Pretoria seeks greater control

Most South African universities have welcomed proposals for reform but some fear government interference. Karen Mac Gregor reports from Durban. The South African government is to secure far firmer control of universities, technikons and advanced colleges using a cluster of mechanisms detailed in its green paper on higher education, which was finally released this week.

Institutions have welcomed most of the new policies, but fear that some, which include plans to send government-appointed independent assessors to investigate campuses in crisis, will leave the door open for government interference in the affairs of highly autonomous universities.

In future the government will steer a single coordinated system of three-year rolling national plans through a much expanded branch of higher education in the department of education. Up to 50 higher education jobs could be created, sources said.

There is a need for major restructuring, said John Samuel, a deputy director general of education. A nationally coordinated system will be a central plank in developing an efficient higher education system which is able to propel South Africa into the 21st century.

The government will use funding as an incentive to ensure that institutions produce the kind of graduates the country needs, and will create a stable of new bodies, among them a quality committee, and a national student admissions scheme as well as information and performance indicator systems to monitor what they do.

Institutions are not happy about the inroads into their autonomy which greater government control implies, and are particularly worried about the green paper's proposal for government-appointed independent assessors to troubleshoot when crises occur on campuses which in South Africa is quite often.

The assessors will play an advisory role, enabling the government to respond to crises involving corruption, mismanagement or campus turmoil more rapidly than is possible using the current mechanism of ministerial commissions of inquiry.

At the moment, a commission of inquiry can only be initiated at the request of a university council: the legislation allows a state representative officially on to campuses at the government's discretion, considerably infringing jealously guarded institutional autonomy.

The education department argues that autonomy in academic affairs will not be tampered with, that assessors will only be deployed in exceptional circumstances, that the intention is to ensure greater accountability and transparency and also that assessors are used by many countries, among them Nigeria and the Netherlands.

Although the government already has the legal right under the Technikons Act to investigate problems in technikons, and has only used this right once, many universities remain unconvinced.

John Fielden, the director of the Commonwealth Higher Education Management Service in London, said the assessor idea appeared similar to the visitor system in some countries, in which an eminent person, often a judge, is called in to help sort out campus problems, usually issues of discipline.

It sounded similar too, he said, to the thinking behind the powers recently given to the Department of Education and Employment in Britain to initiate commissions into badly-run schools. But government appointed assessors, Mr Fielden said, would certainly cross the boundary of institutional autonomy, and would go beyond what is a commonwealth norm.