Page 90 - Transformation Indaba Report

20. Differentiation, Transformation and the Idea of the University

a. Our higher education system has differentiated itself for well over four decades
now, beginning prior to the collapse of the apartheid system to date, yet our
policy and funding system has not explicitly come to terms with and provided for
an adequate framework for supporting differentiation. The residues of the
‘classical’ university type are still a dominant major part of our thinking, public
discourse, the intellectual system of knowledge production, funding models and
current strategies of national higher education development. The most well-
known, but inadequate mode of differentiation is that stemming from the
‘institutional landscape’ reforms introduced by Government from 2005, with the
creation of the so-called ‘universities’, ‘comprehensive universities’, and
‘universities of technology’ types to designate morphologically distinctive types of
educational offerings and forms of knowledge creation. Whilst the exact
boundaries marking the transition from one to the other institutional ‘type’ is less
than clear, and often disputed in the literature, the higher education system has
also not been able to codify their supposedly differentiated funding and policy
support requirements.

b. Moreover, beyond these broad distinctions, universities are differentiated across a
range of markers including programme configurations and areas of specialization;
their links to segmented and specialized local, regional, national and international
markets for students, staff, resources and intellectual exchanges; their internal
funding models; their skills profiles and strategic orientations; the nature and
intensity of their links to industry, commerce and public sectors; their application
of knowledge and strategies of innovation; their pedagogical and curriculum
praxis, and so on.

c. Whilst almost all university leaders recognize these distinctions, they do not
nearly coincide with institutional-type demarcations depicted at policy level, as all
universities have evolved in a myriad of ways of combining their teaching,
research and engagement praxes. All our universities embrace, and must embrace,
the three core mandates of teaching and learning, research and engagement. It is
therefore curious to see attempts by some universities to artificially distinguish
their institutions as ‘research’ universities, as if they eschew their other mandates
and/or imply, by default, that the rest of the university system does not embrace
research as a core part of their differentiated mandates.

d. This attempt at projecting the elite ‘research’ university is often sitting alongside
an unspoken ‘hierarchy of knowledge’ (‘higher’ and ‘lower’), which is itself tied
up with value assumptions and preferences; elitist pretentions of some
universities pitched as ‘global’ or ‘international’, whilst others are being deemed,
by default, as ‘local’ or ‘regional’, and others as ‘national’ in their nature and

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NelsoN MaNdela UNiversity • traNsforMatioN iNdaba • 2022 85