South Africa's Higher Education System in Crisis … in a State in Crisis

Abstract

South Africa's Higher Education System in Crisis … in a State in Crisis Ahmed C. Bawa (bio) on december 16, 2017, the then-president of south africa, jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, gave his last address as president of the African National Congress (ANC) at the party's 2017 elective conference. The three-day event captured the attention of millions of South Africans, partly as engaging reality TV, but mainly because of its potential impact on the future of this adolescent democracy. At the end of the meeting there would be one of two outcomes: a consolidation of the rent-seeking, corrupt, and corruptive state that had pervaded every level of government in the previous 10 years, or the chance of another start to the South African dream of producing a caring, nurturing, innovative society, bringing to reality the dreams of millions. The unexpected, even shocking centerpiece of Zuma's address at the conference was the announcement of a new system of funding for "students from poor and working-class families" to access higher education (HE) in response to the #FeesMustFall campaign waged by students since August 2015 (Zuma 2017). Universities are social institutions of a special kind. In South Africa, as in other parts of the world, while they protect and reproduce power and privilege, they are also fiercely independent and often the loudest voices of political and social dissent. They are simultaneously global and intensely local; places of construction and deconstruction of national imaginations; powerful engines for social mobility and the construction of a more equitable society; and central to the creation [End Page 253] of South Africa's democracy. They are both witness to and participants in the emergence of a human-centered society carrying the hopes of most of its citizens after hundreds of years of devastating oppression. The recent crisis that overtook the HE system between 2015 and 2017 is an interesting prism through which to understand some of the dynamics of the last 24 years of South Africa's faltering adventure into democracy. Between 1994 and 2016, the number of students in the HE system grew from fewer than 500,000 to more than a million, the largest part of the growth being driven by the broadening and deepening participation of black South Africans. By 2016, some 74 percent of students in the 26 public universities were black, and the shift in enrollments over the past 24 years has had an enormous influence on the universities (CHE 2018). Their role in social mobility may be garnered from the fact that 20–30 percent of students receive financial aid, which means they are from families with a gross annual income of less than R122,000 (about $8,500; NSFAS 2018). Issues of food insecurity, deep inequality, and social justice are firmly on the agendas of all South Africa's universities and are major causes of high incompletion rates (Letseka and Breier 2008). The HE crisis has unique aspects, but it is also fully connected to the general crisis in national development. Interestingly, this is happening at a time when the performance of the universities has, over the last 5–10 years, improved significantly in terms of the usual metrics by which HE is measured. While the student upheavals were initially directed at the objective of establishing a free-HE-for-all system, this was supplemented very significantly by the additional demand for "decolonized, quality education"—a much more qualitative demand that focused on the perceived orientation of the knowledge project of the university system. There is significant conceptual and practical overlap between the student activism and contemporary community struggles that occur daily. [End Page 254] SOUTH AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION POST-1994 Following the transition in 1994, President Nelson Mandela signed into existence the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) with very broad social representation, including leaders of universities, the business/industry sector, the trade union structures, and civil society organizations. The idea was to produce a new framework for HE consonant with the vision of the new democratic state, to provide it with a policy infrastructure that would help it to reshape its purposes in a transforming society. These were captured in the Education White Paper 3...