5. 8.1. 1 Bureaucracy and the role of leadership
The university has set up a Quality Unit and at the time of fieldwork for this research this unit had appointed all but one of the planned staff. A Senior Quality Assurance Coordinator headed the unit. The Quality Unit came under the overall direction and guidance of the Director of Planning and Development, who was a member of the Vice-Chancellor's Office. At the USP, in recognition of the view that planning and quality were closely linked, a single individual in senior management was identified to take responsibility for the planning and quality implementation of all new initiatives
across the university. This person had a vital leadership role as the institutional standard bearer of quality.
In addition to a centrally located key figure, at the level of Schools, Departments, Institutes and Support Services, 'Quality Facilitators ' were also identified to "contribute to improving existing academic and administrative quality systems" (PDO, 2004, p. 1 7). The Quality Unit worked with these Quality Facilitators to jointly act as innovators and motivators for all staff. The university was in the process of restructuring into a faculty system and it was envisaged that each faculty would take over this responsibility of quality facilitation, in a faculty-wide and consistent manner. Other members of the university senior management, such as the librarian, registrar and bursar, also took delegated responsibility for quality in their respective areas. Within the Schools (after data collection restructured as faculties) of the USP, the Heads of Schools took on delegated responsibility for all aspects of academic quality. The Pro Vice-Chancellor (Teaching, Learning and Research) maintained delegated responsibility for directing the overall approach to teaching, learning and research, across the university. The Quality Unit worked closely with the Quality facilitators, to assure and enhance the quality of student experience and academic standards and it contributed to the audit of all areas of the university. A central aim of the quality strategy was to have an efficient but lean Quality Unit, with a strong supporting and monitoring role, whilst responsibility for quality was firmly embedded within the academic units (PDO, 2004, p. 1 8).
Quality assurance, as it was practised at the USP, was said by one participant to be "a bureaucratic monster". It required academics to spend more time filling out forms, demonstrating that they were doing certain things and taking time away from when they might actually be doing these things. According to this participant:
I think this increasing documentation is a waste of time. I don't think that' s the way to achieve quality because people need to make only cosmetic changes to be able to say certain things. For example, one form of quality assurance is to count the number of publications that staff members create. This encourages people to write briefer and shallower things in lower and lower quality journals so that they can demonstrate an increasing number of outputs and research activity. (MQO I -USP)
This was not QA according to this participant. "It is neither assuring quality, nor is it encouraging it. It' s quite the contrary. So this is counter productive", explained this
Chapter Five: Presentation of Results - The Secondary Case Studies 1 65 The same participant conjectured what the practice of QA was trying to do as follows:
I think what quality assurance is trying to do is attempting to find a bureaucratic substitute for a Weberian model of leadership. You don't have leadership in academies any more. This way, Weber seems to have taken a back seat along with Marx and is not too clear, and now what we've got is bureaucracy instead. This is not necessarily quality assurance. (MQOI -USP)
This statement underscores the importance of good leaders. A bureaucratic set-up, emphasising managerialism, does not necessarily bring about quality in higher education. This type of practice was the same as saying "that we need inspectors, less than we need good leaders" (MQOI -USP). The importance of leadership, in promoting quality within higher education, was stated by this participant as:
If you have good leaders, then quality takes care of itself. If you don't have good leaders, no amount of report writing and form-filling is going to bring about quality. Efforts to raise the quality assurance processes as I have experienced in the past, tend to put more and more pressure on the people at the bottom of the academic hierarchy: the ones who do most of the teaching and are supposed to be most active in research. The pressure, in my view, should be on the people at the top to ensure quality. They provide the academic leadership, institutional stability and efficiency. (MQO I -USP)
Thus, quality comes about when the institution provides the environment within which people can deliver quality. Paradoxically, it is also observed that contradictory developments have occurred within tertiary education systems. One participant observed:
At the same time as we are getting this tremendous boost of energy into quality assurance, critics are finding that universities are actually lowering standards. (MQO I -USP)
Quality management has become extremely administrative, according to one participant, who was critical of the role of managers in managing academic quality. As the role of the university was to teach students, the most important aspect of the university, according to this participant, should be the "teacher-student relationship" (MQ03-USP). This being the case, the participant critically questioned the role of the management:
Where does the management come in? Management comes in to manage us: those who teach. But, if you go through the university funds which may be coming from various sources in different countries . . . you will be surprised that 60-65 percent goes to pay the salaries of the management. 3 5-40 percent is the amount that comes to [teaching] staff. What is the management doing? They are assuring quality. . . . Quality should be assured between students and us. (MQ03-USP)
Chapter Five: Presentation of Results - The Secondary Case Studies 1 66 5. 8. 1.2 A udit and review
Evaluation of performance, through reVIew and audit, was also an important dimension of the USP quality strategy. All activity areas of the university continued to review and evaluate their performance on an annual basis through self-review. Such reviews produced action plans for the following year, with dates and persons responsible for each action.
Internal audits were undertaken at the direction of senior management. These could be annual or they could arise when such a need was identified, as a result of irregularities or perceptions of poor performance in a given area or unit within the university.
5.8. 1.3 Quality culture and attitude
Creating a culture of quality is necessary, in order for people to believe in quality. People within an institution tend to believe in quality, once such a 'quality platform' is established. An example of how this quality platform was established, in one department at the USP, was given by one participant from the area of setting assignments. This HOD continued by offering an explanation through an example:
I have asked them that when they set assignments they state what the students are going to learn from it or what they are expected to do. So that becomes quality. It helps the students as well as the lecturers. So what happens really is that the students, lecturers and I are on a common wavelength through the assessment criteria or objectives, for example. Then I know that they are going to do that, they know that they are going to do it and the students know that they are going to do it. That is the
'what' part of it. (MQ06-USP)
Establishing a 'quality culture' not only addressed the 'what' part of it. The 'how' part of it also needed attention. As explained by the same participant:
Then we go and ask the other question which is the 'how' part of it. How are they going to do it? Here we talk about different strategies, what I call pedagogies or different ways of learning: cooperative learning, inquiry based learning and so on. So that goes on. I always try and see that the lecturer does not go there and just read out the lecture. He attempts to construct knowledge. He himself constructs but also he helps the students to construct new knowledge as the lecture unpacks. (MQ06-USP)
Quality culture was also reported to be built in, through the system of workload sharing. In the past, the teaching load was so high that staff rarely undertook any research. Workload distribution was said to be 40 percent / 40 percent / 20 percent in this particular department, whereby 40 percent was allocated for teaching, 40 percent for research and 20 percent for management (MQ06-USP). Quality was said to go up
Chapter Five: Presentation of Results - The Secondary Case Studies 1 67
"by itself . . . as research informs their [staff] practice" (MQ06-USP). Action research was encouraged, within this department, since money was allocated for research. According to this participant, who was also a HOD, "the quality of teaching was improving because people go and find the strengths and limitations of their practice and they try and understand the students" (MQ06-USP).
Quality improvement was also reported to be affected by the attitudes of the staff. These attitudes affected the students' morale, according to one participant, who narrated an example from one of the university departments, where first year students were warned about failure in their very first lecture at the University. The participant continued:
The lecturer comes and tells them, 'Look at your neighbours. Next year they probably won't be with you. ' This means that two thirds will drop out. If this is the kind of attitude we have right from the beginning in the first lecture, what message are we giving to the students? So we have to change the whole attitude: the mind set. Why are we here, we have to question. Are we promoting success or failure? (MQ04-USP)
Not only the attitudes of the teaching staff, but also the attitudes of the management affected the quality of student performance. When students achieved higher marks, the academic staff tended to be questioned. One interviewee explained this as follows:
In a particular course, supposing 50 percent of the students get an A+, immediately they will raise questions, ' How come 50 percent have got A+? ' I say, 'What's wrong with that? This is the criteria for getting A+, this is the criteria for A, B, C, etc. If the students have satisfied the criteria they will get it' . We want people to succeed. Let everybody get an A+. That's why we are here. We want all students to do well. But if you assume that so many should fail, you will work towards that. (MQ04-USP)
5. 8.2 Student Evaluation
One very important component of the institutional QA was the course evaluation undertaken by students. This evaluation was implemented during all the semesters and for all courses. At the end of each semester, teaching staff were reminded by the Head of School to download and photocopy the evaluation forms, and then hand them to the students. Usually, when they were completed, the students collected them and brought them over to the School office. The Schools dealt with these forms, following the posting of their examination results, so that there would be no element of penalising students (MQ02-USP). One senior academic, who also performed managerial tasks, explained the process of student evaluation as:
What we've always had is a very simple questionnaire that goes out to the students. There is a policy to say how you deal with a course evaluation. But in my experience we haven't really dealt with it as well as we could have. (MQ02-USP)
This senior academic explained how the process had been improved, at least within the School and Departments that came under the jurisdiction of the KI:
In the last two and half years I've been leading this section, I really made use of those evaluation questionnaires. However simple they are, they still give you some ideas . . . . We collect those ideas. The staff go through them and pick up the important strengths and weakness that the students have come up with overall and in respect to the course and the teacher. Then the HOD goes through it as well and then they sit down and say, ' Ok, now this is good practice we carry on. ' or, 'Let's talk to the others about it. These are the weaknesses and how do we deal with these. ' Then we document those and that will then come to my office [we' ve got one staff member looking after that] . And the next year we will then check to see if the comments are any different. And then we can build on that. We've now got three cycles of it, so we've got a pretty good measure of it. (MQ02- USP)
However, not all the KIs from the USP were convinced of the usefulness of student evaluation. As recounted by one participant, this type of QA activity did not achieve a great deal :
Student questionnaires are neither useful nor, as far as I know, used for anything. This form of quality assurance was a very elaborate, time consuming, tedious and inefficient activity. (MQ0 1 -USP)