imagine that this could be so. We might complain of Eurocentrism in our academic practices and call for a greater Africanisation of our curriculum, but we would here be talking of the content of the practices (which problems they address, and how they relate to the specific historical contexts of their practice) not the practices themselves. Academic practices are essentially trans-cultural, and mathematics provides a clear example of this. The same is true even of a controversial academic practice such as history. There are different ‘schools’ of history, sometimes in deep dispute with one another. But even here, the fact that they are in dispute with one another implies that there must be some standards of argument or evidence which they share. Were this not the case, the academic practice, which we now call history, might divide into different practices, incommensurable with one another. And this is the way new academic practices have emerged over time. But what this is an example of is not that history is the possession of particular local cultural, national or political groups, but rather that, as in the case of all academic practices, it is open to development and change. Academic practices do not in themselves serve sectional interests. It is, of course, true that an academic practice might be used to serve a sectional interest, but this is not a reason to reject the academic practice itself. A Rodin miniature might be used as a murder weapon, but this does not persuade us that we should throw it away. The skills, materials and tools of building might be used to build either torture chambers or schools, but the fact that they can be used to build torture chambers is no reason to throw away those skills, materials and tools. Similarly, that academic practices can be misused to serve sectional interests is not any reason to think that this is an inherent feature of academic practices as such, rather than a corruption of those practices.

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Can it then be the case that academic practices serve to maintain asymmetrical relations of power, in short, that they are ideological? The view that they are is probably based on a confusion between an academic practice and the theories, beliefs and other results which it achieves. Academic practices do not rest on substantive foundations, immune from revision; nor are they bodies of ‘content’. Academic practices are disciplines in terms of which it is possible to think rigorously. It is self-contradictory to think that such disciplines could serve to maintain asymmetrical relations of power. Unless this thought is merely an inarticulate rejection of academic practices, it must itself be founded in some academic practice. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za

An interest in emancipation provides the guiding ideal of academic practices. What someone acquires if they achieve epistemological access to an academic practice is emancipation from particular forms of domination. In this way academic practices are inherently anti-ideological, and the only way to escape from ideology is to become a participant in an academic practice. For good reason, academic practices have very special significance in our understanding of education. Such practices have developed around the universal human aspiration of people to know and understand themselves and the world. And it is not sectional interest, mere prejudice, cultural domination, historical accident, or ideological tyranny that explains why learning how to participate in academic practices is central to our conception of education. Successfully achieving epistemological access links the agent into a trans-cultural community, and relates her to the ideals of human emancipation that we inherit from the Enlightenment.

In the sphere of education, entitlement that repudiates achievement is self-defeating I find it difficult to state the argument crisply, but let me, finally, try.7 In education the culture of entitlement presupposes the significance of educational achievement; if that culture denies that significance then it undermines its own significance. Entitlement cannot stand alone; without its ‘object’ it is incomplete. Claims to entitlement are dependent on the independent significance of their object. In

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the sphere of education the object of entitlement is educational and academic achievement, so we might say that these achievements structure the culture of entitlement in education. If such achievements are undermined, corrupted, delegitimised or denied, then the culture of entitlement loses its point. To the extent that the culture of entitlement itself denies the significance of these achievements, it is simply being suicidal. The culture of entitlement requires a horizon of significance that cannot be generated from within that culture. If my friends and I decided to award ourselves Bachelor of Science (BSc) degrees or Comrades gold medals, they could hardly have the same significance (even probably in our own eyes) as degrees with the same name awarded by a reputable university, or gold medals awarded by the Comrades Marathon Association. In the case of education, the horizon of significance is constituted by publicly recognised educational and academic achievements acknowledged by the trans-cultural academic community. If the culture of entitlement rejects the judgements of that community, it deprives itself of significance through rejecting the horizon of significance which is its condition. In education, the culture of entitlement becomes self-defeating when it concentrates on entitlement in opposition to academic achievement, or if it sees itself as an enemy of such achievement, as it implicitly does if it claims entitlement to success. Slogans such as ‘pass one pass all’ or demands for a ‘moratorium on failure’ shut out academic achievement by denying the horizon of significance constituted by academic practices and the necessary agency of the learner in gaining access to those practices. As in the case of everyone automatically getting a birth certificate, if everyone passes or everyone gets a degree, passing or getting a degree would no longer be significant achievements, and would further contribute to the decay of a sense of the significance of systematic learning. To shut out demands issuing from outside of the culture of entitlement is to court trivialisation; its own demands make no sense outside of the context of those independent demands. To reject the significance of academic achievement is self-stultifying; it destroys a condition for the realisation of entitlement. My purpose in this essay has not been to argue that we need to restore some mythical golden age, nor to suggest that all is in good shape in our current educational institutions; it has been to try to retrieve a sense of what would be lost if we demolished, rather than revitalised or revised, what we have at

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present in education. I am concerned that attempts to transform education, to the extent that they are founded on a rejection of independently recognised educational and academic achievement, are more likely to destroy than transform it. The culture of entitlement, and its enthusiastic support, runs the serious risk of undermining the very good which it is their object to attain. It is incoherent to delegitimise or repudiate educational or academic achievements in the name of educational entitlement. To take the citadel in this way would be to destroy the treasure that it contained.


Notes

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1

This essay was first published as ‘Entitlement and achievement in education’ by Wally Morrow in Studies in Philosophy and Education 13(1): 33–47, 1994. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.

2

M.C. Nussbaum, ‘Non-relative virtues: An Aristotelian approach’ in M.C. Nussbaum & A. Sen (eds), The Quality of Life, 1993, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, p. 264. Quoting from Aristotle Metaphysics I.1.

3

Kenneth King, ‘Education policy in a climate of entitlement: The South African case’ in Perspectives in Education, 14(2): 201, Winter 1993.

4

See King, ‘Education policy in a climate of entitlement: The South African case’, p. 202.

5

See King, ‘Education policy in a climate of entitlement: The South African case’, p. 200.

6

The Durban July is a famous South African horse race, and the Comrades Marathon (a few lines down) is an extraordinary South African ultra-marathon between Durban and Pietermaritzburg (90 km) in Natal.

7

Those who have read Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 1992, London: Harvard University Press, will recognise that some of the phrases in this section, and even the formal shape of the argument, take their inspiration from this book.

7

Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions in South Africa


(First published in 1998)1

Introduction Questions about the governance of the system and the institutions of public education have been at the top of the agenda of the transformation of education in South Africa. In spite of some vulgar convictions to the contrary, the governance of education cannot, of course, be the whole story. Transforming South African education will involve much else,2 but it is not implausible to maintain that governance stands high in the order of priority; once we have decided who will make the relevant policy and decisions, then, it might be said, they can get to the more substantive issues of what they should decide. A main argument of this essay will be that the ‘who?’ question and the ‘what?’ question cannot be so neatly separated from each other, especially in a field such as Higher Education. My principal focus will be on the internal governance of higher education institutions in terms of a contrast between stakeholders and senates, and I shall begin at the stakeholder end.

Governance by stakeholders Over the past few years the word ‘stakeholders’ has become predominant in discussions about governance in South Africa. In a sense, we have all now become stakeholders, whether we like it or not, and to refuse this description is to abandon one’s claims to a voice in collective decision-making. A striking feature of the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) report3

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and the Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation4 is that they both refer to the national government itself as ‘a stakeholder’. Although this way of talking was not invented in South Africa, it has been taken up with enthusiasm in our historical context; it flourishes in our political discourses and creates our political world and its new cleavages. It has become the dominating common sense in our situation, forging both the self-understanding of many people in our country and their convictions about legitimate governance.


The word ‘stakeholders’ is, of course, not merely cosmetic. It is the central concept of a distinctive political theory that is assumed by its supporters to be quintessentially democratic, but is seldom spelt out in any systematic way. I shall provide a brief sketch. At the heart of this theory stands the view that a complex society or institution is composed of competing groups, each with its own particular interests, which need to be served in collective decisions. Each of these interest groups is called a ‘stakeholder’, or sometimes a ‘stakeholder group’, which needs to articulate its particular interests autonomously and then put them forward, usually as demands5 which should be met in collective decisions. Where there are conflicts between the demands of various interest groups, as there inevitably will be, then negotiation needs to take place to find some kind of compromise or consensus, which usually involves concessions from at least some of the stakeholders. Where the demands of the various stakeholders, fortuitously, overlap with each other, we have what can be called the common interest. The democratic claims of this theory arise in the first place out of the ways in which it is a critique of a monolithic mode of government in which a ruling party rides roughshod over the interests of significant groups in a complex society or institution. The dominant group unilaterally imposes its own interests on the whole, typically by claiming that its own interests coincide with the general interest. In contrast, a stakeholder political theory can claim to be democratic because it is an attempt to replace the concentration of power in a single interest group with the dispersal of power across independent interest groups. Stakeholders are self-defining and organised as such around perceived constellations of interests. Indeed, if they are not organised, interest groups

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S takeholders and senates


cannot be counted as stakeholders. In this rhetoric, ‘organised constituencies’ is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘stakeholders’. Thus it is not individual members of the academic staff of the university but the Academic Staff Association which might have a voice in the governance of the university, and it is not individual professional teachers, but the ‘organised teaching profession’, which might be allowed representation in negotiation about public education policy. The idea of homogeneous interest groups is central to this theory, which attempts to distance itself from the presupposition of classical liberal theory that atomised individuals are sources of interests. Stakeholder theory is based on an organic conception not of society as a whole, but of the social groups that are conceived as composing it. In line with this tendency, this political theory will be strongly opposed to the utopian ideal that the expressed interests of each individual can be satisfied in collective decisions. Part of the theoretical background here is a structuralist or communitarian social theory and this is a reason why more careful theorists of this mode will tell us that the ‘self-definition’ of stakeholders cannot be a free invention, a ‘subjective’ expression of wants and interests, but needs to be an articulation of something more ‘objective’. Labour unions are paradigm examples of stakeholders and, significantly, their interests are conceived as structurally in conflict with those of owners or management. This has little to do with the personal (probably selfish) wants and interests of individual workers. A worker out of line with the stance of their union is understood as suffering from a form of self-deception about their real interests, and the same kind of view is taken of dissenting voices in any stakeholder group. The democratic credentials of this theory are reinforced, in the second place, by strong views about stakeholder equality. In this theory, there can be no reason to distinguish between the status of various stakeholders when it comes to collective decision-making. All stakeholder groups are conceived of as equal on the grounds that we can have no reason to favour any particular interests above others; if there is a system of voting in respect to collective decisions, each stakeholder group should be entitled to the same number of votes. This can be claimed to be democratic, as it stands opposed to a hierarchical mode of governance, ‘power from above’, or any form of elitism in which the opinions of some people or groups carry more weight than others.

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This view of equality, of course, throws strong emphasis on the identification and specification of stakeholder groups, and paralysing disputes about this issue are legion in this mode of politics. As soon as one steps away, even marginally, from an orthodox theory of structurally antagonistic groups, then the issue of stakeholder definition is riddled with problems. This is a matter I shall take up later in this essay.


It should be fairly clear how this theory plays itself out in the context of the governance of a university.6 A university is seen as a complex institution composed of a variety of interest groups each with its own particular interests and each, thus, potentially a legitimate and equal stakeholder in the governance of the university. The Broad Transformation Forums, which have sprung up to effect the transformation of universities in South Africa, are expressions of this political theory. Broad Transformation Forums are seen by their supporters as the royal road to the simultaneous transformation and democratisation of higher education institutions. Broad Transformation Forums are composed of ‘equal stakeholders’ representing the range of interest groups that compose the university. If the Council and Senate of the university are included at all they can, at best, be ‘equal stakeholders’ alongside students, workers, ‘management’, administrative staff, alumni, and so on. Before I draw out some of the problems and consequences of such a theory in the governance of universities, I shall indicate why it has such undoubted appeal, especially in the light of our history of injustice.

The appeal of this theory in the South African context The Apartheid state can be seen as having made explicit what was merely implicit in colonialism. It imposed on society its own racially inspired definition of the groups that make up society and systematically consolidated those definitions in ramifying legislation. As part of that project, the unequal dignity, status and privileges of the officially defined groups were reinforced in such a way that their advantages and disadvantages would be carried forward into the future. The gross and blatantly unjustifiable inequalities which this ideological regime spawned became more and more difficult either to ignore or to hide, and the edifice, with all its rationalisations, collapsed.

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One way of putting this point is to say that Apartheid overrode major and significant interest groups in society; many voices were excluded from collective decision-making by being marginalised, ignored, silenced or eliminated. But this political strategy could not last forever. Eventually the mounting pressures of excluded interest groups destroyed the whole oppressive machine. In a way educational institutions, and particularly higher education institutions, can be seen as the epitome of this pattern of injustice. Such institutions are major distributors of benefits in society, especially those benefits that stretch forward into the future. Universities, in particular, are bastions of privilege, and as soon as one presses the questions of who is paying for them and who their beneficiaries are, then their key role in the maintenance and perpetuation of an unjust society becomes clear. Universities are supposed to serve society which, after all, pays for them, but they become ivory towers protecting the pursuit of esoteric research that is irrelevant to the needs of society, and arbitrarily prevent admission to their privileged spaces by erecting artificial barriers to access. Universities, typically, have a restricted view of who their stakeholders are and are, thus, constitutionally unresponsive to some major social needs and mired in the complacency of the powerful. This is reflected in their traditional mode of governance, which is hierarchical and opaque and excludes the voices of most of those actually affected by what they do, especially their students. Their traditions of governance are characterised by an anti-democratic lack of equality, transparency and accountability. If we think in terms of a theory of complex institutions as composed of particular interest groups, and ask whose interests university senates serve, then the only answer can be that they serve their own interests. Their supposed neutrality is fraudulent and their self-understanding as guardians of knowledge simply ignores the truth that power and knowledge are inextricably entangled with each other and that power is more fundamental than knowledge. The fashionable slogan ‘it is all about power’ succinctly expresses this stance. Governance, after all, is about power, not authority, and the illegitimate exercise of power in the name of the authority of knowledge is the classical ploy of university senates. Stakeholder politics, so it is thought, can provide the remedy for these ills and injustices. It replaces top-down group definition (which, as we have learnt

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from Apartheid, is a prime strategy for the consolidation of power) with self-definition by stakeholders themselves and thus opens up the spaces in which previously excluded voices can be heard. No one outside a stakeholder group (even if they are called professionals or experts) can be in a better position than members of the group themselves to say what their interests are. Stakeholder politics is based squarely on a view about the diversity of interests in any complex society or institution and it insists on a principle of equality constructed around a conception of independent and self-defining interest groups.


Against self-serving university senates, Broad Transformation Forums, composed of stakeholder groups, take equal account of the range of interests that the university should serve; they provide significant public space for previously silenced voices, they replace the opaqueness of governance by senates with democratically transparent governance and they open up the prospect, at least within one of the major institutions of society, of achieving the classical democratic ideal of a coincidence between the governors and the governed.

Problems of stakeholder political theory However, this theory runs into problems, which we can begin to understand in terms of the difficulties surrounding the idea of self-defining stakeholder groups. Here are two revealing examples. Towards the end of a workshop focused on support systems for the professional development of schoolteachers, it was proposed that the work should be carried forward by a committee set up for this purpose. Driven by the idea of the equal representation of diverse interests, which underpins stakeholder politics, it was decided that the committee should be composed of stakeholder representatives and the issue was, then, who the stakeholders should be. The chairperson, a paragon of conscientiousness, invited the assembled company to propose stakeholders, which she listed on a chalkboard. By the time we had reached about 10, the board was full and the proceedings had to be suspended until the workshop organisers could find another board which, in its turn, was filled with proposals. When we reached about 30 stakeholders there seemed to be a lapse in the flow of suggestions. The chairperson, determined to avoid excluding any voices, prompted the assembled company

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to ensure that no stakeholders had been left out, whereupon we obediently ‘discovered’ six additional stakeholders. With relief the session ended and the representatives of the some 36 proposed stakeholder groups gathered together to try to find a time for a meeting. The second example is drawn from a Broad Transformation Forum in a university. It had been agreed that the Forum would be composed of seven stakeholder groups, with equal votes in collective decision-making and under a rule of simple majority decision. One of the stakeholder groups then contested this agreement on the grounds that their group was not politically homogeneous but consisted of various ‘political tendencies’, in fact six in number,7 which should each be regarded as a stakeholder with its own delegates and each, of course, with a vote. Other stakeholder groups responded to this proposal by claiming that they, also, were not politically homogeneous and should thus also be split into various stakeholder groups. This dispute exposed an additional problem. Some members of the university community already belonged in two, and sometimes even three, stakeholder groups. For instance, a member of the administrative staff might also be an alumnus of the university and thus belong in two stakeholder groups; a member of the academic staff might also be a Senate member and an alumnus of the university and thus belong in three stakeholder groups. If political tendency were also allowed to be taken into view, such overlapping of membership would become even more prevalent. If we accept the principle of stakeholder equality, we can appreciate how important these disputes are; any factional group which can successfully claim stakeholder status, thereby achieves an equal voice in collective decisions. But the resistance of this theory to any kind of external definition of stakeholders opens the way for a proliferation of stakeholder groups with no limit until we reach individuals. This runs in the face of the rejection by stakeholder politics of the liberal presupposition that individuals are the ultimate source of interests. Faced with this problem, a defender of stakeholder politics can remind us that the self-definition of stakeholders cannot be a free invention, but must be understood as resting on something more objective. Stakeholder politics, based as it is on an organic conception of social groups, should not be accused of giving rise to an unprincipled proliferation of stakeholders.

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But what are the principles involved in the identification of stakeholders? In the case of the Broad Transformation Forum mentioned above, we can note that the original agreement was that there should be seven stakeholder groups. However, such an agreement must have had some grounds; there must have been some criterion for agreeing to the original seven stakeholders. It should be fairly obvious that the criterion was based on the different functions and responsibilities of the various sectors of the university community. In the light of this understanding of the dispute, the attempt to introduce political tendency into the definition of stakeholders was, in effect, an attempt to introduce a different kind of criterion, one that does not sit harmoniously alongside the original criterion.8 To agree on criteria (i.e. interpersonally agreed rules) for the specification of stakeholder groups is, in a sense, already a violation of the principle of the self-definition of stakeholders, but for a defender of stakeholder politics it is not a fatal violation. We always need to ensure that those criteria themselves reflect the objective interests of the various groups and the principle of stakeholder independence defends stakeholders against external interference in their own affairs, especially in the matter of discovering what their particular interests are. The dispute about whether political tendency should be admitted as a criterion for stakeholder specification illustrates this. The claim was, implicitly, that the previously agreed criterion did not properly reflect the objective interests of stakeholders and the proof of that was that within one stakeholder group it had been autonomously discovered that their interests were not homogeneous. The question of how that discovery had been made exposes another set of problems in stakeholder political theory; this time, a set of problems that raises serious doubts about the democratic credentials of this theory. At least one very central principle of democracy is that collective decisions should be taken as an outcome of public deliberation. But the principle of stakeholder autonomy is in serious tension with public deliberation. Let us consider some of the dimensions of this tension. Stakeholders are conceived of as homogeneous interest groups that need independently to deliver their particular demands to the collective forum. The theory tells us that as organic groups, stakeholders should be naturally homogeneous, but

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this essentially romantic vision is seldom to be found in practice, and what is a stakeholder group to do when it finds disagreement amongst its members?


One solution is to claim that what was previously thought of as a single stakeholder group should, in fact, be thought of as two or more, and this, in effect, is the lesson of the attempt to get political tendency agreed as a principle of stakeholder specification in the example above. But, short of this manoeuvre, which potentially leads to the unstable fragmentation of stakeholder groups, what can be done? Depending on the number of individuals in the stakeholder group, there might at this point be something like public deliberation within the stakeholder group; this is a claim frequently made on behalf, for example, of mass meetings.9 But there might be a resort to less savoury methods, methods that violate the democratic principle that disagreements will be resolved by reasoned persuasion rather than demagogy or other forms of manipulation, violence or threats of violence. These less savoury (antidemocratic) methods might be rationalised in terms of fragmentary thoughts about false consciousness or ideological distortion. However achieved, the message to be taken forward by stakeholder delegates to the collective forum must at least be presented as the expression of a homogeneous interest. In this mode of politics, stakeholder groups are inexorably driven to finding ways of excluding dissenting voices (by marginalising, ignoring, silencing or eliminating them!). At the collective forum each stakeholder group must put forward a unified front; without that, their particular interest will be sidelined. Stakeholder politics is, constitutionally as it were, unsympathetic to any member(s) of the stakeholder group breaking rank and thus spoiling the impression of a unified front. Paradoxically, in the light of its democratic claims, this kind of politics is unsympathetic towards dissent within stakeholder groups and provides fertile ground for repression and tyranny. Within the context of the collective forum, stakeholder autonomy has to be respected; thus no questions can be asked about procedures used in arriving at the demands presented by the delegates. To do so would reveal a failure to respect the integrity of stakeholders. Furthermore, delegates have a restricted mandate simply, like messengers, to deliver the demands of their stakeholder group. There is no expectation that demands need to be supported by reasons;

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the reasons for them are supposed to be embedded in the way they are conceived as the expressions of stakeholder interests. This has the consequence that the collective forum itself is not a place for public deliberation about the merits or demerits of the demands that are delivered.


Stakeholder politics fosters the proliferation of stakeholder groups; similarly, it has a tendency to lead to the unrestrained escalation of demands. Because demands are seen as without question the legitimate expression of group interests, even the consideration that they make exorbitant claims on the common resources is not an objection that can be raised. The demands of other stakeholder groups will simply have to be cut back to accommodate them. The idea of assessing the merits of competing demands in the light of the common interest is logically impossible, because the common interest is conceived of as the convergence between the demands of various stakeholders. However, a defender of stakeholder politics might now want to claim the protection of the quicksand of a relativist view of political values. We are, it might be said, in a realm of conflicting values (interests?), and we all know that reason does not reach into this realm. However, this story might continue; it is not one that is compatible with democracy. Democracy is a political theory committed not to moral or political relativism, but to the idea that, however deep our disagreements might be, we need collectively to deliberate about them, to try to appeal to impartial considerations that rationally persuade those from whom we disagree and so to come to a collective decision. Democracy is conceptually committed to rational discussion as the way to arrive at collective decisions. Such discussion is to be sharply distinguished from negotiation with a view to forcing concessions from competing stakeholders and winning victory or suffering defeat in the collective forum. The outcome of a democratic discussion might be quite different from the original position of any of the participants who, through the discussion, might come to appreciate the shallowness, partiality or other shortcomings of the views with which they started, or the unenvisaged virtues of views from which they started off in profound disagreement. Stakeholder politics undermines the necessary conditions for such discussion. Quite apart from the practical problems that I have already outlined (and it might be said that such problems arise out of the mere contingencies of implementation and can, perhaps, be eliminated by different practical 96



arrangements), there is a more pervasive problem which undermines the regulative ideals of democracy. What I have in mind here is the ways in which stakeholder political theory is rooted in, and profoundly shaped by, a theory of complex societies or institutions as composed of competing interest groups that are encouraged to maintain their independent identities. In line with this theory, groups are constituted as rivals for the common resources of the collective and are expected to articulate their identifying interests in a way that sharply emphasises their differences from other stakeholder groups. This generates a pervasive climate of hostility and distrust in the collective forum. Stakeholders are constitutionally driven to regard one another with suspicion: what the representatives of other stakeholder groups say in the forum must, the theory tells us, be either the personal view of the representative (and thus of no account) or a defence of sectional interests; there is no other alternative. Such a climate of mutual hostility and suspicion excludes the possibility of the kind of public discussion that lies at the root of the ideals of democracy. Democratic decisions are decisions about what is in the common interest of the democratic community and a standing hazard in democratic politics is how to ensure that participants (voters, representatives or others) are ‘answering the right question’, namely, the question about what is in the best interests of all of us rather than merely in my or my particular group’s interest. What the most viable procedures are for the achievement of these ideals has been the substance of debate in democratic theory at least since Rousseau first posed the problem. But stakeholder politics, as worthy and appealing as its founding rationale might be, is more of a threat to the regulative ideals of democracy than a discovery about how to achieve them. Given the dominance of this view of politics in the South African context, it is not an exaggeration to say that we need to defend our fragile new democracy from its collapse into the ideology of stakeholder politics.

Stakeholder politics in two official documents about Higher Education in South Africa Some significant differences between the final report of the NCHE and the Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation can provide an example of a collapse into this ideology in the sphere of the governance of Higher Education.

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The NCHE tried to maintain a delicate balance between ‘stakeholder participation and expert input from the sector’ (p. 180). The latter grouping was characterised in terms of ‘the principle of the legitimacy of peers’ (p. 187) and it was recommended that ‘the expertise available within the higher education system has to be accessed in a way that is not linked to any one stakeholder interest’ (p. 187, author’s emphasis).


The NCHE proposed two new statutory bodies for the governance of the national system of Higher Education: a Higher Education Forum and a Higher Education Council. The former was to be an ‘advisory body’ of about 30 ‘direct stakeholder’ representatives (p. 186); the latter was envisaged as having ‘allocative and planning functions’ and to be composed of about 12 members. The HEC will not be a stakeholder representative body, but will consist of about 12 people … who have experience, knowledge and an understanding of higher education issues that is informed by work experience or through an engagement with research about challenges confronting the sector. (p. 189, author’s emphasis) In line with these recommendations about the governance of the national system of Higher Education, the NCHE recommends that higher education institutions retain, as is traditional, a Council and a Senate, but that to these be added ‘Institutional Forums’. About councils, the NCHE recommends that they: … remain the highest decision-making bodies in institutions. It also proposes that as a matter of urgency councils become more representative of higher education interests, particularly blacks and women, with at least 60% of the members obtained from outside the institution. (p. 201) In passing we can note that to characterise councils as the ‘highest decisionmaking bodies in institutions’ imposes a hierarchical view on the traditional mode of governance of universities, in which Senate and Council are distinguished not by their vertical relations, but by their different functions in the institution. About senates, the NCHE recommends that: … in keeping with international trends, senates and academic boards should provide leadership regarding the planning, context 98

T eaching large classes S takeholders in higherand education senates

and provision of academic programmes … At least 80% of the members should be academics. (p. 203) About institutional forums, the NCHE recommends that:


The Commission proposes the establishment of Institutional Forums in individual higher education institutions. These forums would be advisory bodies for restructuring and innovation where representatives of all stakeholders could meet, identify problems, mediate interests and advise relevant structures such as the SRC,10 senate and council. (p. 204) In contrast with these recommendations the Green Paper swings strongly towards stakeholder politics. It refers throughout its chapter on governance (Chapter 4) to ‘competing and complementary interests’ and to constituencies that need to ‘acknowledge their different interests’ and ‘maintain separate identities’. However, most significantly for the argument of this essay, it collapses the proposed Higher Education Forum and Higher Education Council into a single body, to be called the Higher Education Council, and, in respect to institutional governance, it focuses on councils with very little reference to senates. The membership of the proposed Higher Education Council ‘will reflect a balance of stakeholder interests and expertise on the basis of knowledge and understanding of higher education issues’ (p. 25) and: One possible model for its composition is a membership of nineteen, comprising a full-time chair and eighteen part-time members. This would include nine stakeholder representatives from the college, technikon11 and university sectors including three students, three academic staff members and three institutional managers; plus ten members, the majority of whom would be external to the higher education sector (e.g. from business, industry, labour, community bodies) and chosen for their expertise, experience and knowledge of higher education. (p. 25)12 This Higher Education Council is characterised as an advisory body, with the resource allocation, policy formulation and national planning functions to be carried out by a branch of the national Department of Education.

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Institutional councils are said to be ‘the highest decision-making bodies of public institutions’ and their membership should include ‘a majority of at least 60% of members external to the institution’ (p. 27). As I have said, senates are rarely mentioned and then only in passing. Unlike the NCHE, no definite recommendation is made about their membership and there is no reference to anything like their ‘leadership regarding the planning, context and provision of academic programmes’. The commitment of the Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation to the ideology of stakeholder politics, especially to stakeholder equality, entails a populist understanding of universities and what they are about and reveals a persistent anti-academic and anti-intellectual prejudice that does not bode well for the future of Higher Education in our country. The delicate route charted by the NCHE between the Scylla of stakeholder politics and the Charybdis of untrammelled power to academics has simply been rejected in favour of the former, with a centralised state bureaucracy left holding the trump cards. The Green Paper rejects the NCHE’s brave attempt to defend the idea of Higher Education against its collapse in the face of stakeholder political theory and, losing sight of both what Higher Education must be and the inherent problems of stakeholder politics, it pulls the higher education system into the morass of governance by ‘separate but functionally independent stakeholders who recognise their different identities, interests and freedoms’ (p. 7), with all the key decisions left in the hands of a branch of the national Department of Education. The Green Paper acknowledges that the NCHE ‘has noted the prevalence of conflict on many campuses’ but it fails to recognise that the very ideology of stakeholder politics, which it so strongly endorses in its proposals, might be a cause of many of these conflicts and will lead to the progressive collapse of Higher Education in our country.

Institutions and interests The basic claim of stakeholder political theory that complex institutions, especially universities, are composed of competing interest groups has an obvious ring of truth to it for anyone who has worked in such an institution, or even knows about them in more than a merely superficial way. But apart,

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perhaps, from raising a question about whether it is interest groups that contend with each other in universities, we need to disentangle two strands in this claim.


On the one hand, there are constant attempts by those outside the institution to domesticate its activities to what are claimed to be the needs of society or the interests of some or other sectional group within society (labour, the business community, industry, etc.). On the other hand, there are internal disagreements that are characteristic, one might almost say definitive, of the life of universities. Here I shall focus on external pressures on the institution; later I shall discuss internal disagreements and in a concluding section I shall briefly address the problem of corrupt senates. Universities should serve society. If we ask why they should do so, then a ready reply can be found in the thought that universities are expensive institutions and it is society that, by and large, foots the bill. But there are two different ways in which public institutions can, and do, serve society, and we can roughly classify institutions in terms of these different ways of serving society.13 Some institutions, which for convenience I shall call ‘service institutions’, serve needs and interests whose source is essentially independent of the existence of those institutions. As an example, we might think here of those institutions that form the health services of a society. Human beings get ill or become injured through the accidents and hazards of ordinary life, and they suffer such contingencies independently of whether their society has or maintains hospitals, clinics, a medical profession, and so on. However, some institutions which, again for convenience, I shall call ‘constitutive institutions’, are themselves a source of needs and interests whose maintenance and very possibility is crucially dependent on the existence of institutions that provide for them a home which nurtures them and enables them to flourish and develop. In this sense such institutions constitute a sphere of interests whose existence is fragile and apart from the institutions that cherish them. The classical example of such an institution is the Christian church in mediaeval Europe, which defined people’s identity, specified a distinctive range of aspirations and generated a set of standards of excellence in its characteristic activities. A more homely example might be a soccer federation (if we allow this to be called an ‘institution’), which by definition is devoted

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to promoting and formalising the practice of playing soccer and regulating it in such a way that the interest in this practice is nurtured and enabled to flourish. The theory of stakeholder politics has no logical space for the idea of constitutive institutions. The starting point for this theory is the view that (all) complex institutions are composed of competing groups, each with its own particular preformed interests that need to be served in collective decisions. However, this view assumes that such interests arise independently of the institution; thus, the only kind of institutions there could be are service institutions. Indeed, in stakeholder political theory, the origin of interests remains mysterious; interests are construed and treated as if they were primitive facts, not themselves subject to reasons because they are themselves reasons, uninfluenced by frameworks of interpretation, and logically prior to institutions. If this is the way in which we conceive of interests, then all institutions logically must be service institutions; their purposes can only be instrumental to serve interests whose source is independent of the institution. In the light of this distinction, let us now turn our attention to universities. We need immediately to concede that whatever they might have been in the past, universities in modern societies have become, in many respects, service institutions. There are those who talk of modern societies as ‘knowledge’ or ‘learning’ societies and they are referring to the fact that modern societies depend crucially, both for their maintenance and for their development and survival in the internationally competitive world order, on knowledge and information. But universities cannot fulfil even this service function satisfactorily unless they are understood by others and themselves also as constitutive institutions. This dimension of universities is logically primary. In order to become clearer about what this means, we can consider what is often said to be one of the three principal functions of universities: ‘community service’. If one thinks of a university exclusively as a service institution, which should serve the ‘needs of society’, then there is no limit to the kinds of needs and interests that press forward for consideration and no boundary to the kind of way in which universities are supposed to serve those needs and interests. But the business of universities cannot be to serve as all-purpose welfare agencies for society; their contribution to serving the needs of society is by definition of a particular kind, that kind which has some

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connection with the kind of knowledge in which universities deal and which it is their function in a democratic society to maintain, distribute and advance. Under the pressures of a service conception of universities, the transformation of universities might ‘transform’ them in such a way that they are no longer universities at all. The conception of a university as a constitutive institution draws a boundary around the extent to which an institution could be ‘transformed’ while remaining a university in anything but name. If we think in terms of preferences, a university needs to retain the idea that it is not merely in the business of preference satisfaction, but – like other educational institutions – in that of preference formation. If it loses sight of this consideration, as it is likely to under the impact of stakeholder politics, it would be on the slippery slide towards failing to be a university. This line of thinking also exposes the shallow roots of the conception of the ‘common interest’, which is one of the supporting pillars of stakeholder political theory. We can recall that for stakeholder political theory the common interest is the fortuitous overlap, or convergence, between various stakeholder interests. I have already noted a way in which this view of the common interest excludes the possibility of democratic discussion in the collective forum. We can now notice the way in which it contributes to the undermining of the idea of a university. In stakeholder political theory interests are conceived of as arising from sources other than formal social institutions. This implies that there is no in-principle limit to what institutions are or could be. In the case of a university, however, there is a limit to what it could be, and this limit is equally a limit on which stakeholder interests might be relevant to a university. This limit arises not from universities being, as it were, constitutionally unsympathetic to stakeholder interests, but from the kind of institution which a university, by definition, must be. Universities can be distinguished from other institutions, such as industrial training schools, prisons, hospitals, mental asylums, armies and art galleries, in terms of their formal aims.14 The formal aims of universities centre around a particular kind of knowledge, which I shall call ‘higher knowledge’. Higher knowledge refers to knowledge that presupposes more elementary knowledge and is deeply embedded in traditions of disciplined thinking which are not casually accessible.15 Universities constitute the realm of higher knowledge

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and they do this by nurturing the practices of the maintenance, distribution and generation of such knowledge. This is their central and definitive purpose, and it is by fostering the practices that further this purpose that they make their principal contribution to the common interest of society. The maintenance, distribution and generation of higher knowledge is the identifying interest of all members of the university community, as members of that community. It is a common interest, but one that is conceptually quite different from the common interest spoken about in stakeholder politics. It is not merely the contingent convergence of the interests of various stakeholders – we need no empirical investigation to discover it because it is the criterion for what it is to be a member of the university community. We might put this point by distinguishing between two kinds of common interest: one that we find in stakeholder politics, to be called a ‘convergent interest’, and another that is central to understanding what a university is, to be called a ‘shared interest’.16 The shared interest which binds the members of the university community together, is an interest in the pursuit of academic practices in all their variety. Academic practices are dynamic traditions of inquiry that have as their regulative ideal the pursuit of knowledge. Academic practices are essentially the practices of a community of inquirers who relate to each other not in terms of their own or some sectional group interest, but in terms of their shared interest in pursuing academic practice in the light of the standards of excellence that define it as such. It is possible to engage in academic practices outside the context of formal institutions, but it is the formal institutions, which we call universities, which are established and maintained in modern democratic societies to enable academic practices not only to flourish in their own right, but to be made more widely accessible in society. To see universities exclusively as service institutions is to be blinded to this definitive feature of universities and it is to fail to understand the value of universities and why they are such significant institutions in modern societies.17 Universities constitute the public space in which the shared interest in academic practice can be pursued and this is the sense of saying that universities are constitutive institutions. Unless we understand this clearly, we will not be able to understand even the service dimensions of the ways in which universities

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serve society. We now need to turn our attention to the appropriate kind of governing structure for a constitutive institution of this kind.

Governance by senates


Stakeholder political theory is founded on strong views about stakeholder equality and, in addition to the problems already raised, this kind of emphasis on equality is incompatible with the governance of a university. Because of their commitment to open inquiry in the sphere of higher knowledge, universities cannot be egalitarian institutions in which all voices carry equal weight in collective decisions. Unlike, for instance, practices such as playing soccer or running marathons, academic practices are opaque to outsiders. Uninformed observation of what physicists, biologists or even historians or literary critics are doing in pursuing their academic practices, cannot reveal the nature of those practices. The criteria for success, or the standards of excellence, in academic practices can be understood only by someone who is already, at least to some degree, a successful participant in the practice. Academic practices are, in these senses, essentially not transparent to those who are not themselves participants, and a demand that they should be reveals a failure to understand the nature of academic practices and underpins a populist conception of universities. Three consequences for thinking about the appropriate form of governance for universities arise from an adequate understanding of academic practices. First, there is frequently a call for universities to become more relevant to their local contexts and in the South African context there are demands for the Africanisation of university curricula. This essay is not the occasion to engage in systematic and disciplined argument about these issues, but it can be seen that such calls and demands might be driven by the idea that academic practices should be transparent. Here we can say that academic practices are dynamic traditions of systematic disciplined inquiry; they are not the particular findings that have been yielded by such inquiry. For academic practices the current outcomes of inquiry are the ‘content’, which is always open to revision in the light of a redirection of attention or further inquiry. The methods and standards of inquiry are more stable; they are open to improvement, in the light of, for example, the invention of new technologies and the discovery of more effective methods,

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but only over a longer time span. Academic practices can be refocused on new problems and issues, perhaps those with more local relevance, but this does not mean the replacement of traditional academic practices with different ones. Academic practices are ongoing traditions that cannot be reinvented at will and that have much deeper roots than the problems of the present or the technologies of power. Second, learners (students) are, by definition, novices with respect to the academic practice(s) they are trying to learn. Of course, competence in respect of an academic practice is not an all or nothing matter; there are degrees of competence and, correspondingly, degrees of being a novice; complete neophytes are in a different situation from, say, post-graduate students, and even amongst the academic staff of a university there are different degrees of expertise in an academic practice. Access to an academic practice, like access to any fairly sophisticated practice, is not something that can be accomplished in an instant; it requires persistent and focused effort from the learner over a fairly extended period of time. Furthermore, because academic practices are essentially opaque, a ‘normal’ learner needs the reliable assistance of someone who already understands the practice and is very much dependent on the sympathetic, but impartial, judgements of such a person. This leads to a third consideration. The judgement of the quality of academic work depends on discriminations that are possible only for someone who is already a (fairly) expert participant in the practice. Such judgement is based on a clear perception of the merits of the work, in the light of the standards that currently define the academic practice in question. To the extent that such judgement is influenced by, for example, personal characteristics of the author of the work or some other interest or concern – such as friendship or promoting the interests of a sectional group – it fails to be an embodiment of the form of justice that defines the sphere of Higher Education. Such considerations entail that the appropriate mode of governance of a university, with respect to its academic work, which is definitive of it as a university, is out of line with the mode of governance we have come to think of as appropriate in democratic organisations or societies. Democratic organisations are based on the principle of equal respect for all their members. It is this principle that underlies the modern ideas of ‘one person one vote’ in political elections and of ‘citizen equality’ which replaced the hierarchical ranking of the members of pre-democratic societies. But given

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the nature of academic practices and, we can now add, the conditions for it to be possible for them to survive and flourish and be accessible to potential new participants, the principle of equal respect cannot hold. To insist on equality in the context of a university’s academic affairs is to undermine precisely what it is that makes a university a university, as opposed to some other kind of institution. A way of making this point is to say that universities are paradoxical in modern democratic societies. They are like enclaves of a previous mode of social organisation, one centred around the principle of honour rather than that of equal respect. Unlike equal respect, which persons deserve by virtue of being human, ‘honour’ is something that has to be earned by demonstrating an appropriate degree of virtue, competence or excellence in some valued practice.18 In pre-modern societies this might have been the practice of being a knight, a sangoma, a master craftsman or a warrior. In modern society something of this tradition is evident in the idea of a profession, and we can see a pale reflection of it in relation to the practice of being an outstanding sportsperson. Honour is accorded on the basis of achieved competence in the practice in question and demonstrated possession of the virtues appropriate to that practice; it is not something which people deserve simply because they are human. In addition, the principle of peer judgement is part and parcel of this mode of social organisation. It is one’s fellow knights or the appropriate guild or professional association that accord the honour. Given that the purpose of universities is to constitute the public space in which academic practices can be pursued and flourish, and given the characteristic features of such practices, which I have discussed in the previous few paragraphs, we can understand why it is that it is accomplished academics who should govern the academic affairs of a university. In line with a mode of organisation that centres around honour, accomplished academics are conventionally referred to as ‘senior academics’ and the body of senior academics in a university is traditionally called a Senate. This conclusion is compatible with the membership of a Senate including those who are not (or not yet) senior academics, provided the majority of the Senate members are senior academics and thus carry the decisive weight in the decisions made by the Senate.

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It is not part of my purpose in this essay to give a closer specification of what might be meant by a ‘senior academic’, but we might note that it is traditional for senior academics to be appointed under the title of ‘Professor’, which is not merely a notch on a salary scale, but an acknowledgement of achieved competence in some academic practice and demonstrated possession of the virtues appropriate to that practice.


Nor is it part of my purpose here to give a more detailed specification of what count as the academic affairs19 of a university. However, I do need to note the following brief points, to clarify the position I am defending. In thinking of governance there is a very important distinction, frequently fudged in our historical context, between consultation (and advice) and decision. When I claim that the Senate of a university is the most appropriate governing body for its academic affairs, what I mean is that it is the Senate which should make the authoritative decisions about academic affairs, such as the establishment of new chairs or programmes, the approval of curricula or, especially, the appointment of professors and other members of the academic staff and the award of degrees.20 This does not mean that the Senate can take its decisions in a political or economic vacuum. A Senate should, like any sensible governor, take into account the ways in which its decisions have an impact on those it affects and take advice from other bodies, such as Institutional Forums or SRCs. But a Senate would be failing in its responsibility to govern the university as a university if it did not carefully assess such advice in terms of the definitive purpose of the university. A Senate, as the governing body of the academic affairs of a university, should not regard all the demands of stakeholders as equal and it is entirely inappropriate to think of senates as having to be neutral with respect to the various interests that press for its attention. Some such interests might be irrelevant to the academic purposes of universities and some might indeed have the potential actually to subvert those purposes. It is the responsibility of a Senate to judge the merits of the proposals put before it from the point of view of the shared interest that defines the institution as a university. The traditional arrangement of a horizontal relation between the Senate and the Council of a university, with these two bodies having different responsibilities in relation to the governance of the institution, makes obvious good sense. The Council is responsible for the financial affairs of

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the university.21 The decisions taken by the Senate need to be within the boundaries of what is financially possible and, for this reason, but only this reason, the decisions of the Senate need to be ratified by the Council. There is a sense in which it is true that universities are complex institutions, but it is not the same sense that we find in stakeholder politics. They are complex because although we can say, at an abstract level, that the principle of unity of a university is a shared interest in providing a home for academic practice, academic practice is neither homogeneous (there are various academic practices which differ from each other in some quite dramatic ways) nor indisputable (even within academic practices there are various legitimate interpretations, which can lead to differing judgements about the quality of academic work). It is disagreements and ongoing discussions about such matters that are characteristic of a university; one might almost say they are its lifeblood. But such disagreements and discussions assume that there is agreement that the topic of discussion is the nature of academic practice, rather than something else such as, perhaps, personal or sectional interests, or merely the primitive desire to dominate. The Senate of the university is the space in which public deliberation about such disagreements should take place. They are disagreements about the interpretation of the ideals of the university and how they might be most effectively embodied in practice within the restraints and opportunities of a particular context. Such disagreements are in an essentially contested, but not boundless, realm, however; even where an indisputable solution is not found, the Senate as the responsible governing body of the academic affairs of the university needs to make an authoritative decision for the sake of the maintenance of the institution, all its members and the society that benefits from its local presence. The kind of public deliberation in view here assumes that participants are answering ‘the right question’ rather than a question about what is in their own interests or the interests of their sectional group (their gender, political tendency, functional role in the institution, department or faculty). The way a university tries to ensure that participants are indeed answering the right question is for the majority of the members of its governing body to be accomplished academics. In this way the Senate provides a bounded public space specified in terms of the shared interest that defines the university. The justification for this restriction on the membership of the governing body of

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a university lies in the opacity of academic practices and the definitive role of universities in constituting the institutional space for such practices. My conclusion is that governance by senates is the most appropriate form of governance for universities and this conclusion explains what it means to claim that, in the case of the governance of a university, the questions of who takes the key decisions and what they decide cannot be delinked.


Corrupt senates This conclusion does not provide us with a general remedy for the problem of corrupt senates but, if the argument of the essay is correct, governance of higher education institutions by stakeholders rather than senates will not only not provide us with a remedy, but will contribute to the demise of Higher Education in South Africa. There are various ways in which a Senate might be corrupt, but the most insidious would be for it, under the powerful pressure of the ideology of stakeholder politics, to begin to understand itself as an equal stakeholder in the governance of the university, defending what is merely a sectional interest. To the extent that senates do not strongly resist the blandishments of stakeholder politics, they would be contributing to the corruption of Higher Education in our country and providing evidence for the popular belief that they are merely self-serving bodies competing for common resources which they had no part in producing. It is absurd to think of senates as imposing their interests on the whole university. The interest that they should defend, and for which they need to provide a conducive institutional context, is the shared interest that defines the institution as a university. Although this interest is open to reinterpretation and is a site of disagreement, we cannot redefine it according to our fancy. The shared interest of a university is not ‘owned’ by anyone, but anyone who does not share it has no business in the governance of a university. This essay has argued that to try to substitute governance by stakeholders for governance by senates will destroy Higher Education in South Africa. To the extent that stakeholder politics triumphs in the governance of our higher education institutions, it would be a pyrrhic victory of disastrous proportions for our longer-term prospects as a just and flourishing society in which the quality of life of all our people will be enhanced. 110



Notes 1

This essay was first published as ‘Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions in South Africa’ in Cambridge Journal of Education 28(3): 385– 405, 1998. Reprinted with permission and available at http://www.informaworld.com.

2

We might think of the need for a renaissance in the culture of learning, of the revival of teaching at all levels, of revitalising curricula, of retrieving disorderly or degenerate educational institutions and many other matters to do with the institutions, practices and participants of public education, which might be negatively affected by an inappropriate form of governance but cannot be produced by it.

3

The National Commission on Higher Education, 1996, A Framework for Transformation, Section 7.4, p. 179.

4

The Department of Education, 1996b, Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation, Chapter 4, Section 1.2, p. 23.

5

That this mode of politics is inhospitable to institutions is revealed in the way in which students often refer to the rules of the university as the ‘demands’ of the Senate.

6

Because traditionally universities provide us with the paradigm of a higher education institution, I use the word ‘university’ as the general label for ‘higher education institutions’. I should not be understood as expressing a prejudice against, for instance, Universities of Technology and Colleges of Education, although I should be understood as implying that to the extent that any institution is to be called a higher education institution, it deals in ‘higher knowledge’ (see notes 12 and 15 below).

7

The fact that the agreed forum had seven stakeholders and that for one stakeholder to be divided into six would, in effect, deliver 50% of the voting power to them should, of course, not be read as an underhand political manoeuvre.

8

The proposal that ‘political tendency’ should be a criterion for stakeholder specification in the context of the governance of a university reveals an understanding of universities as unproblematically political institutions, on all fours with other political institutions such as local, regional or national government.

9

‘Mass meetings’ are typical of resistance politics; their democratic credentials in a constitutionally democratic society are open to some doubt.

10 Students’ Representative Council 11 These are now called Universities of Technology. 12 It is extraordinary, and revealing, that the Green Paper refers to those explicitly external to the higher education system as chosen for their ‘expertise, experience and knowledge of higher education’. One could hardly cite a more striking symptom of anti-academic prejudice.

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13 Taylor (C. Taylor, ‘Institutions in national life’, in Reconciling the Solitudes, 1993, London and Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, p. 123) distinguishes between institutions which are ‘dispensers of services’ and those which provide ‘environments characterised by practices that are the primary sites in which we define importance, and hence the possible poles of identity’. 14 The formal aim of an institution is what enables us to distinguish between kinds of institutions, but should also guide and shape those institutions.


15 The idea of ‘horizontal mobility’, which we find in the National Qualifications Framework, is unsympathetic to the idea of higher knowledge. 16 Taylor (C. Taylor, ‘Social theory as practice’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 1985, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–97) makes a distinction between ‘convergent’ and ‘shared’ goods. However, my argument here rests none of its authority on this source. 17 Modern societies value universities for their products or effects; their value is construed as instrumental. Part of my argument is that even those instrumental values cannot be achieved if we undermine the intrinsic values of universities, as stakeholder governance or domination by philistine views of market forces would do. 18 This distinction was discussed by Charles Taylor at a seminar in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape in 1995. 19 Although there might be some dispute around the edges, the core reference of ‘academic affairs’ should be clear to anyone who understands the nature of academic practice. If there are boundary disputes, it is the Senate, as the authority of the academic affairs of the university, which should adjudicate such a dispute. 20 The awarding of degrees or diplomas is a way in which a university honours a successful learner in academic practice. The reputation and legitimacy of the degrees awarded by a university is a crucial matter (among other things, this affects their exchange value in the employment market) and only the Senate of a university has the kind of academic status that can underwrite this reputation and legitimacy. The idea that a Broad Transformation Forum could award degrees or appoint professors is an absurdity that we could simply dismiss were it not that there are some who think this a real possibility. 21 The financial affairs of the university become more and more salient in these times of shrinking public resources for Higher Education. But this is not a reason to think that management or Council can proceed without reference to the Senate. All stakeholders must respect the academic judgement of the Senate, if it is a university rather than merely a business we are concerned with, and also trust that the Senate will understand the fiscal limits within which its decisions need to operate.

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8

Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education


(Prepared for the National Commission on Higher Education, December 1995)1

The purpose of this essay is to consider the functions of Higher Education (HE) in South Africa and to discuss the nature of the knowledge in which Higher Education ‘traffics’. It does not set out to be a general discussion of these issues, but to contribute to debates that arose in the work of the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE). We should note here that Higher Education is a particular kind of tertiary education; not all tertiary education is Higher Education. Part of the purpose of this essay is to clarify what distinguishes Higher Education from other kinds of tertiary education. The essay makes two central claims. One is that the function of Higher Education, in South Africa as elsewhere, is to preserve, disseminate and generate higher knowledge. The other is that certain debates about knowledge and Higher Education in South Africa take us on a path that might prevent us from adequately understanding the nature and purposes of Higher Education in a modern (or modernising) society.

I It is commonly said that, at the most general level, the functions of Higher Education are teaching, research and community service. This is reflected in typical mission statements of universities, and in the three broad criteria generally referred to for the appointment or promotion of members of academic staff. This way of thinking about the functions of Higher Education is not wrong, but it is a cliché, with the opacity of lethargic thinking. In addition, it does little to enable us to understand what is distinctive about Higher Education. After all, teaching is an activity that is widespread in any society, not only in Higher Education. The word ‘research’ has been absorbed into the language

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of advertisers, publicists and populists of many stripes, and it has lost its distinctive link with specialised knowledge production. Furthermore, community service is rendered by many organisations apart from higher education institutions. The primary question, then, is: what is distinctive about Higher Education? What is it, if anything, which marks it out as a particular kind of education, perhaps a particular sphere in society with specialised functions?


II An obvious starting point is to note that Higher Education has to do with knowledge. Muller says that: the principle currency of HE is knowledge. HE institutions traffic in knowledge, both in its embodied (i.e. as graduates) and its discursive form (i.e. as new knowledge, or research).2 This much should be uncontroversial, but in our historical context it might not be. Social theorists of education have for some time been revealing to us the political and social conditions and effects of education, and Apartheid provided a vivid example of the ways in which education, especially Higher Education, distributes life-chances, status and privilege in society. This has given rise to a kind of discourse, prevalent in our current situation and behind the call for the ‘transformation’ of HE institutions, which tends to occlude the definitive place of knowledge in an account of Higher Education. There is, for example, a tendency to use words such as ‘redress’, ‘access’ and ‘mobility’ as if they pose exclusively political and financial problems. From an analytical point of view, what has happened in such cases is that the distinction between the aims and the effects of Higher Education is fudged; this fudging may be reinforced by the use of the ambiguous ‘functions’ in talking about Higher Education. To ask what the functions of Higher Education are might be interpreted as a conceptual question about what it is, and about what other things we might need to distinguish it from. However, it might be an empirical question about what the effects of Higher Education may be. To answer it in this form we might reach for the expert findings of such specialist domains of knowledge as sociology, economics, political theory and perhaps psychology.

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higher knowledge and the functions of higher education


The importance of this distinction can be brought out in the following way. The claimed effects of Higher Education – we might think of such things as the distribution of status and privilege, or an increase of self-esteem, or improved national economic performance – can, potentially, also be brought about by projects other than Higher Education. Thus, if we set out to design a higher education system on the basis of a too exclusive concern to bring about such effects, we might design a system that is not a higher education system at all. An answer to the conceptual question is necessary to avoid this outcome. Let me add that an adequate answer to the conceptual question ‘What is Higher Education?’ is not ahistorical; it does not have to assume a sharp boundary between conceptual and empirical questions. Barnett, in The Limits of Competence, makes this point in a thesis about the intertwined relationships between Higher Education, knowledge and society. He claims that changes in the realm of knowledge, and in the nature of modern society, shape, and in turn are shaped by, changes in the idea of Higher Education. Previously, Higher Education was simply one institution among others in a society, but it is increasingly becoming incorporated into the mainstream. He formulates this in terms of a contrast between Higher Education as an institution in society (one amongst others) and as an institution of society. He claims that in general terms there has been a shift from one pole to the other; because knowledge has become more salient in modern society, there is increasing pressure on Higher Education to deliver the products ‘society’ needs, and this puts strain on the ‘traditional’ autonomy of higher education institutions. He outlines the argument as follows: nowledge is an essential feature of modern society. We cannot K hope to understand the modern society unless we find some place for knowledge in our account. In Giddens’s terminology, knowledge is part of the ‘project’ of modern society … igher education, too, is inescapably bound up with knowledge, H both in advancing our understanding through research, and in its acquisition through teaching … urthermore, the forms of knowledge characteristically to be F found in higher education are typically those that the advanced society values. There is no simple correspondence between the knowledge capacities sought by modern society and those

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favoured in higher education; but the general point still holds. Formalized knowledge is prized both by higher education and by the modern society. Higher education, not surprisingly, has become a pivotal institution in and for society.3 Our understanding of Higher Education is indeed historically conditioned. Nonetheless, there are limits to what could conceivably count as an adequate answer to what it might be. And one limit is marked in the claim that it has to do with knowledge.


III But, this does not, yet, get us far. ‘Knowledge’ is a spacious category that includes a vast and diverse range of capacities and information, covering the spectrum of ways in which human beings live in the world. Unless we qualify the word ‘knowledge’ in some way, any and every human society is a ‘knowledge society’. Even if we confine our attention to modern society, with its characteristic skepticism about traditional knowledge, its characteristic emphasis on formal or discursive knowledge (reading, writing, arithmetic, etc.), and its characteristic provision of mass schooling to the whole of its younger generation, and if we recognise the ways in which it uses and circulates information, we still have an account of knowledge much wider than that involved in Higher Education. Higher Education has to do with a particular kind of knowledge. It is difficult to find a neat way to characterise it. The words ‘formalised’, ‘discursive’, ‘advanced’ and ‘specialised’ have all been suggested, and sometimes the phrase ‘higher learning’ has been used; but, however we characterise it, it is a kind of knowledge that is not readily accessible, even in an informationsaturated society, networked on information technology. For ordinary people it is typically attained through an extensive process of systematic and guided learning that presupposes and follows on the acquisition of other kinds of knowledge, such as literacy. Contrary to much popular opinion, the kind of knowledge involved in Higher Education is not a question of quantity; it is qualitatively different. Taking our cue from the phrase frequently used in our context, that some

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students are ‘underprepared for university study’, we can say that the kind of knowledge which is the special concern of Higher Education builds on an already achieved mastery of more elementary kinds of knowledge, and for this reason I will use the tag ‘higher knowledge’ to refer to the kind of knowledge with which Higher Education is concerned. My claim, then, is that Higher Education has to do with higher knowledge. Higher knowledge is the kind prized in modern (or modernising) societies, and it is, typically, seen as a catalyst in breaking through the inevitable limitations of common sense and settled consensus. In this sense it is seen as a potent source of innovation and development, and is in the background of discourses claiming that modern societies are ‘learning’ or ‘knowledge’ societies. Using the work of three other theorists, let me briefly expand on what might be meant by ‘higher knowledge’. Richard Rorty, in ‘Education without dogma’, a commentary on the debate in the United States between ‘conservatives’ and ‘radicals’ about the nature of Higher Education, argues that there is an important distinction between primary and secondary education and the Higher Education which follows, typically, at about the age of 18 or 19. According to Rorty, primary and secondary education is mostly a matter of socialisation, of ‘getting the students to take over the moral and political common sense of society as it is … [A]ny society has the right to expect that, whatever else happens in the course of adolescence, the schools will inculcate most of what is generally believed’.4 He continues, ‘… [e]ven ardent radicals, for all their talk of “education for freedom”, secretly hope that the elementary schools will teach the kids to wait their turn in line, to avoid drugs, to obey the cop on the corner, and to spell, punctuate, multiply and divide’.5 In contrast, Higher Education is ‘a matter of inciting doubt and stimulating imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing consensus’.6 This might be understood as developing a capacity for creative and critical thinking, clearly distinguished from maverick or anarchic thinking. Thus, Higher Education presupposes primary and secondary education, though this distinction has little specifically to do with the age of the students; it has to do with the attainment of prior kinds of knowledge. Referring to Higher Education as a form of ‘individuation’ (a kind of cognitive autonomy?), Rorty says that ‘… [s]ocialization has to come before individuation, and education for freedom cannot begin before some constraints have been imposed’.7

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Rorty acknowledges that in practice it might be difficult to map the boundary between primary and secondary education, and Higher Education:


Things get difficult when one tries to figure out where socialisation should stop and criticism start. This difficulty is aggravated by the fact that both conservatives and radicals have trouble realising that education is not a continuous process from age five to age 22. Both tend to ignore the fact that the word education covers two entirely distinct, and equally necessary processes – socialisation and individuation. They both fall into the trap of thinking that a single set of ideas will work for both secondary school and college education.8 But he does, nonetheless, provide us with a conceptual distinction of some use in our context. If it is true that the word ‘education’ covers two ‘entirely distinct processes’, only one of which can properly be called ‘higher education’, this has important consequences for a higher education policy. In my terms, what Rorty calls ‘individuation’, which he links with ‘inciting doubt and stimulating imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing consensus’, is one way of characterising the kind of higher knowledge characteristic of Higher Education. In The Idea of Higher Education, Ronald Barnett comes to a similar conclusion as Rorty. He argues that: … ‘higher education’ is essentially a matter of the development of the mind of the individual student. It is not just any kind of development that the idea points to. An educational process can be termed higher education when the student is carried on to levels of reasoning which make possible critical reflection on his or her experience, whether consisting of propositional knowledge or of knowledge through action. These levels of reasoning and reflection are ‘higher’, because they enable a student to take a view (from above, as it were) of what has been learned. Simply, ‘higher education’ resides in higherorder states of mind.9 Although we might have serious doubts about the idea of ‘individual minds’ and ‘states of mind’, the central point being made here, that ‘higher education’

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refers to a process which is not simply continuous with education in general but marks out a kind of education which is qualitatively different from primary and secondary education, is one that we should keep in sight. When Barnett says that ‘the student is carried on to levels of reasoning which make possible critical reflection on his or her experience’, and that ‘[t]hese levels of reasoning and reflection are “higher”, because they enable a student to take a view (from above, as it were) of what has been learned ’, he is reaching towards that qualitative difference which I try to capture in the idea of ‘higher knowledge’.


As a third example we might consider the following from the paper by Muller: There is a key cognitive capacity that is widely valued by the knowledge society, and therefore routinely looked for by employers. The capacity does not have one commonly accepted name. Some of the more usual ones include ‘coping with change’ …, ‘ability to innovate’, and so on. It involves a capacity to manipulate information and knowledge to produce new configurations (this is really what ‘new knowledge’ means in the ‘steady state’ knowledge society …) and to be able to learn new skill/content constellations. It involves, in other words, the ability to distinguish between representations and objects … and to be able to manipulate the representations to generate new connections.10 A principle virtue of this kind of formulation is the way in which it shifts our attention to capacities, and this is something I shall hold on to as I proceed. But, again, we can note the emphasis on change and innovation as the ‘key’ capacity, ‘widely valued’ in the ‘knowledge society’. The distinction here between ‘representations’ and ‘objects’ has its problems but, with the phrase ‘produce new configurations’, it provides a clue to what might be a fruitful characterisation of higher knowledge. The key to the value of higher knowledge is the kind of flexibility that it enables. But what is the secret of that flexibility? A possible answer here is in terms of the idea of ‘grammar’, generously understood so that we can talk not only of the grammar of (literal) languages, but also of practices, including discursive practices, such as traditional

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academic disciplines. In this way of talking, any established and disciplined practice, such as civil engineering, teaching, mathematics, legal practice, biochemistry, history or primary healthcare, can be said to be constituted by a particular (but not necessarily exclusive) grammar. Higher knowledge of the practice in question would consist in understanding the constitutive grammar (the telos or fundamental rules and principles) of the practice, the grammar that makes it the practice that it is. We need to add that this understanding might or might not be discursively expressed, or even expressible (this was Michael Polanyi’s main thesis in respect to scientific research). In some cases, which are crucial if it is Higher Education of which we are thinking, the understanding of the grammar of the practice might be merely tacit, and none the worse for that. In discussing tenure for members of the academic staff of a higher education institution, Muller makes the following point: Apart from the traditional argument regarding academic freedom, there is a second compelling reason why the likely erosion of tenure should be strictly limited. This has to do with tacit capacity, the sedimented innovative capacity that productive HE departments and units accumulate and that good postgraduate research programmes depend upon …11 Higher knowledge refers to an understanding of the grammar of a practice. Someone in possession of such higher knowledge is not merely embedded in the practice, but is able to participate in the practice freely and innovatively. Because she understands the grammar of a practice like mathematics, for example, a mathematician with higher knowledge in this domain is not confined to standard routines, but has the capacity to generate new routines. In the next section I shall respond, briefly, to a possible objection to the view I have defended here.

IV The claim that Higher Education is qualitatively different from other kinds of education and has to do with higher knowledge, not readily accessible, and normally attained only through a fairly extensive process of systematic learning, might be seen as defence of an elitist and anti-democratic conception

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of Higher Education. This kind of objection might be founded on a failure to distinguish between the aims and effects of Higher Education to which I referred earlier, but let me try to construct a brief reply along another line.


The starting point in my argument is the assumption that higher education institutions are characteristic of modern societies. We might say that South Africa is not yet a modern society and, as a generalisation, this is true. But a sensitive reading of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and other programmatic national documents will show that our purpose is to become a modern society. An underlying assumption of my argument is that the attainment of that purpose will depend on the health of our higher education system – but as a higher education system. What I have claimed is that a modern society does not so much value knowledge per se, but rather that kind of knowledge that is a potential, and potent, catalyst for innovation and growth. I have called this ‘higher knowledge’, and have characterised it in terms of understanding the grammar of practices. Further, Higher Education is characterised and defined in terms of this kind of knowledge. An implication of my argument is that unless we abandon the idea of Higher Education, we cannot avoid at least the following three consequences: 1. Higher education institutions cannot be organised on egalitarian principles; if it is definitive of such institutions that they traffic in higher knowledge, which is by definition not readily available, then such institutions must necessarily acknowledge that they are composed of members with different degrees of such higher knowledge. This implies a hierarchical organisation. 2. Related to this, higher education institutions must necessarily discriminate in respect to levels of attainment in the characteristic kind of knowledge in which they traffic. Given individual differences in aspiration, engagement, talent and circumstances (not all of which circumstances Higher Education, as Higher Education, can do a great deal to alleviate), not all students who gain formal access to Higher Education can be equally successful in gaining access to the higher knowledge that is the particular concern of Higher Education.

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3. Given that Higher Education is concerned with higher knowledge (which is qualitatively different from, and presupposes, other kinds of knowledge), we need selection mechanisms to regulate intake to higher education programmes. In terms of the argument I have developed in this essay, this is not merely a question of resources; it is more a question of how to bring access and potential success in line with each other. These consequences might be thought to be an affront to the democratic principle of equality, but this misunderstands the public nature of the kind of knowledge involved in Higher Education. This kind of knowledge is misconstrued if it is understood as a private possession, a personal benefit. The reason such knowledge is prized in modern society is that it is a public good, and its prevalence in a society is conceived as of general benefit to the society.12 This can be seen in juxtaposition to the idea of aims. The very word can be a hazard. In a culture in which it is thought appropriate for all kinds of organisations to have ‘mission statements’, generated by the collective membership of the organisation, it is fatally easy to slip over into the idea that any organisation, even, say, a university, can simply, freely and collectively decide on what its aims are, on its own mission statement. If the argument I have advanced above is correct, then there are conceptual limits to what could justifiably be claimed to be a higher education institution. A higher education institution might agree on a set of aims, or a mission statement, and might even adopt a self-description of itself as a higher education institution, but it could be wrong in all these matters if it failed to give appropriate weight to higher knowledge. An institution does not become a higher education institution by claiming or announcing that it is one. A denial that there is a qualitatively distinct kind of knowledge, which might be called higher knowledge, will subvert our national aspirations to become a modern society, with all the benefits that promises. This point has been zealously argued by Renfrew Christie, whose slogan is: ‘No research? No development’. The opening paragraph of his paper reads: dvanced research is central for all higher education, including A graduate programmes. In its turn higher education is a key provider of proven new ideas, skills and able humans: • to all other education; • to government;

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• to industry and to the economy in general; • to Economic Growth and the Reconstruction and Development programme; • and to the knowledge based prosperity of the twenty-first century.13


Our democratically inspired suspicion of experts and expertise, which it is one of the functions of Higher Education to produce, should not blind us to the fact that without experts and expertise in relevant fields we are unlikely, collectively, to be able to overcome the challenges with which we are confronted, or to enter the coming century with the confidence and competence of which we are capable.

V There has been a tendency, reflected in some contributions to the work of the NCHE, implicitly to deny that there is a qualitatively distinct kind of knowledge in which Higher Education traffics. This is entirely understandable in our historical context, with our legacy of a racially skewed higher education system, and our commitment to democracy as our main hope to achieve a more just society. However, this might be described as a slide towards epistemological populism underwritten by such democratic principles as transparency, accountability and egalitarianism. I shall provide two examples. The first is the ongoing debate about the alleged distinctions between mode l and mode 2 knowledge production, and its relevance for the design of a higher education system. Mode 1 research – called ‘disciplinary research’ by Muller – is claimed to be the typical and traditional kind of research we find in universities. Mode 2 research – called ‘problem-solving research’ by Muller – arises in the context of application, is trans-disciplinary and trans-institutional, is often financed from more than one source, and is organised and regulated by collaborative management structures … that are designed to take a wider, more hybrid social accountability – to donors, to local communities, to diverse disciplinary communities, to local government, to corporate concerns – into account.14

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This ‘wider, more hybrid social accountability’ rouses the spectre of populism, and the text proceeds to reinforce this impression:


… unlike disciplinary research with its peer-group-assessed internal criteria of scientific excellence, and unlike conventional applied research with its single corporate client and unproblematic criteria of utility, the quality of such research is increasingly being assessed against hybrid, contextually-relevant criteria. Evaluation thus becomes a new field of research and application, as well as a new kind of problem for national research systems, knowledge clients and donor agencies alike.15 The problem is that however skeptical we might be about traditional ways in which Higher Education assesses the value and relevance of research, at least there are established procedures (peer review, accredited journals, the award of higher degrees, and so on) that distinguish the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaff ’; and however skeptical we might be about the ‘unproblematic criteria of utility’ in the case of ‘conventional applied research’, we have at least some benchmarks. But in the case of mode 2 knowledge production these benchmarks are removed and, in the extreme, we might not even know whether it is knowledge that is produced, rather than merely the preferences or prejudices of this or that stakeholder group. Faced with this threatening prospect, Muller insists repeatedly that mode 2 is parasitic on mode 1, and that higher education teaching, certainly at the undergraduate levels, must be in mode 1. The following is a sample of this insistence: [W]hatever else happens, the importance of mode 1 undergraduate training will never be in question. Since mode 2 knowledge production depends upon a sound mode 1 disciplinary base, the general policy priority is clear: strengthen and consolidate mode 1 undergraduate courses in these institutions irrespective of whether they are destined to be ‘teaching’ or ‘research’ institutions or both. Mode 2 development will then follow. If an institution, like a technikon, is pushed towards mode 2 by an aggressive funding policy before it has adequate mode 1 capacity especially amongst the staff, then what you can only get is outreach: you can’t get mode 2 knowledge production. 124



Whether mode 2 follows mode 1 or not, it is always and necessarily an adjunct form, not a replacement form. This is what an analysis of globalization captures: mode 2 can be said to come after – to be a postdisciplinary form – in a supplementary not sublative way.16 (Author’s emphases) But, for all that, this might be read as little more than special pleading on behalf of the continued maintenance (and public funding) of higher education institutions, in societies where their traditional monopoly on research is increasingly corroded. From the point of view of the position I have adopted here, the problem arises because no explicit link is made between the two modes of knowledge and higher knowledge, which is qualitatively distinct from other forms of knowledge and not transparent. I think it is assumed that mode 1 (disciplinary knowledge) is obviously higher knowledge, but mode 2 has a tendency to escape this characterisation, so we have to say that it is not really mode 2, but only outreach, if it loses its umbilical link with mode 1. I take this point slightly further in section VI. The second example of a slide towards epistemological populism is to be found in a challenging and wide-reaching paper by Ahmed Bawa. Bawa develops a ‘research spectrum’, ‘bracketed on the one side by basic research and on the other by what may be called product-related research’. Within this spectrum he distinguishes between four distinct research types: • the traditional research type; • applied research or applications-driven research; • strategic research; and • ‘participation-based’ research.17 He shows some hostility towards traditional research, talking of the ‘… high level compartmentalisation of knowledge produced within the traditional paradigm’, and the way in which ‘[t]he traditional mode remains dominant and continues to shape the terrain for the applied mode’. Furthermore, in characterising traditional research he says: … it is usual that this type of research is defined by a knowledge production paradigm based on questions established for academic ends largely by academics. The outcomes might have use in application but that is really of subsidiary interest. The central interest is the academic interest and this leads to the

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production of knowledge being dominated by discipline-specific needs. The discipline-specificity of this type of research has the undesirable outcome of locking research exercises into knowledge compartments.18


One main distinction between applied and strategic research is that whereas applied research is both ‘directed and autonomous’, strategic research loses its autonomy. In strategic research projects, ‘… the tasks put forward to these scientists were determined well beforehand’, they are ‘… driven by end-user definitions of outcomes and are therefore, in their formulation, largely out of the hands of academics’ but, worst of all, strategic research projects: … usually lack transparency and accountability to society at large though this is a function of the nature and content of the projects involved.19 (Author’s emphasis) We might understand this requirement in terms of the subsequent reminder that: The ongoing destruction of the environment – which is inextricably linked to particular models of industrial development, the decline of international health standards for vast parts of the earth’s population, etc. has spurring it on an international campaign to make science and technology more accountable to society on the one hand and more self critical on the other.20 However, the words ‘transparency and accountability’ indicate some skepticism about the idea of higher knowledge. The discussion of participation-based research takes this tendency further. In participation-based research, ‘the pre-eminent role of the scientist’ is removed. Of interest in this type of research: … is that it widens the social base that contributes to the production of knowledge, to the dissemination of knowledge and to the usage of knowledge. The growth of this type of research is dependent on the inability of the traditional and applied forms of research to meet all the needs of society in terms of useful and usable knowledge and the access to that type of knowledge.21

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Here the slide into epistemological populism, the suspicion of a qualitatively distinct kind of knowledge, not readily accessible, is blatant. Bawa acknowledges this kind of problem in his reference to the ‘more complex … measurement mechanisms’ in the ‘participatory research mode’, and in his support for a ‘genuine and committed presence of the basic sciences’ in the ‘research profile for higher education’:


An erosion of the existing capacity in the basic sciences would severely restrict the development of new technologies and the production of human resources in the applied terrains.22 But his obvious approval of participation-based research, with its assumption that knowledge should be transparent, has a tendency to undermine the fundamental rationale of Higher Education, and to throw out the baby with the (dirty) bath water. No matter how important it is that Higher Education ‘serve social needs’ and ‘be accountable’, if we think that these principles imply that it must be based on a populist epistemology in which all knowledge should be transparent, we deprive ourselves of the principle justification for having a higher education system at all.

VI Near the beginning of this essay I remarked that, although a cliché, the characterisation of the functions of Higher Education as teaching, research and community service is not so much wrong as unhelpful in specifying what is distinctive about Higher Education. We achieve more clarity if we add that Higher Education has to do with higher knowledge. With a view to breaking the hold of ways of thinking frozen into immobility, I shall here offer a reformulation of the function of Higher Education. What Higher Education has to do with higher knowledge is to constitute, disseminate and generate it. No one of these can be done adequately without being linked to the other two. Given the salience of higher knowledge in modern society, and given that it is widely understood as a potent source of growth and development, and a public good, we can understand why modern, or modernising, states are willing to devote public funding to institutions that constitute, disseminate and generate higher knowledge.

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It is difficult to imagine an institution that is in the business of constituting higher knowledge independently of distributing and generating it, but perhaps accrediting agencies are a move in that direction. Research institutes, which have no role in distributing higher knowledge, are, of course, possible, although Christie is skeptical about their longer-term viability:


… it does seem that the divorce of higher research from higher teaching in the Soviet Union, where the great brains were in think-tanks in Novosibirsk far away from the youth searching for the truth, was bad for research, bad for teaching and bad for the development of the country in the long term.23 It is less clear whether there could be institutions concerned exclusively with the dissemination of higher knowledge. Its effective dissemination appears to depend for its vigour on active generation of knowledge. A higher education institution brings together the constitution, dissemination and generation of higher knowledge. Such institutions are unlikely to be seamless garments, as the constant tensions between research and teaching in universities reveal. Nonetheless, the ideal of a higher education institution is to bring the constitution, dissemination and generation of higher knowledge into fertile relationship with each other, and they should thus be conceived of not as three functions of Higher Education, but as three interrelated aspects of a unified function. With a view to linking this claim to possible policy formulation, I shall briefly spell out each of these aspects of Higher Education.

Constituting higher knowledge We can make a rough distinction between service and defining institutions in a society. Service institutions are instrumental, serving needs that can be defined quite independently of those institutions. A petrol garage (a service station) is an example of a service institution. By contrast, a defining institution defines who we are and our needs. In mediaeval Europe, the Christian church was an institution of this kind. We can agree that most social institutions fall somewhere between these two ideal types; that self-understandings and public perceptions of institutions can change along this continuum, and that as soon as we move away from basic needs (such as the need for nutrition and shelter)

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we are into the realm in which needs themselves are socially constructed, and open to dispute. However, the distinction has some use in thinking about Higher Education. One interpretation of Barnett’s claim in The Idea of Higher Education that ‘Higher Education has become a pivotal institution’, is that it has moved increasingly into the position of being a defining institution of modern society. But the pressure increasingly being brought to bear on Higher Education for it to turn its attention away from ‘the ivory tower’ and to the needs of society, can be seen as an attempt to turn it into a servant of society, and to understand it as a service as opposed to a definitive institution. At its extreme, this kind of pressure is based on a misunderstanding of higher knowledge, or a mere rejection of the idea that there is such a thing. But such misunderstanding, or rejection, is on a suicidal trajectory, aiming at depriving Higher Education of its capacity to constitute the domain of higher knowledge. Higher Education will not be able to serve society in the distinctive way in which it does, and can, if it loses its capacity to constitute the domain of higher knowledge. It is likely to lose this capacity rapidly if it is understood and treated as the servant of some other agency, whether society, current political power or corporate business. We have not yet invented alternative institutions that can do this job, and in the longer term the knowledge society is dependent on its being done adequately. This is what lies at the root of the conviction that, in whatever ways modern society intrudes on the traditional territory of Higher Education, its autonomy, nonetheless, should be protected. Unless Higher Education has the appropriate autonomy, its capacity to constitute the domain of higher knowledge is distorted or limited. Higher knowledge is a socially constructed domain vulnerable to powerful takeover bids, market forces and political pressures, and much more fragile in some societies than in others. There are examples of higher knowledge being lost through the decline or degeneration of higher education institutions, sometimes through internal collapse (for instance, by failing to sustain a viable conception of higher knowledge in their practices), but often through well-meaning or malicious attempts from outside their walls to control them. But the decline or degeneration of Higher Education, from whatever source, is never good news for a society, especially one on the track towards modernisation.

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In a roundabout way, I think that the insistence that disciplinary knowledge (mode 1) must be reinforced and emphasised in our higher education institutions, and even the claim by Bawa that: … [a]n erosion of the existing capacity in the basic sciences would severely restrict the development of new technologies and the production of human resources in the applied terrains …24 implicitly recognises that Higher Education constitutes the domain of higher knowledge, and that if we lose that, we will lose the key to the future.


Disseminating higher knowledge There are two ways in which Higher Education disseminates higher knowledge: by teaching and by community service. Teaching is primary. Indeed, teaching higher knowledge can be seen as encapsulating a form of community service, especially if one takes seriously the view that higher knowledge is a public good. Teaching in Higher Education is of a distinctive kind. This has to do not so much with the age of the students, but with what they are assumed to know already. When we say that many South African students are not yet ready for university study, what we mean is that they have not yet mastered the kind of prior knowledge they need as a basis for engaging with higher knowledge, which is qualitatively different. Thus, teaching in Higher Education is a qualitatively different kind of teaching, which should enable learners to come to understand the grammar of practices. In this kind of teaching, a higher education institution is offering a community service of vital importance in modern society. It is developing the competences and capacities for people to operate flexibly and innovatively in an unpredictable range of settings, and the cognitive skills that enable them to cope with change and challenge in an orderly and productive way. There have always been less general programmes of training and study than this. Here I am thinking of professional programmes. We should recall that modern European universities developed from schools that trained people for the professions (originally theology, law and medicine) and that the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) started life as a training institution for mining experts. But even in these cases, higher knowledge was understood as the key

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to flexibility and innovation. The professional education of a medical doctor or a nurse, for example, is concerned with developing a domain of expertise that will then be deployed in a wide range of situations and settings. Attempts to make Higher Education more relevant by tying it to preparing people to operate competently in particular settings reveal a misunderstanding of the point that Higher Education distributes higher knowledge, that is, knowledge of the constitutive grammar of practices, and that this is the clue to its preeminent value in volatile modern societies. Thus, teaching in Higher Education, whether general or professional, is necessarily linked to enabling people to develop disciplined ways of thinking and acting. This is part of what underlies the view that higher education teaching should focus sharply on mode 1 teaching. The problem in making the point in this way, however, is that the bounded nature of mode 1 is habitually contrasted with the trans-disciplinarity of mode 2. Thus mode 1 is driven into a marriage with traditional academic disciplines. This is much better than throwing out the baby with the bath water, but it does ignore the baby’s parentage. Traditional academic disciplines do not have clean epistemological histories. They are the products of largely contingent, but sometimes logical, disputes in established universities, mostly European, over the years. Many of our traditional academic disciplines have embarrassingly brief histories, laced with elopements and forced marriages. Attempts to provide the grounding for clear distinctions between academic disciplines have not been very successful, and in the real world of university politics academic disciplines tend to develop hard boundaries to preserve their status and defend their territory from uninitiated intruders. In this way, academic disciplines can become ossified, losing their disciplined flexibility and closing themselves off from potentially generative challenges from other disciplines and other sources. Traditional academic disciplines should not be treated with uncritical reverence. They have evolved and are still evolving over time; they jostle with one another, and their practitioners are often influenced by the circumstances of the day. They do, nonetheless, provide the springboard from which to leap into the future. They encapsulate the best of these traditions of disciplined thinking, living examples of how people have tried to pursue the project of higher knowledge. Particularly when Higher Education is in rapid change, with continuing education, lifelong learning, open learning, massification

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and distance education, and when higher education students include many who do not fall in the traditional 18–23 age range, it is all the more important to hold fast to the core of higher knowledge in this fluid and often confusing environment. Some of these contemporary contexts of higher learning will be discussed in the final essay in this collection.


Generating higher knowledge The word ‘research’ is sometimes a problem in the modern world, and in higher education institutions. On the one hand, it is widely used to refer to what are sometimes little more than trivial, low-level information-gathering exercises: ‘Our research shows that 7 out of 10 film stars use Lux.’ Unless we qualify knowledge in some way, to say that research means the production of new knowledge is open to a degenerate interpretation in which, for example, looking up a number we did not know in the telephone directory might be dignified as research. On the other hand, in higher education institutions themselves, research is often mystified. This is possibly because of its high status, and the emphasis increasingly placed on research and publications in distributing the benefits characteristic of such institutions. In his paper for the NCHE, Renfrew Christie keeps before our attention that he is discussing advanced research. He does not pause to elaborate what he means by ‘advanced’ in this context, but in his view Higher Education is based not on research as such, but on advanced research, and the main claim of the paper is that: … advanced research in higher education is crucial both to the number and quality of jobs, as well as to the number and quality of schooling places in educational institutions of all types.25 To say that one function of Higher Education is to generate higher knowledge is at least to signal that there is a particular kind of research characteristic of Higher Education. This is not to deny that, pace the mode 2 arguments, there are other sites in modern society where higher knowledge is generated. We might add that the generation of higher knowledge is always disciplined and always driven by problems. The source of the discipline in the research process might be the scholarly parameters of a ‘traditional academic discipline’ or the

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limitations imposed by natural or historical realities; the problems, in short, might arise from inside or outside an academic discipline. Whatever the origin of a research problem, only when it is addressed through systematic and disciplined inquiry can it be said to be a contribution to higher knowledge. Though higher knowledge may be produced by independent researchers and thinkers, even in such cases they are members of a wider intellectual community, linked by the literature of their fields and by the necessity to interact with their peers. Generally, however, higher knowledge is generated within universities or other organised research communities. One of the key features of such research is that the outcome cannot be predicted in advance. This is one reason why it is counterproductive for an outside agency to attempt to direct higher education research programmes too insistently. Higher Education, I have argued, is centrally about higher knowledge. Often in tension, the three elements of constitution, distribution and generation are also essential to one another. Attempts to constitute an area of research without practising or teaching it are likely to be arid; teaching outside a context of active research may lead to a valuable pedagogy, which is not to be despised, but one that typically cannot advance the grammar of a research area; generation of higher knowledge has to be practised within what must be in some sense a community of scholars. No instrument better serves these purposes, which are intimately linked and collectively central to the production of higher knowledge, than Higher Education.

VII Finally, I want to tie this discussion more directly into issues arising in the South African milieu. I am arguing for the importance of a central place for epistemological issues, but carry this argument further than some other commentators. Paradoxically, but crucially, it is in the area of epistemology, which is only apparently divorced from the social and political concerns of a modernising society like that of South Africa, that the practical as well as intellectual value of higher knowledge is fully apparent. This ground must not be ceded to a Philistine definition of what is of value in knowledge; to a production paradigm based on a misleading parallel with the production of goods and services. The kind of higher knowledge outlined in this essay is of central importance to South Africa’s modernising project.

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Debates in the 1990s and onwards raise crucial considerations on the future organisation of Higher Education in South Africa. They emphasise that epistemological considerations must lie at the heart of the organisation of Higher Education, that the production of knowledge has been transformed in the modern world and, consequently, that the relations between higher education institutions and society have changed, and are continuing to change rapidly. Muller notes ‘the increasing salience of knowledge and the consequences this has for the organisation of higher education (HE) in South Africa’.26 This statement has two noteworthy features. Firstly, it fails to mention the modern world. Developments in the project of modernity underlie the changes in knowledge production and the extra-academic forces for change that are challenging the traditional autonomy of higher education institutions. If we had no interest in steering South Africa into becoming fully part of the modern world, or if we could resist the international forces driving us in that direction, then debate about the future of Higher Education in South Africa would take a very different form. Secondly, Muller’s statement tiptoes gingerly around the issue of what the relation is between ‘knowledge’ and ‘the organisation of Higher Education’. The claim is that the increasing salience of knowledge will have consequences for the organisation of Higher Education. This careful formulation avoids a problem that threads through much of the recent debate, the problem of thinking either that an account of knowledge will provide us with a blueprint for the design of a higher education system (as in ‘If knowledge is unified, then the higher education system must be unified’) or that social forces (forces of production?) determine the nature of knowledge. Here, and finally, I will restate the case that I have been building in this essay, bringing to the fore seven pervasive assumptions that need to be examined critically. As argued above, Higher Education does not produce common-sense knowledge; it is the disciplined application of intellectual expertise to the production of what I have called higher knowledge. So, Higher Education is not merely tertiary education. Instead, it is characterised by a particular view of knowledge. This is necessarily the realm of those who have undertaken a generally long and certainly intense engagement with academic disciplines. These disciplines shift and are contested in content and meaning over time, but are no less real for this. They are both the product of and the enabling condition for higher knowledge. None of this can be a democratic process, but

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this does not mean that higher knowledge is anti-democratic or that it does not serve broader social purposes.


Much of the lack of clarity over the role of higher knowledge, and its relationship to Higher Education, stems from the confusion between epistemological and social issues. Higher knowledge has its own logic, and higher education planning on the basis of superficial and unexamined analogies with the world of, for example, policy formulation, can only lead to the erosion of capacity and achievement in the central area of higher knowledge. A connected and also generally unexamined analogy that is destructive of higher knowledge is that of the location of knowledge in a production paradigm. The language and thinking, pervasive in contemporary society, of referring to material objects, but also services and even human beings, as products is damaging when applied to higher knowledge. This essay has sufficiently demonstrated that higher knowledge is not a product in this sense, and that its very value to society lies in the very different logic that it follows. A production paradigm as applied to higher knowledge risks desiccating this logic at its roots. This is linked to the also pervasive and unexamined notion of needs, which runs through the debate. Needs are often misdiagnosed, and the particular imperatives of the day may receive an obsessive, but narrow, form of attention ungrounded in any wider understanding. This is where higher knowledge, through its disciplined thinking and emphasis on skills that are likely to be transferable, and for the very reason that it may offer approaches that are not immediately linked to the particular problem at hand, is likely to be valuable. This is real capacity building, in contrast to the often superficial initiatives billed as such. Paradoxically, Higher Education does not serve society by turning itself into its servant. Another, insidious, way in which higher knowledge and Higher Education, its natural arena, are undermined is through the conception that successful higher education students are all destined to become knowledge producers (or researchers). Though higher knowledge is central to Higher Education, it is not its only purpose. It also produces trained people who play an important role in society, but who do not and are not expected to go on to become researchers. If higher knowledge is elided with the other functions of universities, and if various levels of achievement are not differentiated, it is likely that the understanding of what is specific to higher knowledge 135



will be greatly decreased, with damaging effects. In addition, paradoxically, the training function of universities will in the long run suffer if higher knowledge atrophies and dies. This point is linked to universities’ role in professional training, in fields such as medicine, law, architecture and education. As noted earlier, though the professions are dedicated to specific vocations, what is valuable about university professional training is its relationship to higher knowledge. Because of its setting within institutions where research and higher knowledge are acknowledged as vital, professional training can be embedded in a wider humanistic endeavour. It is the flexibility and openness to new ideas that universities at their best engender that should characterise professional knowledge – a far cry from the mechanical application of learning skills that will then be mechanically applied. Professional knowledge is thus closely linked to higher knowledge. Ironically, at a time when the pursuit of higher knowledge is in a fragile position, the emphasis on success in research has seldom been more marked, to the extent that teaching is often marginalised. Thus – this oversimplifies and overgeneralises, but may capture an important point – there is a tendency towards an ever more pressing demand for measurable research results in a context where throughput of students, measured numerically, is seen as vital. Thus, there are powerful forces that should be resisted, shepherding research and teaching towards banality and towards giving ever less attention to introducing students to paths that may lead to the vital area of higher knowledge. Notes

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1

The original paper has been heavily modified for this book.

2

J. Muller, ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’. Task Group 2: Technical paper submitted to the National Commission on Higher Education, Pretoria, 1995.

3

R. Barnett, The Limits of Competence: Knowledge, Higher Education and Society, (Bristol: Open University Press, 1994) p. 11.

4

R. Rorty, ‘Education without dogma: Truth, freedom and our universities’ in Dialogue 32, 1990, p. 45.

5

Rorty, ‘Education without dogma’, p. 45.


6


7


8


9

R. Barnett, The Idea of Higher Education, (Bristol: Open University Press, 1990) p. 202.

10 Muller, ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’, pp. 22–23. 11 Muller, ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’, p. 28.


12 This is a reformulation of a point made by Muller in ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’, p. 28, and might be one way of summarising a major thrust of the paper by Renfrew Christie (see Note 13). 13 R. Christie, ‘Assessing needs for research and graduate programmes’. Task Group 5: Technical paper submitted to the National Commission on Higher Education, Pretoria, 1995. 14 Muller, ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’, p. 12. 15 Muller, ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’, p. 12. 16 Muller, ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’, pp. 13–14. 17 A. Bawa, ‘Research: A conceptual paper’. Task Group 5: Technical paper submitted to the National Commission on Higher Education, Pretoria, 1995, p. 21. 18 Bawa, ‘Research: A conceptual paper’, p. 11. 19 Bawa, ‘Research: A conceptual paper’, p. 16. 20 Bawa, ‘Research: A conceptual paper’, pp. 18–19. 21 Bawa, ‘Research: A conceptual paper’, pp. 17–18. 22 Bawa, ‘Research: A conceptual paper’, p. 26. 23 Christie, ‘Assessing needs for research and graduate programmes’, pp. 17–18. 24 Bawa, ‘Research: A conceptual paper’, p. 26. 25 Christie, ‘Assessing needs for research and graduate programmes’, p. 7. 26 Muller, ‘Knowledge and Higher Education’, p. 1.

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9

Learning delivery models in Higher Education in South Africa (First presented to the South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association,


July 2003)1

Access to Higher Education in South Africa In 2001 the South African Minister of Education, introducing the National Plan for Higher Education (NPHE), commented that: The people of our country deserve nothing less than a quality higher education system, which responds to the equity and development challenges that are critical to improving the quality of life of all our people … There can be little doubt that the National Plan provides us with a unique opportunity … to establish a higher education system that can meet the challenges and grasp the opportunities presented to us by the contemporary world.2 These challenges include improving access to Higher Education while seeking to enhance its quality and redress the exclusions of the past. Public funding is unlikely to increase significantly in the foreseeable future. This constraint, together with the overall lack of well-qualified academic staff, suggests that imaginative, even radical, thinking is required about how to meet the challenges facing contemporary Higher Education in South Africa. A key development in the contemporary world, relevant to the content and delivery of Higher Education, has been the unprecedented and ongoing innovation in information and communication technology (ICT). The significance of these innovations for the future of Higher Education has been acknowledged in South Africa and elsewhere over the past decades, and indeed the claim that ICT is revolutionising Higher Education is more than empty rhetoric, although its meaning remains controversial. We need to examine this claim with a sensitive appreciation of our historical context,

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including the resources available, and with due consideration of the digital divide that particularly threatens poorer countries.


The distinction between contact and distance education has played a key role in debates about Higher Education in South Africa and elsewhere. But it is a controversial and increasingly blurred distinction, and the use of these categories has become a problem. The Department of Education (DoE) has expressed concerns about some of the ways in which some traditionally contact higher education institutions have moved into distance terrain. Given the lack of clarity about how to draw lines of demarcation, key policies and decisions send mixed signals to the sector. Within institutions this distinction has served to marginalise the ways in which rapid developments in modern distance education increasingly pose a challenge to traditional modes of delivery, especially in the light of the massification of Higher Education. In addition, the distance education operations of traditionally contact institutions tend to be treated as peripheral to what are seen as their mainstream activities. This essay does not set out to retrace familiar debates about this distinction. Its main purpose is to develop a conceptual framework for an informed discussion on the issues involved, and to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of the key higher education goals in South Africa, including expanding access and boosting achievement, economic development, high-level contributions to the knowledge economy, and the advancement of critical inquiry essential to a healthy democracy. It develops the theme that full advantage must be taken of contemporary developments in ICT, but ends with a recognition (albeit qualified) of the crucial importance of the community of scholars and students in the pursuit of higher knowledge, an argument that relates back to the theme of the previous essay.

The SAUVCA vision I start with the South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association’s (SAUVCA’s)3 A Vision for South African Higher Education of November 2002. This document expresses a growing consensus within the higher education sector on a number of key issues. One is the need to balance redress and the competitive demands of a knowledge economy in the volatile higher education landscape. Another is the acknowledgement that given resource

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limitations, and that Higher Education in South Africa is attractive to forprofit and foreign providers, the sector needs to search for ways of achieving practical and productive co-operation amongst public higher education institutions and between the sector and the DoE. The document outlines a vision for South African Higher Education against the background of the malign legacy of apartheid. It points to the tensions between the various functions public higher education is called on to fulfil, such as increasing student numbers, improving efficiency, enhancing quality and creating new knowledge. In short, the transformation of Higher Education in South Africa presents formidable challenges, which it is unlikely that the system will be able to meet without radical rethinking, especially about its function as a generator and disseminator of higher knowledge. Rapid developments in ICT, accompanied by a more informed understanding of how the form of knowledge characteristic of Higher Education is acquired, require the system to operate within a ‘different mode of production’. Elaborating on this ‘different mode of production’, A Vision for South African Higher Education notes that: … the knowledge economy is driven by intellectual capital and a more sophisticated understanding of knowledge production. The danger is that current policies may ‘produce’ a student ill-prepared for the new economy.4 What is required, it continues, is a system that exploits ICT, benchmarks South African Higher Education against current international developments in education, is geared towards networking and creating stronger research links with business and government, re-evaluates outdated types of institution and attempts to create a well-articulated Higher Education, transcends the categories of ‘contact’ or ‘distance’, and shows national and regional leadership in research and outreach. Organised Higher Education in South Africa, it would thus appear, is reaching towards a coherent position on distance education, in the context of the many challenges it faces.

International developments Mass elementary education – based on a ‘cottage industry’ model of face-toface classroom teaching – was one of the outcomes of the Reformation and of

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learning delivery models in higher education in south africa


industrialisation in Europe and its colonial empires from the mid-19th century. This form of mass education typically led via competitive examinations to selective secondary schools and elite universities. People across the world still see this form of institution-based learning as real education, and it has been the model which, with varying degrees of success, governments tried to develop and expand for much of the last century.5 While access to secondary and tertiary education remained the privilege of the few, the model seemed to function satisfactorily. However, with the expanding demand for post-elementary education it came under increasing strain. During the latter half of the last century, mass secondary education increasingly became the norm in more affluent countries, and less affluent countries strove to achieve that same norm. Towards the end of the century, mass tertiary education became an ideal in affluent countries and increasing proportions of the relevant age cohort partook in some form of tertiary education. But, as Anderson argues: … it is becoming clearer that even the wealthiest countries cannot continue with strategies of educational expansion based on the prevailing model. The poorer countries, confronted not only with the severe financial problems that expansion entails, also have to contend with the increasingly apparent failure of the traditional model, when expanded, to serve their educational needs, particularly beyond the basic primary level.6 We need to understand the emergence of distance learning against this background. It is sometimes suggested that Isaac Pitman in 19th-century Britain was its pioneer, founding a system of correspondence education subsequently copied elsewhere. In 1900 the University of Chicago, and in 1911 the University of Queensland, established correspondence education departments.7 In 1946 the University of South Africa (Unisa) became the first full-blown correspondence university in the world, providing access to tertiary education for generations of South African and other sub-Saharan African students unable to attend traditional universities. In its earlier forms – especially those which were almost exclusively correspondence – distance education came to be seen as a subsidiary form of education, inferior to the prevailing face-to-face system, understood as the genuine article. Distance education came to be seen as a second-rate

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simulacrum of the real thing. This legacy remains and is particularly virulent in South Africa where apartheid divided the population into the haves and the have-nots along racial lines. For the vast majority of have-nots the only kind of Higher Education accessible was distance education.


However, since the 1960s, there have been significant developments in the field of distance education, reinforced by unimagined innovation in electronic technologies, which have dramatically changed not only distance education but also the higher education landscape more broadly. Perhaps the key event was the establishment of the (British) Open University in the early 1960s. Preliminary investigations for the establishment of the Open University involved, amongst other things, an investigation of the organisation and teaching methods developed at Unisa. But the Open University broke new ground, and it has subsequently provided the model for the development of distance Higher Education in many other countries. It is sometimes said that the Open University established a new paradigm for Higher Education – and this is worth thinking about in the South African context. The name itself is significant. As Anderson points out,8 there is an important distinction between distance learning and open learning. Distance learning begins with a method – it is a way of teaching that does not require the presence of the teacher and learners in the same place at the same time. This is what John Thompson calls the ‘situation of co-presence’.9 But open learning began with a purpose – to develop new strategies at an affordable cost, to include all who seek higher levels of education and training. It might be said that the idea of open learning is a product of the increasing concern in the United Kingdom during the 1950s about the elitism of Higher Education. In the early 1960s there was a dramatic increase in the number of British universities. And we can note that the same developments took place elsewhere, even in South Africa where, however, the expansion of universities had a vicious political edge. It soon became clear that the expansion of access to Higher Education could no longer rest on the prevailing model of face-to-face institution-based teaching. The ground was prepared for a conjunction of the methods of distance learning with the purpose of open learning, yielding the idea of Open/Distance Learning (ODL), which has subsequently become common currency. Anderson comments as follows:

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At its best ODL is now characterized by: • well sequenced, clearly presented and attractive course designs; • course related examinations and well designed forms of assessment; • comprehensive user friendly learning material; • regular contact with tutors; • planned localized support, for example, tutorials, discussion groups and teaching, often using the facilities of traditional institutions; • ICT, video links, web sites, e-mail, (telephone, including cell phones) The success of leading edge open learning institutions in achieving these developments is well recognized. But it goes beyond establishing quality ODL and experimenting with ICT. It opens up questions about the design of learning systems in total …10 (Author’s emphasis) The idea of ODL was taken up with enthusiasm by other countries faced with the same problem of expanding higher education provision, where founding new institutions on the traditional model was increasingly unaffordable. In 1988 the Commonwealth of Learning was founded, ‘… born from the desire of Commonwealth countries to share the benefits of open and distance learning with each other, (and) to enable those without existing ODL structures to establish them …’11 Significantly, its primary mission was not to promote distance education but to enhance access. In 1999 the Commonwealth of Learning celebrated its anniversary with a Forum on Open and Distance Learning in Brunei. John Daniel – the then Vice Chancellor of the Open University – made a presentation that captures the promise and the risks of ODL. I will quote his arguments at some length, as they are highly relevant to the South African situation. He began by listing three changes between the world of the late 1980s and the world of the late 1990s: First, distance learning is now the height of fashion. After toiling for years in obscurity, as the pioneers of open learning did, it’s nice to see the field become à la mode … [However] once something becomes fashionable its currency gets devalued. Today everyone is

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jumping in, claiming that they are doing distance education and inventing new terms to make their own activity distinctive.


Second, the hot technologies have changed. When the Commonwealth of Learning was born the satellite star was in the ascendant. Today, if you are not living and breathing the Web you are a technological cave dweller. Three years ago, in the United States at least, distance education meant videoconferencing. Today, in the United States at least, distance learning means the Web. Since the vast majority of the population of the Commonwealth have never engaged personally with either videoconferencing or the Web, that is a problem. The third new element compounds the problem. We now live in a global world … Imperial fantasies about the Virtual Corporate University of the Universe are rampant.12 (Author’s emphasis) He then moves to a comment about ‘open learning at the university level’: I talk about ‘university level’ rather than universities because much of what universities now do is not university level work. I do not blame universities for this. Our societies have urged us to inculcate simple skills and to transmit well-codified knowledge and we have eagerly complied. Such activities have, however, obscured the core role of universities and encouraged a host of new players, who may well be better than established universities at teaching straightforward skills and knowledge, to call themselves universities and move into the field.13 There are strong resonances here with the situation in which South African higher education institutions find themselves. Daniel then explains what he means by ‘university level work’. He refers to the definition of the role of universities in the Report of the Dearing Committee,14 namely that ‘The role of universities is to enable society to maintain an independent understanding of itself and the world’, and proceeds to unpack it word by word and phrase by phrase. One of the points he makes is highly relevant to the role of public higher education institutions in South Africa, and to the purpose of this essay:

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The word ‘independent’ is there to capture the unique role of universities as creators of understanding. In a knowledge society many claim the right to help us interpret and understand the world. However, most of those claimants – the media, industrial and government research centres, and the new breed of corporate universities – cannot be independent of commercial interests. The individualistic and disinterested nature of a true university remains unique.15


The marketisation of education has a tendency to distort the ideal of disinterested inquiry that is at the heart of the university level work, and public higher education institutions are a key to maintaining that ideal. The question is, can ODL provide ‘university level’ education, in Daniel’s sense? He responds to this question by saying that the kind of learning implied here is ‘best captured in a conversational model of learning that involves students with academic teachers who are also engaged in critiquing and developing knowledge in their fields’: The ideal of conversation has been the basis of the model of distance education that we at the Open University call Supported Open Learning. It has four key ingredients: 1) excellent learning materials; 2) individual academic support for each student; 3) effective administration and logistics; and 4) teaching rooted in research. The world’s largest distance teaching universities, which I have written about elsewhere as Mega-universities, owe their considerable success to these principles of supported open learning which they have introduced with appropriate local variants … By operating flexibly at large scale, with low costs and with good quality, the mega universities have created a revolution in higher education.16 He discusses the threats and opportunities of the ‘new technological forces of change’. The ‘threats’ are relevant to how we need to think about the role of public higher education institutions in South Africa – and the ‘opportunities’ indicate how we might move forward. He lists the following five threats: • The new technology makes it easier to access information. But we must remember that university teaching is much more than this. 145



• T echnology tends to drive the curriculum towards skills rather than knowledge and understanding. • Technology is best exploited by teams whereas universities emphasize the creativity of the individual academic. • The market approach to education creates alternative providers who threaten the financial base of universities by picking off the cherries of basic skills development and skimming off the cream of basic knowledge transfer. True university learning for understanding must be linked to research, which costs money. • Government pressure to widen participation in higher education at low cost appears to threaten the close student– teacher relationship that university education requires.17 Daniel then raises the question of what the best response is ‘to the opportunities presented by technology and the most effective answer to the threats posed by current trends’. His answer consists in distinguishing between hard technologies (‘bits and bytes, electrons and pixels, satellites and search engines’) and soft technologies (‘processes, approaches, sets of rules and modes of organization’) and he concludes that: … if you want to use the hard technologies for university-level teaching and learning that is both intellectually powerful and competitively cost-effective, then you must concentrate on getting the soft technologies right.18 This requires a major change in the self-identity of academics, and the ways in which universities are organised, according to Daniel: Although universities specialize and divide labour as between disciplines, the habit in teaching is for the same individual to do everything: develop the curriculum; organize the learning resources; teach the class; provide academic support; and assess student learning. This robust, cottage-industry model does not require much organization. However it does not allow us to reconfigure the eternally challenging triangle of cost-access-quality in the directions of lower costs, greater access, and higher quality. The mega-universities have been able to reconfigure that eternal triangle and we should look to them for inspiration. Their achievements are remarkable.19

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And they have done this by adopting the soft technologies of modern enterprise – division of labour, specialisation and teamwork, which, as Daniel asserts: all require project management. The university itself has to take responsibility for seeing that it all hangs together. How do I sum this up? Very simply. Success in the coming era requires a radical change of focus.


The tradition in universities is that the individual teacher teaches. The future is that the university teaches. This may be a radical change of focus but it does actually take us back to the roots of universities in medieval times.20 (Author’s emphasis) Finally, one of the most important changes in Higher Education in South Africa and abroad is the emergence of the so-called lifelong learning market. This is driven by the fact that in many disciplines the shelf life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter, with a consequent need for a more frequent upgrading of the knowledge base. The need for education is gradually changing from learners desiring three-year training at the beginning of a 40-year career, to continuous training during a 40-year career to meet the changing demands of the workplace. This requires a delivery model where regular contact with lecturers and tutors will not always be possible and will also have to be independent of time and place. It is possible that lifelong learning will soon provide the biggest client base for higher education institutions.

South African policy background Throughout the post-1994 period of higher education policy formation in South Africa, from the DoE’s Technology Enhanced Learning Investigation (July 1996) to the National Plan for Higher Education (February 2001), there was a consistent (if sometimes implicit) insistence that if we were going to transform Higher Education, and simultaneously pursue the potentially divergent goals of access, quality and redress in an affordable way – in other words, to ‘reconfigure the eternally challenging triangle of cost-access-quality in the directions of lower costs, greater access, and higher quality’21 – then

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distance education would need to be expanded. The White Paper on Higher Education, for example, argues as follows:


Distance education and resource-based learning, based on the principles of open learning, have a crucial role to play in meeting the challenge to expand access, diversify the body of learners, and enhance quality, in a context of resource restraint. They enable learning to take place in different contexts, at a multiplicity of sites, at the learner’s own pace, using many media and a variety of learning and teaching approaches.22 However, various policy directions might flow from this argument. The principal complicating factor is what might be meant by distance education. There have been repeated attempts in the various policy documents to qualify or clarify what is understood by this phrase. One persistent strand running through the documents is an acknowledgement that a distinction between contact and distance education no longer (if it ever did) reflects the reality of modes of provision in Higher Education – especially where the education of large numbers of students is involved. But we need a further distinction in the category of distance education: between correspondence and ‘true’ distance education, as the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) put it in August 1996. The question of whether it makes better sense – from educational and funding points of view – to work with a two- or a three-fold distinction between modes of provision, will remain an issue unless we develop agreed and accountable criteria (conventional as they might be) for drawing the boundaries. It is a sign of our conceptual difficulties that while we try to make this two- or three-fold distinction, the developing impact of ICTs on Higher Education worldwide moves the goalposts. This is reflected in the policy documents. The fact is that a clear-cut distinction between distance and face-to-face teaching has collapsed, or is collapsing. In the documents this is recognised in terms of an acknowledgement that there is increasing ‘convergence’ between modes of provision, and a ‘continuum’ of modes of provision between the imaginary poles of distance and solely face-to-face provision. The Technology Enhanced Learning Investigation of July 1996 expresses a view also to be found in various subsequent policy documents:

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The growth of new communications technologies … has begun to make the notion of ‘distance’ difficult to interpret, while opening a great number of educationally and financially viable means of providing education. Simultaneously, awareness is growing that elements of distance education have almost always existed in face-to-face programmes, while educators involved in distance education are increasingly recognizing the importance of different types of face-to-face education as structured elements of their programmes. This renders rigid distinctions between the two forms of delivery meaningless. This leads to an important conceptual shift. In many circles, the notion of a continuum of educational provision has been developed.23 (Author’s emphasis) This conceptual shift involves acknowledging the ways in which both contact and distance provision have benefited from their increasing convergence, and recognising that the result is a concept of teaching which transcends these categories. This is not merely a question of the ways in which technology (including the increasing variety of media available and the decline in their production, duplication and reception costs) has become a key ingredient in both modes of provision, but also the way in which the convergence obliges us to focus on the design of learning systems in which face-to-face contact is only one potential resource amongst others, and not necessarily the most important or the most effective, as generations of students at residential institutions can confirm. Embedded practices in traditional Higher Education, including teaching and institutional organisation, make it difficult to accomplish this conceptual shift, or even to raise the fundamental questions about teaching and learning in Higher Education which result from developments in distance education coupled with the forces of technological change. The DoE’s Technology Enhanced Learning Investigation included a scan of technologically enhanced learning initiatives in South and southern Africa. This revealed that most initiatives do not reflect a conceptual shift, but focus ‘on enhancing or extending the traditional classroom learning environment’.

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[V]ery few broke new ground in teaching and learning methods … Adding technology on to traditional classroom teaching and learning practices will not achieve redress in South Africa on any significant scale.24


Emphasising this point, the document claims that ‘South Africa needs a whole new culture of education and training’ in which face-to-face teaching is no longer privileged above all other methods. One phrase often used to refer to this ‘new culture’ in the policy documents is ‘resource-based learning’. This implies that we need to think about teaching from the point of view of what resources will be provided to learners. Designing an instructional programme then involves selecting an effective combination of learning resources that can be used by learners in a flexible way. These resources might include face-to-face teaching and other forms of contact; however, ‘a significant but varying proportion of communication between learners and educators is not face-to-face, but takes place through the use of different media as necessary’.25 The DoE’s Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation claims that ‘… the reorganisation of learning and teaching in contact institutions involving the use of well-designed learning resources will result in improved quality and effectiveness’.26 If we accept this conceptual shift, then we can: … turn from meaningless debates about the relative virtues of particular methods of educational provision, to a consideration of the nature of learning and the educational value of a course’s structure and content.27 But this shift beyond distance and face-to-face delivery modes affects both contact and distance institutions. The phrases ‘dual mode’ or ‘mixed mode’ institutions are sometimes used to express these developments, but in these terms both the distance and most of the contact higher education institutions in South Africa have become de facto dual mode, or mixed mode institutions. But this typology of institutions assumes that there is still a clear distinction between contact and distance modes of delivery. These developments are in tension with, and potentially undermine, another persistent strand in the policy documents. This is that if distance education

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is going to fulfil its promise of enabling the higher education system to contribute as indicated to the pursuit of the goals of increased access at an affordable level, then it needs to be of high quality. This cannot be achieved except in an institution dedicated to this mode of delivery. The view that there should be a single public dedicated distance education provider in South Africa – especially in the light of concern about the quality of much so-called distance education – was put forward in the report of the NCHE, and has been repeated in subsequent policy documents. The NCHE recommended ‘a single distance education institution offering modern distance education programmes to very large numbers of students’, adding however that ‘this single institution would co-ordinate the production of high quality learning materials for widespread use across the system’,28 a view echoed by the DoE’s Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation. The possible tension between the recommendation that a single distance education higher education institution be established, and an acknowledgement that there is no longer a clear distinction between contact and distance modes of delivery, is ameliorated once we notice that these documents do not recommend the restriction of distance activities at traditionally contact institutions. To say that there will be a dedicated distance education provider is not to say that this provider will have the exclusive right to teach in distance mode. Perhaps this was implicitly acknowledged in the DoE’s White Paper on Higher Education in which the idea of a single dedicated distance education provider is not mentioned.

National Plan for Higher Education The NPHE accepted the major strands of previous policies in respect to distance education, for instance the view that ‘modes of delivery are converging’ and form a ‘continuum’ and that ‘distance education’ should not be equated with ‘correspondence education’: the traditional correspondence model of distance education has become outmoded. It is being replaced with a model that incorporates the provision of learner support through a variety

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of mechanisms, including learning centres with audio-visual and computer-assisted support.29


Noting four factors that have influenced the rapid expansion of distance education – new modes of delivery through changes in ICT; the need for greater cost efficiency; increased competition from private higher education providers; and the role of distance education and resource-based learning in the context of resource restraints in expanding access, diversifying learners, and enhancing quality – the document: [W]elcomes these developments … as they indicate the growing responsiveness of institutions both to changes in learning and teaching technology but also to the needs of learners who are in employment who need to work in order to meet study costs.30 We can add that there are other learner-related reasons why distance education might be welcomed, such as remoteness of many students from major centres, personal responsibilities (such as childcare), the impact of HIV/AIDS, and other barriers to access to traditional on-campus Higher Education. The DoE is, however, concerned about ‘the uncritical introduction and adoption of distance education as a panacea for the challenges that confront higher education in South Africa’. One reason is the need to: educat[e] and nurtur[e] the next generation of intellectuals and leaders, especially black intellectuals, including professionals and researchers. It is unlikely that this role can be played either by higher education institutions that are narrowly driven by market imperatives or by ‘virtual’ universities. They cannot replace the traditional contact higher education institutions where scholarship, research, teaching and service are valued in equal measure and where the focus is on the full range and breadth of disciplines. And more importantly, where knowledge generation and intellectual development are themselves the product of social interaction and engagement.31 Further, the document notes that embracing new technologies, partnerships and approaches should not be ‘at the expense of the social values and moral purpose that is the defining characteristic of human endeavour’, and that ‘no account has been taken of the potential impact of developments in distance

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education at contact institutions on the sustainability of the dedicated distance education institutions’.32 Also, there are concerns about the quality and relevance of distance education programmes offered by contact institutions. The DoE agrees with the Council on Higher Education (CHE) that:


… a single predominantly dedicated distance institution that provides innovative and quality programmes, especially at the undergraduate level, is required for the country. The opportunities that the present distance education institutions have created for students in Africa and other parts of the world must be maintained and expanded.33 According to the DoE, the establishment of such an institution would have many advantages for the development of the higher education system. These include the creation of a clear focus and strategy for distance education in contributing to national and regional goals; the implementation of networks of innovation and learning centres, facilitating both the development of courses and materials for use nationally and access and learner support; the promotion of access and human resource development within the Southern African Development Community and Africa as a whole; and the creation of opportunities for economies of scale and scope, particularly ensuring that advantage is taken of the rapid changes in ICT. Much of this technology is expensive and unlikely to be accessible to any one institution.

The current higher education environment in South Africa Open/distance learning There is evidence that many of the characteristics of ODL mentioned by Anderson and Daniel (see above) are increasingly being adopted by institutions across the South African higher education sector. Most of the 19 institutions which responded in a survey that accompanied research for this essay, mentioned learning materials, course-related examinations, planned localised support with regular tutor/teacher contact in their own or other institutions’ venues, and the use of ICT. ODL has become the internationally preferred label for innovative nontraditional modes of delivery whose defining purpose is to overcome barriers to access. International good practice in ODL includes well-designed and

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produced learning materials, face-to-face contact, and the appropriate use of technology and communication systems, all in a properly integrated course design in which learning resources complement each other in fostering goodquality, flexible, cost-effective learning. This coherent integration of various learning resources is the hallmark of best ODL practice, underwriting a concept of teaching that transcends contact and distance. A criterion for distinguishing ODL from conventional teaching is the frequency and nature of the contact involved. But this criterion is elastic and cannot yield a clear-cut distinction. In ODL, contact is supportive and relatively infrequent, while in face-to-face teaching it is the primary mode of delivery. In ODL the focus of contact sessions is on learning facilitation rather than direct teaching, as in lectures. In addition, in conventional teaching it is assumed that face-to-face contact is the primary mode of delivery, and is between the learner and the individual academic expert. This, of course, is a utopian ideal, and rare, certainly in undergraduate teaching in higher education institutions. In terms of transforming Higher Education through increased access, institutions indicate that they have indeed done so in terms of the numbers of learners reached, outreach to rural areas and provinces beyond their locations, variety of programmes, and variety of ICTs used. In their different ways, all these programmes have helped to redress past inequalities and are assisting institutions to reflect South African social demographics. Institutions, however, need continuously to check that redress is across all modes of provision, and that, indeed, ODL programmes are not used to keep contact sections of institutions predominantly white. However, the key issue of quality, or epistemological access, remains. Transformation of distance education provision requires a focus on improving the quality of programmes and learner support services. This is crucial.

Terminology The range of terminology used in institutional responses to the survey that accompanied the research for this essay is rich and colourful. However, it also demonstrates how diverse, even idiosyncratic, institutional description and provision can be in terms of the ODL characteristics outlined above. Terms

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used include distance education, open learning, open and distance learning, telematics and e-learning.


The use of ICT features prominently in many responses. Whatever terminology we decide upon, it will be important to demonstrate how it encompasses the elements of good ODL practice. We should also remain aware that use of new technologies is not necessarily distance education. As John Daniel aptly puts it: [M]any people automatically associate the educational uses of the newer information and communications technologies with distance learning. This leads them to link three ideas and assume that technology-based teaching will foster distance learning and therefore show productivity gains over classroom methods. There will be widespread disappointment when this assumption proves false as it usually will.34 The notion of a continuum of delivery modes recognises that between pure correspondence and pure contact, various combinations of learning resources and media will be used in educational provision. A sharp distinction between contact and distance delivery, is no longer possible. Consequently, distinction between institutions in terms of modes of delivery has become redundant. However, while this is correct in theory, in practice most higher education institutions carry features of their prehistory and, in terms of predominant modes of delivery, tend to be located at some point along the continuum. Although convergence of modes of delivery is a rapidly emerging reality, in practice, especially in most countries of the developing world, it is not yet fully realised. Where it exists, it tends to be in small pockets, whose quality has not been assessed, within institutions or programmes.

The development of a diverse institutional landscape The Education White Paper comments that the DoE: … favours an integrated and co-ordinated system of higher education, but not a uniform system. An important task in planning and managing a single national co-ordinated system is to ensure diversity in its organisational form and in the institutional landscape, and offset pressures for homogenisation.

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Such pressures exist at present, and will intensify as the demand for higher education places escalates, and as the system responds to the acknowledged needs to widen access and diversify the curriculum.35


Current developments in the public higher education sector in South Africa are in line with this aspiration. ODL covers a range of learning resources, programmes and learning outcomes; a higher education system that accepts ODL as its mainstream teaching mode can accommodate considerable diversity. If, to enhance the quality of higher education teaching, we want to encourage the development of a ‘national network of centres of innovation’ which draw on the best expertise available in our higher education system, and a ‘national network of learning centres’ which provide excellent facilities and student support services, then institutional diversity in programmes and modes of delivery is a valuable national resource. A diverse higher education institutional landscape of this kind seems to have been envisaged in the DoE’s recommendation of: … a national network of centres of innovation in course design and development, as this would enable the development and franchising of well-designed, quality and cost-effective learning resources and courses, building on the experience and expertise of top quality scholars and educators in different parts of the country.36 (Author’s emphasis) The next paragraph states that: … contact and distance education institutions will be encouraged to provide effective and flexible learning environments on a continuum of educational provision.37 (Author’s emphasis) This diversity of modes of delivery, already evident in our higher education institutional landscape, needs to be encouraged and supported adequately, particularly through appropriate funding systems. International experience shows a growing trend towards the development of both single and dual mode institutions within one country, and there are already many indicators that the distinction between open, distance or flexible learning, and conventional education, is disappearing.38

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In the light of such developments it would be counterproductive to curtail or restrict burgeoning ODL practices in our public higher education institutions. ODL has de facto become the mainstream mode of delivery for many higher education institutions, in South Africa and elsewhere. Self-descriptions of institutions as contact, distance or dual mode lag behind these developments.

E-learning


ICT has and will increasingly have a profound impact on higher education.39 This is widely accepted and also applies to e-learning or online learning. As with other emerging modes of education delivery, e-learning lacks an exact definition. It belongs to the broader class of ODL models that use modern technology to the fullest.40 Where bandwidth permits, the internet can be used to transfer learning material. Good e-learning is characterised by well-designed, clearly presented and attractive course and learning material, organised according to structured processes and assessed through quality criteria. In the case of e-learning, personal contact with lecturers and tutors has sometimes been limited and even replaced with electronic contact through the internet. However, there is general recognition that to be effective it still requires some form of face-toface contact. E-learning is particularly suited for the lifelong learning market, where frequent face-to face contact with tutors and lecturers is often impossible. As pointed out before, this market is steadily increasing in size and importance, and it is essential that ODL models should be designed with the flexibility to allow them to be used within an e-learning setting. All institutions should therefore endeavour to acquire an e-learning capacity for a future education market where time and place will be largely irrelevant. E-learning is the domain of all higher education institutions and should not be restricted to a single institution. Another important issue is the changing nature of teaching, which is no longer transferring content. Those who interpret teaching in this way will be obliged to recognise that such teaching will disappear as a career in the new world where information is freely available and where ICTs play a huge role in the

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transfer of information and knowledge. Those who realise that teaching now concerns learning facilitation, that is, facilitating and optimising learning, will bloom in this new world of ICT. Tony Bates provides an excellent account of the prospects for e-learning, especially in developing countries. He concludes that no country can afford not to develop a local e-learning capacity, and that ‘those concerned with national planning for post-secondary education and training need to give as much consideration to the potential and implications of e-learning as to campus buildings and facilities’,41 though he cautions against regarding e-learning as the answer to the most pressing educational problems of poor countries: ‘[o]ther strategies, such as open universities, can provide greater access and more cost-effective delivery’.42 He continues: If e-learning represents a significant element in the future of education, as seems increasingly likely, the sooner that a nation or an education system gains experience and practice in e-learning, the more economically competitive that nation is likely to become.43 (Bates’s emphasis) A striking feature of e-learning is that it is ‘borderless’. It is no respecter of time, place or national and cultural borders. This may be one of its major benefits: Although almost all are at the very beginning of using such new technology, its future use in education cannot be underestimated, particularly because of its ability to link students in the smallest towns of every country with the rest of the world.44 In our context, one of the major challenges is how to prepare students for Higher Education. Over the years South African higher education institutions have attempted to address this problem, and it is increasingly understood that the most effective solution lies not in providing ‘add-on’ academic development programmes, but in transforming the curricula and teaching and learning practices in higher education institutions. To address access of poorly prepared students to Higher Education – a ‘problem’ likely to be with us for some time to come – we need curricula and teaching and learning practices responsive to the diverse levels at which our students arrive at our doors, and to the developmental needs of our country.

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Effective collaboration between public higher education institutions and imaginative exploitation of flexible e-learning programmes, especially in the main undergraduate qualification pathways, may enable the system to develop the kinds of locally responsive curricula that we need.


Bates claims that, ‘[E]-learning raises some fundamental issues regarding national policy for post-secondary education and training …’45 One of his main points is that in e-learning, the main competition for a national higher education system ‘will come from outside the system, from foreign universities and from the private sector’.46 Providers such as these may represent a threat not only to national educational institutions, but also to national cultures and languages. The faltering development of the African Virtual University 47 is symptomatic of problems involved in a decontextualised view of Higher Education. Vijay Kapur claims that instruction strategies from one cultural setting combined with learners from another can cause ‘confusion and misunderstanding’.48 This will have a negative impact on the learning process. Thus, ‘[T]he provision of distance education courses does not remain a purely technical issue – instead such courses take on cultural and social contexts, especially when examples are not culturally unidimensional and idioms do not transfer easily between cultures’.49 The argument here is not so much a defence of cultural specificities; it is about the quality of learning. Such arguments provide a strong reason – in terms of learning theory – to support the view that we need to develop robust local e-learning capacity, building on the experience and expertise of the best available scholars and educators in designing programmes and developing high-quality learning materials responsive to our context, thus enabling our ‘ill-prepared’ students to gain effective epistemological access to quality Higher Education. In addition, the main interests of non-public and non-local providers are likely to be commercial, unsympathetic to some of the fundamental ideals of our public national higher education system. As Bates puts it, ‘… probably the main danger of relying on foreign provision of e-learning is the threat to quality and professional standards’.50 But ‘… trying to stop foreign institutions from offering programmes into a country by refusing them accreditation is a fairly futile operation. Welcome to globalisation’:51

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Over the long run, dependency on private sector or international agencies for e-learning will have serious implications for equity of access to educational services, the development of a national e-learning capacity and national and cultural identity.52 (Author’s emphasis) According to Bates, for the sake of national development therefore, and for its potential to improve the quality of teaching generally within institutions, e-learning needs to become a core part of post-secondary institutions.53 National higher education policies should encourage this development. But as in the case of other good ODL models where careful design and technology are integral, this has major financial implications. It is wrong to assume that there are no extra costs involved in e-learning; it needs investment, as Bates points out: The main advantage for public institutions and governments investing in e-learning is not likely to be to save money, but to improve the quality of learning, and to develop workforce skills that will eventually facilitate economic development. Governments and institutions that think that e-learning can be successfully introduced without additional investment should not go this route.54 (Bates’s emphasis) Bates recommends encouraging the development of national e-learning capacity: ‘Probably the most effective strategy in the long run will be to meet the competition from outside head-on by building strong internal e-learning programmes through the existing public sector.’55 He offers a number of models for how this might be done, one of these being especially relevant to current developments in South African Higher Education: There is much that national or state governments can do to facilitate the development of e-learning within existing public post-secondary institutions. In the long run this is likely to be the most sustainable policy with the biggest impact, although it will require additional and significant public-sector investment.56 (Author’s emphasis) Bates comments that ‘… technology, and particularly the threat of out-ofstate e-learning programmes, can provide the incentive to bring institutions together to collaborate’,57 adding that ‘… especially for small or economically

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less developed countries, competition between local institutions in the field of e-learning is likely to be counter productive. The real competition for local universities and colleges will come from outside the system, from foreign universities and the private sector’.58


If we take account of what Bates and other informed commentators contend, we cannot ignore the rapid growth of e-learning if we have the interests of South African public Higher Education and its role in preparing students for the globalised economy at heart. We can recall Bates’s claim that ‘the sooner that a nation or an education system gains experience and practice in e-learning, the more economically competitive that nation is likely to become’.59 There is, thus, good reason to recommend that higher education institutions should develop strategies for developing this capacity. Lifelong education, which will become the dominant market for all higher education institutions, demands appropriate learning materials and delivery methods. Because contact students will need the same access, these requirements are true for all higher education institutions. Three of the main problems in developing high-quality e-learning capacity for higher education institutions, which are no different from developing good ODL models, are the start-up and maintenance costs of establishing a reliable and high-quality e-learning infrastructure and delivery platform; the lack of access for the majority of our students, to the appropriate technology; and the scattering of local academic expertise across the institutions that comprise the sector. These problems demand a systemic solution that can only be found through collaboration between higher education institutions and with strong government support for these initiatives. The mistake should not be made of trying to develop an e-learning capability at a single institution; collaboration between higher education institutions, as with the e-University in Britain, is a possibility. Bates claims that, ‘[T]he big difference between e-learning and open universities is the direct interaction between the instructor and the students in e-learning, leading to more individualised instruction.’60 He further asserts: This, however, comes at a cost. Although there are some economies of scale compared with conventional education,

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e-learning requires a reasonable student/teacher ratio to avoid instructors becoming swamped with e-mail and discussion forum messages. What e-learning is offering is a more interactive education encouraging critical thinking, communications skills, and flexibility for both students and teachers, compared with the one-way mass media of open universities.61 In conclusion, while it is undisputed that regular face-to-face contact between learners and lecturers or tutors within the framework of good ODL models of education delivery would in general provide for greater learning efficiency, it should be recognised that more and more learners in the lifelong learning market will have to make do without such regular contact. E-learning, as a customised extension of ODL to serve this future market, should therefore be offered by all higher education institutions. The challenge remains to develop learning materials and content which, for the sake of cost-effectiveness, could be used in settings where regular contact is possible as well as in those where it is not. The importance of collaboration between institutions to drive down costs cannot be emphasised enough. Development of good-quality ODL learning materials, including e-learning content, is costly. The implementation and the maintenance of e-learning programmes are equally costly. These costs could be reduced by collaboration between higher education institutions, as well as by private sector involvement and government support and incentives for such collaboration. One particular area of substantial savings is in the joint use of very expensive software for managing ODL learning materials. While we need to develop national e-learning capacity for the sake of the quality of learning and of access for our ill-prepared students, in our context it can at best provide a supplement for well-designed ODL. ODL brings with it, we have argued, a concept of teaching which transcends the distinction between contact and distance, and prompts us to think much more carefully about the design of the learning systems and resources that will be available to students. At this stage in the development of our higher education system, e-learning should be seen as one additional learning resource in an ODL system. Excellent, well-supported print material and increasing use of online learning are likely to be the best options for us at this stage. We have a dearth of geographically

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dispersed, well-qualified tutors or facilitators, and in this context we must think of ways of using electronic communication systems.

Residential universities


As noted previously, one of the DoE’s reasons – stated in the National Plan for Higher Education – for concern about the ‘uncritical introduction and adoption of distance education as a panacea for the challenges that confront higher education in South Africa’ is that the country needs: … to ensure that it educates and nurtures the next generation of intellectuals and leaders, especially black intellectuals, including professionals and researchers. It is unlikely that this role can be played either by higher education institutions that are narrowly driven by market imperatives or by ‘virtual’ universities. They cannot replace the traditional contact higher education institutions where scholarship, research, teaching and service are valued in equal measure and where the focus is on the full range and breadth of disciplines. And more importantly, where knowledge generation and intellectual development are themselves the product of social interaction and engagement.62 We repeat this weighty consideration, since it deserves our close attention. We have already shown why a distinction between contact and distance modes of delivery can no longer be used as the criterion for drawing up a typology of institutions. As we have said, at best it might be possible to make a rough distinction between institutions on the basis of where they lie on the continuum of their predominant modes of delivery. But the DoE’s reasoning introduces a dramatically different dimension. This dimension is that if we think merely in terms of modes of delivery, we have an impoverished conception of the ways in which traditional higher education institutions serve their constitutive ideals. Traditional residential universities, such as, paradigmatically, Ivy League universities in the United States of America and Oxbridge in the United Kingdom, have characteristic features that contribute to the richness of their students’ education in many subtle and less subtle ways. One feature, of course, is the presence of concentrations of outstanding scholars and academics from a diversity of

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disciplines and modes of intellectual inquiry, in frequent contact with one another, and themselves at the leading edges of research and innovation in their specialist fields of inquiry. The idea that teaching in Higher Education should be rooted in research has its natural home in such communities.


But other features of such universities underwrite their educative power. We might think, for example, of the fact that, typically, students live their lives full time for four or five years, at a malleable stage of their development, immersed in the cultural and academic ethos of the university. The community of diverse scholars and the diversity of more and less advanced students in constant formal and informal contact with each other generate this ethos. But it is also generated by the on-site availability of well-stocked libraries and other resources, facilities and equipment, which provide ready access to knowledge way beyond that on the formal curricula. We also cannot discount the impact of the clubs and associations that foster diversity of interests and generate standards of commitment and excellence in a range of activities which, on the face of it, might appear to have little to do with higher knowledge. A great deal of the impact of such institutions, the intellectual and moral autonomy and vitality and commitment to social values and moral development which they foster, depends on the constant interaction and engagement at various levels of those gathered in the university. In such a context, we can make sense of the idea that knowledge generation and intellectual development are themselves a product of social interaction and engagement. Nor can we underestimate the intangible influence of the physical environment, and the rituals, obscure traditions and institutional ethos, which express the history of generations of confident and creative scholars committed to the disinterested and disciplined inquiry which are the hallmarks of Higher Education. This richness is hardly conveyed in the phrase ‘contact institution’, with its narrow focus on mode of delivery. ‘Residential institution’ comes closer to the heart of the matter. Such institutions are the outcome of gradual development, and struggles we might add, over generations. They were not designed by an all-seeing planner in one fell swoop, but emerged gradually from the political, economic, intellectual and cultural turmoil of 18th- and 19th-century Europe and North America. Typically, they have achieved substantial economic independence from public funding. If one set out to design a total learning system, they

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would clearly provide an ideal model. Apart from the world-renowned institutions of this type, there are many less internationally famous, including in our own country, which have tried to model themselves on these ideals and have indeed managed to go some way to achieving them. However, one clear lesson of the escalation of Higher Education during the past half-century is that it is not possible to use such a model as the institutional template for the provision of access to Higher Education for more than a restricted elite; not only is it enormously costly, but it depends on the availability of a critical mass of outstanding scholars gathered together in a single institution. We might regret that we do not, in our context, have either the human or material resources to replicate this model on a wide scale. But it is counterproductive to hanker after an unattainable ideal. If residential universities on this model do offer an irreplaceable kind of Higher Education – one essential for the education and nurturing of ‘the next generation of intellectuals and leaders, especially black intellectuals, including professionals and researchers’ – then it is important to retain some such institutions on our higher education landscape. But if we take the equity and development challenges in our context seriously, it would be unwise to drive all our higher education institutions into such enclaves. Higher education institutions on this model might indeed enhance the quality of education for a restricted number of students, but they do so at the cost of ignoring the other two legs of the ‘eternal triangle’: cost and access. Access to higher education institutions of this kind remains, inevitably, limited, probably only to those who can afford it. We can note that there has been a significant increase in the proportion of black students at residential universities, so race is ceasing to be the determining factor in access. Like all public higher education institutions, such institutions are a public resource, and if we regard them as having an irreplaceable contribution to make to our collective future, perhaps we need to devise innovative ways of making the resources of these institutions available to a wider range of students than can be accommodated on a three- or four-year privileged full-time basis. The use of modern ODL methods, supplemented by customisation for learners not having the opportunity for regular contact with lecturers or tutors (e-learning), seems to be the natural answer.

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Notes 1

The original paper has been heavily modified for this book.

2

Department of Education, National Plan for Higher Education, Pretoria: DoE, 2001a, p. 2.

3

SAUVCA has now been succeeded by Higher Education South Africa.

4

South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association, A Vision for South African Higher Education, Pretoria: SAUVC, 2002, p. 11

5

J. Anderson, ‘Designing better education: Distance learning, open learning, designer learning’, unpublished paper presented at the conference: Open Learning in Developing Countries, October 2001, p. 1.

6

Anderson, ‘Designing better education’, p. 1.

7

V. Kapur ‘Distance education in India and the USA – the cultural dimensions’, Special Lecture, 26 March 2002. Accessed early 2003 on www.seattlecentral.org.

8

Anderson, ‘Designing better education’.

9

J. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991.

10 Anderson, ‘Designing better education’, p. 2. 11 The Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) Bulletin, No. 138, April 1999, p. 7. 12 J. Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’ in ACU Bulletin 138, 1999, p. 7. 13 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 7. 14 National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (NCIHE), Higher Education in the Learning Society, report of the National Committee (‘Dearing Report’). London: NCIHE, 1997. 15 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 7. 16 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 8. 17 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 8. 18 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 8. 19 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 8. 20 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 9. 21 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 8. 22 Department of Education, White Paper on Higher Education, Pretoria: DoE, 1997, section 2.57.

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23 Department of Education, Technology Enhanced Learning Investigation, Pretoria: DoE, 1996a, section 13.3. 24 Department of Education, Technology Enhanced Learning Investigation, section 2.6. 25 Department of Education, Technology Enhanced Learning Investigation, section 13.5. 26 Department of Education, Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation, Pretoria: DoE, 1996b, p. 16. 27 Department of Education, Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation, section 13.4.


28 National Commission on Higher Education, Report of the National Commission on Higher Education, Pretoria: DoE, 1996, p. 13. 29 Department of Education, National Plan for Higher Education, p. 48. 30 Department of Education, National Plan for Higher Education, p. 48. 31 Department of Education, National Plan for Higher Education, p. 48. 32 Department of Education, National Plan for Higher Education, p. 48. 33 Department of Education, National Plan for Higher Education, p. 50. 34 Daniel, ‘Distance learning in the era of networks’, p. 10. 35 Department of Education, White Paper on Higher Education, section 2.37. 36 Department of Education, White Paper on Higher Education, section 2.61. 37 Department of Education, White Paper on Higher Education, section 2.62. 38 G. Peters, ‘A personal vision of open and distance learning in the next millennium’, in V.V. Reddy & S. Manjulika (eds) The World of Open and Distance Learning, New Delhi: Viva Books, 2000, p. 467. 39 T. Bates, National Strategies for e-learning in Post-secondary Education and Training, Paris: UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, 2001, p. 17. 40 See Anderson, ‘Designing better education’, p. 2, for characterisation of such models. 41 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 18. 42 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 117. 43 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 115. 44 M. Carnoy & D. Rhoten, ‘What does globalisation mean for educational change? A comparative approach’, Comparative Education Review 46(1), p. 6. 45 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 63. 46 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 62.

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47 See www.avu.org. 48 V. Kapur, ‘Distance education in India and the USA’, p. 5. 49 Kapur, ‘Distance education in India and the USA’, p. 6. 50 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 71. 51 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 48. 52 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, pp. 79–80. 53 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning. 54 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 96.


55 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 62.

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56 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 47. 57 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 59. 58 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 62. 59 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 115. 60 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 112. 61 Bates, National Strategies for e-learning, p. 112. 62 Department of Education, National Plan for Higher Education, p. 48.

Bibliography Anderson J. ‘Designing better education: Distance learning, open learning, designer learning’ (Paper presented at the conference: Open Learning in Developing Countries, October 2001). Badat S., Wolpe H. & Barends Z. ‘The post-secondary education system: Towards policy formulation for equality and development’ (Education Policy Unit, University of the Western Cape, May 1993).


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Index A academic achievement 74–76, 79, 85–86, 139 and deception/fraud 74–75 see also educational achievement academic development 51, 158 academic freedom v, viin3, 34, 41, 55–56, 59–61, 68 O’Brien Affair v, viin3, 57–58, 60 and search for truth 61–67 and The Open Universities in South Africa 57, 61 academic practice iv, 30, 46, 75–81, 84, 107 corruption of iv–v, 3, 64, 67, 82–83 disciplines of 11, 30, 76–77, 84, 120, 131–134, 163 grammar of v, 37–38, 119–121, 130–131 and lack of transparency 105–106, 110, 123, 125–126 and shared interest 104, 108–109 see also inquiry, practices of academic work vii, 30, 37, 64–66, 106, 109 see also academic practice access to Higher Education 20, 34, 43–45, 48, 56, 62, 70–71, 73, 77, 114, 121– 122, 138–139, 148, 152–154, 157, 160 and cost-access-quality triangle 146– 147, 151, 165 accountability 33, 67, 91, 123–124, 126–127 African Virtual University see information and communication technology: and e-learning Apartheid vii, 3, 17, 32, 34, 69, 90–92, 140, 142 and academic boycott viin3, 58 struggle against see liberation movements; protest politics B Bantu Education 71

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boundaries of higher learning see under embedded culture C capacity building 135, 157–162 lack/erosion of 48, 71, 120, 124, 127, 129–130, 135 capitalism 22–23, 59 changed culture of Higher Education see under curriculum transformation character-building and education v, 2–8, 11 colonialism 3, 32, 34, 70, 90 post-colonialism 32 Commonwealth of Learning 143–144 conflict theory of history 21 Constitution 46 consumerism 5, 33, 79 conversation see discussion, practice of co-presence see under embedded culture cost-effective delivery 44, 49, 146, 154, 156, 157–158 and economies of scale 153, 161 and innovation centres 156 and institutional collaboration 123, 159–162 Council on Higher Education see Higher Education Council culture of entitlement v–vi, 1, 69–73, 77–78, 81, 84–86 and effect on teaching 80–81 culture of learning, breakdown in 69–70, 73 curriculum transformation v, 25, 29–32, 41 and Africanisation 83, 105 and epistemic values 32, 36–38, 133–135 and the hidden curriculum 31, 37 and changed culture of Higher Education 43–44, 47, 50, 52–53, 156, 158 market responsive 32–33, 36


metaphor of cemetery and 28–29, 38 paradigm shifts in 50–52 and professional identity 30 and social science 32, 34–38 see also educational policy D debate see discussion, practice of democracy 55–57, 60–64, 67–68 civic-republican concept of 1, 3, 10 participatory 33, 88–90, 94–97 principles/values of iv–vi, 6, 9, 41, 106, 123, 134–135 see also stakeholder politics development of character see characterbuilding and education dialogue see discussion, practice of dialogical education 10 discussion, practice of vii, 9–10, 64 see also inquiry, practices of distance education vi–vii, 42, 51, 139–145, 149–150, 152–157, 159, 162–163 benefits to learners of 152 benefits to SADC and Africa 153 as distinct from correspondence education 148, 151 South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) 40, 45 see also open learning: Open/Distance learning model domination, relations of see ideology: and asymmetrical relations of power E education budgets Higher Education 33, 51, 112n21 and public funding/resources 125, 127, 138, 164 schools 24 education for citizenship 10 educational achievement v 69, 71–73, 75–76, 80–81, 84–86 role of agency in vi, 71, 75, 79 see also culture of entitlement

educational policy v, 1, 8, 24, 41, 46, 48, 89, 99, 118, 128, 135, 148, 160 and equity 24 Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation 25, 88, 97, 99–100, 150–151 National Education Policy Investigation: The Framework Report 18–19 National Plan for Higher Education 138, 147, 151–153, 163 National Qualifications Framework 31, 46, 53n6, 112n15 Report of the Working Group on Values in Education 2, 4 South African Schools Act (No. 84 of 1996) 25 Technology Enhanced Learning Investigation 147–149 White Paper on Education 148, 155–156 see also Higher Education Council; National Commission on Higher Education educational resources 19, 24–26, 42–44, 51, 71, 99, 110, 122, 139–140 and provision of learning materials 143, 145, 151, 153, 154, 157, 161–162 public sector investment in 160 see also educational budgets; teaching: as resource-based learning elitism in Higher Education 41, 56, 120, 142 embedded culture of Higher Education v, 40–45, 47–48, 50–53, 103, 139, 141, 143 149–152, 163 and boundaries of higher learning 46–47, 49 and competitive independence vi, 41, 45 monological 10 and situations of co-presence v, viin2, 41, 45, 142 see also learning delivery models: contact Engels, Friedriech 22 Enlightenment theories 22, 27n9, 84

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174

lack of transparency in 43, 91–92, 126 epistemic values v, 2, 11, 77 see also under organisation of 107, 121, 134, 142, 146, curriculum transformation; knowledge 149–150, 155 epistemological populism 123–125, 127 private 161 equality professional training function of 136 balance of development and iv–v, 17–26, as public spaces 92, 104, 107, 109 160, 165 University of Cape Town 57–58, 60 principles of 92–93, 100, 105–108, 122 University of Witwatersrand 57 equity see equality see also governance of Higher Education; essential purposes of Higher Education see open learning; stakeholder politics functions/nature of Higher Education higher knowledge 46, 54n9, 103, 105, Eurocentrism 34, 83 112n15, 115–117, 119–122, 129, 136, F 139, 164 Freedom Charter 1, 3 dissemination/transfer of 113, 126–128, Freire, Paolo 10 130–131, 140, 146 functions/nature/role of Higher Education production/generation of vi, 104, 113– 52, 113–114, 117–118, 121, 127, 145 114, 123–128, 132–135, 140, 163–164 qualitative difference in 116, 119–120, see also knowledge; research 122, 125, 130 HIV/AIDS 11, 152 as definitive institution 129 human dignity 22–23 see also higher knowledge human/civil rights vii, 22–23, 61 G human resource development 20, 26, 127, Ghandi, Mahatma 2–4 130, 153 True Education 5–6 humanity, cultivation of iv, 1, 10–11 globalisation 2, 7, 9, 47, 51, 159, 161 I governance of Higher Education iv–vi, 24, 24–25, 33–34, 87–91, 97–98, 105–110 ideology 18, 34, 53, 64 and asymmetrical relations of power and national Department of Education 65–66, 70, 72, 81–82, 84 99–100, 139–140, 153, 155–156 and curriculum theory 31 H ideological Higher Education Council 41, 98–99, 153 neutrality vii, 59, 65–66 Higher Education Forum 41, 98–99 struggle 55, 65 higher education institutions India autonomy of 41, 115, 134, 164 National Council for Teacher Education 8 constitutive 101–105 individualism iv, 1, 5, 7–8 corporate role in vi, 145 individuation 117–118 corruption in 101, 110 inequality 17, 19, 91 dual mode see learning delivery models: information and communication convergence of technology 35, 51, 116, 138–140, 143, and egalitarianism vi, 105, 121, 123, 145–146–150, 152–155 134–135 and e-learning 157–162, 165 external pressures in 101 see also under educational policy and internal disagreements 101, 109–110

I ndex

injustice 65, 67, 69, 90–91 inquiry, practices of 10–11, 35–38, 64, 66–67, 104–105, 139, 145, 164 and distinction between warrant and acceptability vii, 10, 37 see also academic practice; research instrumental rationality iv, 2, 5–9


J justice 29, 61, 65–67, 106 K knowledge vii, 4, 10, 34–36, 65, 102–103 democratisation of 62 economy 139–140 epistemological access to 77–81, 84 formalised/discursive see higher knowledge new 114, 119, 132, 140 and power 36, 56, 71, 91 production see under higher knowledge as distinct from propaganda vii, 37 see also higher knowledge; inquiry, practices of L learner centredness 41, 44, 47, 49 competence 106 empowerment 11 literacy 49, 116 support 49, 143, 145–146, 151–154 learning delivery models authoritarian 4 contact vi–vii, 49, 139–140, 148–152, 155–177, 161–164 convergence of 44, 148–151, 155–157 and mass education, history of 140–141 resource-based see under teaching see also distance education; open learning liberalism 15, 17 liberation movements v–vii, 3, 17–21, 29, 32, 51, 58 organisational cement of 18–19 see also Apartheid; protest politics

lifelong learning 43–45, 49, 131, 147, 157, 161–162 see also open learning M marketisation of education v, 1, 26, 129, 145–146, 152, 163 see also curriculum transformation: market responsive Marx, Karl 18, 28, 60–61 theory of history 21–24 massification of Higher Education v, 131, 139 Mbeki, Govan 29 mega-universities 146 metaphor of bounds iv modernisation 3, 113, 115–117, 121, 127, 129, 133 modernity 134 moral blindness 15–17 convictions/certainties 3–4 conflict 15–17, 21–22 degeneration 5 development of children 14–15 order/principles 13–14, 21–22 N National Commission on Higher Education 25, 113, 132 Framework for Transformation report 40–44, 46–48, 50–52, 87–88, 97–100, 148, 151 new patriotism iv, 1, 5–7, 9, 11 Newton, Isaac 61, 74 O opaqueness see academic practice: and lack of transparency; higher education institutions: lack of transparency in open learning and Open University (Britain) 142–143, 145, 161 and Open/Distance learning model 142–145, 154–157, 161–162, 165 and removal of barriers to Higher Education v, 34, 43–46, 48–50, 131

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and Report of Dearing Committee 144 and University of South Africa 141–142 see also distance learning; embedded culture of Higher Education P Pitman, Isaac 141 political exclusion 70–71 post-modern 32, 34 post-secondary education v–vi, 20, 47, 159, 160 poverty v, 2–3, 26, 33 protest politics vi, 1, 3, 17, 20, 29, 69–71, 79 and universities as sites of struggle 81–82 R rationalisation 25–26 Reconstruction and Development Programme 121, 123 redistribution 17, 20, 24 redress v, 17, 19, 24, 70, 114, 138, 154 and historically black institutions 25, 51 relativism 4, 7, 70, 83, 96 universal 36 research 122, 128, 135–136, 140, 146, 164 and autonomy 126, 129 different modes of 123–126, 132–133 resource-based learning see under teaching rights see human/civil rights see also culture of entitlement S science, value of 6 senates see governance of Higher Education skills, transferable 135, 145–146 slavery 22 social cohesion 3 social ontology 3, 7–8 socialisation 117–118 socialism 15, 17 South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association (SAUVCA) A Vision for South African Higher Education 139–140 stakeholder politics vi, 33, 87–97, 99–100, 102–103, 105, 108–110, 111n5&n8

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and autonomy 88, 94 and convergent interests 104 structuralist social theory 89 struggle politics see protest politics; liberation movements subjectivism 7 T teacher : pupil ratios 24–25 teacher education 2, 8 teaching in Higher Education 80, 130–131, 136, 138, 146–147, 149 as resource-based learning v, 42, 48–49, 53n7, 54, 148, 150, 152 totalitarianism 56–58 traditional culture of Higher Education see embedded culture of Higher Education tragedy classical theory of 13–14 educational iv–v, 13, 26 of history 17, 21, 23–24 trans-cultural academic community 83–85 transformation vi–vii, 17–18, 71, 86, 87, 103, 111n2, 114, 140, 147, 154, 158 and Broad Transformation Forums 90, 92–94, 112n20 rhetoric of v see also curriculum transformation transition to democracy v, 1, 7, 17, 20 truth, concept of v, 10, 35, 37, 59, 61–67, 75, 128 U universities see higher education institutions utilitarianism 16 V value-neutrality 7 values in education iv–vi, 1–3, 5, 7, 11, 69 instrumental 9, 11, 104, 112n17 professional 8 Values in Education Initiative 2 see also under curriculum transformation; educational policy

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