Deconstructing autonomy

The slogan “people’s education for people’s power” was a popular slogan during the liberation struggle. The overarching source of the notion of people’s education is traced back to the Freedom Charter clauses which instruct that “the doors of learning and culture shall be opened”.

For the interest of readers with little understanding of higher education, the Higher Education White Paper of 1997 defines institutional autonomy as a “high degree of self-regulation and administrative independence with respect to student admissions, curriculum, methods of teaching and assessment, research, establishment of academic regulations and the internal management of resources generated from private and public sources.”

Not surprisingly for white and conservative academics, institutional autonomy means the preservation of a colonial education structure, its aloofness, slow transformation pace in order to govern themselves and to decide on strategic questions pertaining our education, issues of who teaches, what is taught, who is taught, and who get promoted to the highest ranks of teaching in an institution of higher learning, the professoriate.

With this kind of arrangement in place, our struggle for transformation in higher education is still very far from being achieved. There is no way a system perpetuating and preserving a colonial legacy will ever introduce curriculum content responsive to the need for developing an inclusive and transformed society in general, and an economy in particular.

Based on these realities it’s obvious that our education system represents colonial capitalism, which sought to produce a pool of cheap labour. This is confirmed by the huge numbers of unemployed graduates who cannot find work thanks to the calamitous structure of our education system.

What is to be done? Decisive action needs to be taken as an urgency. First and foremost, government through the Department of Higher Education and Training must review legislative frameworks governing higher education and come up with legislation that will allow government and most importantly the public to have a say in the modus operandi in higher education.

Most of the funding of higher education institutions (HEIs) comes from government and therefore, it makes sense for both government and public to have a say in operations, teaching pedagogies, issues pertaining to epistemology and ontology and research in higher education. This will help to affirm the production of knowledge for the total betterment of society at large.

The green paper for post-school education and training (2012), acknowledges that the number of overall postgraduate qualifications obtained in South Africa is too low, particularly PhDs. HESA (2014) further supported this and noted that research performance of universities is highly uneven, with 10 universities producing 86% of all the research throughput and 89% of all doctoral graduates. One can imagine which universities are included in these statistics and what constitutes the demographic characteristics of these statistics.

One thing that needs to be done is to action the National Development Plan objective of obtaining 5000 doctoral graduates by 2030. I believe this is possible. But primarily government must take charge of achieving this ambitious target. Creative ways of making funding available for post graduate candidates is key. The Free State’s provincial government has already led by example in allocating committed bursaries for Masters and PhD candidates for Free State citizens.

Most critically, enrolments for such resources must be guided so that we produce throughput in relation to demographic disparities prevalent in our country and the national economic and social development needs that are critical for our country.

I would like to conclude with the remarks of former President Thabo Mbeki made in 2012: “I would like to suggest that, in important respects, knowledge has become ever less democratised, and even more compromised as an instrument for the betterment of society.

“I am certain this requires that we descend from the possible abstruse world of high philosophy to confront the challenges indeed of democratisation and the role of knowledge for the betterment of society.”

Anele Nkoyi is a former SASCO branch chair and former SRC premier at Walter Sisulu University’s Buffalo City campus. He is an ANC Youth League and ANC activist at the Dr WB Rubusana branch (ward 3) Buffalo City Metro. He writes on his own behalf

subscribe

Would you like to comment on this article?
Register (it's quick and free) or sign in now.

Speech Bubbles

Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.