Funding is more vital

16 February 2012 - 02:32 By Jonathan Jansen
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President Jacob Zuma's State of the Nation address
President Jacob Zuma's State of the Nation address

There are different ways of reading the recent State of the Nation address by President Jacob Zuma, one of which is to take word frequency as an imperfect test of official priorities.

The salutations acknowledging dignitaries contain more than 150 words, recognising everyone from visiting officials to former presidents, but the words school and university or college only appear once each. The word "history" or "the past" appears six times, but the word future only once. The word quality is completely absent but the word inequality shows up eight times.

These kinds of public address showpieces are, of course, a political cut-and-paste, and there would have been all kinds of interests and groupings insisting that the president "say something about" one or other policy or political interest. Still, the combination of words tell us clearly that this is a government still mired in a horrible past, and fighting fires in the present, without a compelling vision of what the future could look like for all of us.

In terms of delivery, the consensus seems to be that the president did much better than in previous performances. But I am curious about content, and especially about our political leader's sense of "the state of education" in the nation and, of course, what he is going to do about it.

I know the president is not an expert on education, but as a leader he surely must have some basic instincts of what is complex, false or simply unachievable in the lobbied paragraphs on education. Our leader's speech is composed as if the damaging Eastern Cape teachers' strike did not happen, but let me focus on one proposal in a single line for which R300-million has purportedly been set aside.

The two new universities must surely be the most improbable policy position that any government could hold. What on earth is so compelling about a university in every province? Does it matter that the Northern Cape is so sparsely populated that its few high school graduates are an imperceptible number among students in the two closest regional universities?

Does it matter that the attempts at university cooperation with colleges in Mpumalanga fell on hard times because of the unbelievably poor quality of the small numbers of remaining students in the former teacher education institutions of the former homelands?

The two new universities proposed is not a good idea, and works against the interests of the black poor in those provinces for the following reasons.

One, it takes billions of rands to establish a university with even a modest range of infrastructures, disciplines and expertise - and about R1-billion in the annual budget to sustain a small to medium-sized university of quality.

Now one could seriously underspend on such an initiative or simply host two or three academic fields, but then it is hardly a universe of knowledge on offer or a quality post-school site of higher learning.

Two, existing universities already struggle to sustain themselves given massive backlogs in infrastructure - despite a generous spend by the current government after years of neglect. The 23 universities cannot find the quality expertise to teach across disciplines at the levels required. We poach from each other and hire from outside our borders as more and more of a younger generation of academics - especially black talent - find easier vocations in the private sector for a whole lot more money.

So where, exactly, will this high- level expertise come from, not even considering the bureaucratic visits from the department of labour to harass institutions on face equity?

Three, the talented students from these two provinces have been easily accommodated in the nearest regional universities for decades. Rather than establish new universities, how about investing additional funding for residential placements from these two provinces at established institutions, and increasing the funding available to all existing students through the national student financing plan?

There are thousands of students, right now, who have excellent academic records but can't find funds from the national plan or whatever source to continue their studies. Institutional budgets are exhausted, and provinces try hard from their meagre funds to finance individual students from their regions. Institutions spend time managing and pre-empting destructive protests from students who argue, rightly, that they kept up their side of the bargain (good academic results) and that government has not released enough money to support them.

Two new universities, under-funded and under-staffed, is a recipe for educational failure and an invitation for political instability when students find out they got less than what they bargained for.

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