From the NCHE to #FeesMustFall: An incomplete but important story of a difficult journey

Abstract

From the NCHE to #FeesMustFall: An incomplete but important story of a difficult journey: The Council on Higher Education’s South African Higher Education Reviewed: Two Decades of Democracy has to be seen as an important injection into our understanding of the performance of the higher education system over the last 20 years and its impact on the challenges facing our society. It has been a period of much change, expansion, rationalisation and experimentation and it is important that the Council has produced this collection of well-researched articles. This book comes into circulation at a time when the South African higher education system is being severely rocked by the student activism that has so defined the 2015 and 2016 academic years. In multiple voices and forms this activism has raised two major themes: the idea of affordable access to higher education and the need for the transformation of the nature of the system’s knowledge project – captured by the compositely expressed idea of free, quality and decolonised education. We must, however, constantly remind ourselves that the kind of instability that we have seen in the last year has been a part of the higher education system for at least 15 years and is driven primarily by the challenge of access for the poor. These student actions were restricted mainly to those institutions that have attracted large numbers of poor students and were driven primarily by insufficient financial aid. Coming, as it does, about 20 years after the transition to democracy, the time of arrival of the book may be considered both appropriate and inappropriate. On the one hand, it comes at a time when there is an important need to reflect on the role played by the higher education system in post-apartheid South Africa and to assess the state of the system 20 years since the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) and the production of what has to be seen as the excellent Higher Education Act of 1997. It may therefore be important that this set of studies was concluded and published before the onset of the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall campaigns so that they serve the purpose for which they were designed. On the other hand, nowhere in its 380 pages does this review foresee the unfolding of the instability that has beset the system over the last year – an indication perhaps that its writers may have held the common view that the long- standing instability at the historically disadvantaged institutions was caused purely by poor governance rather than by deeply systemic 20-year-old funding illnesses taking hold of the sector. What this means in essence is that this set of articles and analyses of the system may have glossed over or else simply missed some of the most critical issues facing the sector. So one may ponder the overall value of the analyses that constitute this review. Having said this, the logical perspective to adopt would be to assume that one of the outcomes of the National Commission on Higher Education process in 1995–1996 was the crafting of the Higher Education White Paper and the Higher Education Act of 1997 – both of which provided the impetus for creation of the single, unified university system with clearly defined and progressive governance principles. The purpose of this review then was to measure the performance of the composite, complex system against the policy determinations that emerged in that process. As such, this is a valuable set of studies that draws on data and encompasses interesting and nuanced reflections.