Para la práctica pastoral ¿Cómo responder a las preguntas que se plantean?

The White Paper emphasises the importance of institutional collaboration and partnerships as a means to achieve a range of social, educational/academic, economic and political goals. These include:

• Overcoming the apartheid-induced fragmentation of the higher education system. This is especially important, not only to give effect to the White Paper’s vision of a non-racial higher education system, but also because the establishment and location of higher education institutions, in the perverse logic of apartheid planning, bore little or no relation to the knowledge, human resource and social needs of the country.

• Ensuring the effective and efficient distribution of programmes through reducing programme overlap and duplication. This would result in:

(i) economies of scale through reducing unit costs and ensuring the continued provision of expensive and under-subscribed programmes, but which are necessary for social, cultural, intellectual economic development;

(ii) economies of scope, that is, broadening the range of courses on offer, thus ensuring diversity through increasing student choice and enabling greater programme responsiveness to rapidly changing labour market requirements. • Enhancing governance, administrative, management and leadership structures.

The higher education system has singularly failed to make progress towards achieving these goals. This is not to suggest that there has been no collaboration between institutions. However, this has by and large been limited to infrastructural projects, electronic library systems, and the purchasing and sharing, in some cases, of expensive teaching and research equipment. The success of institutional collaboration in infrastructural projects has been linked to two factors, (i) the availability of donor funds for such projects, with the added proviso that donor agencies have made institutional collaboration a precondition for accessing such funds; and (ii) the recognition by institutions that collaboration in these areas allows for economies of scale without threatening institutional autonomy.

There has, however, been little or no collaboration in relation to broader policy goals such as reducing programme duplication and overlap, building academic and administrative capacity, enhancing responsiveness to regional and national needs and, more importantly, laying the basis for new institutional and organisational types. In fact, programme collaboration is still rare, with one or two exceptions, most notably the recently launched postgraduate programme in public health, which has been developed jointly by the five higher education institutions in KwaZulu/Natal. The fact that some joint programmes have been launched suggests that the administrative difficulties, which have been identified within the sector as obstacles to the development of joint programmes, are not insurmountable.

In general, however, programme collaboration remains unchartered territory. If anything, unmitigated competition seems to be exacerbating, instead of reducing, programme overlap and duplication. This is evident from the fact that institutions have submitted to the CHE for accreditation and to the Ministry for funding approval a number of proposed programmes, which are in direct competition with existing and long-established programmes at neighbouring institutions. Furthermore, institutions have been unable to collaborate in ways which would ensure that costly programmes remain sustainable in a regional context. This is illustrated in the case of music in KwaZulu/Natal where, despite the affected institutions themselves recognising the need for regional collaboration to sustain music, they have been unable to develop a viable regional plan. The lack of institutional collaboration seems to be fuelled by fear and mistrust linked to deeply rooted institutional identities and interests. The historical divides inherited from apartheid, which feed suspicion and resentment of the motives and intentions of strong and well-endowed institutions in collaborative endeavours, further compound this. Current competition for declining student numbers has also played a part.

Further evidence of competition is seen in the unregulated establishment of satellite campuses, often on the doorsteps of local institutions. Satellite campuses are often established by stronger institutions and have, in some cases, exacerbated difficulties of institutions in the immediate locality. There may well be a need to establish satellite campuses utilising a range of delivery modes, in particular, distance education, given the need to increase and broaden access. However, the establishment of satellite campuses should not destabilise local institutions by poaching their potential students. Furthermore, there is no evidence of institutional collaboration in the establishment of satellite campuses in terms of sharing infrastructure, teaching resources or developing joint programmes.

Nevertheless, despite all the evidence to the contrary, institutions continue to claim to support the principle of institutional collaboration. In this regard, as the Overview Report on the first set of three-year rolling plans suggested, the “villain in the script is always the institution down the road or across the fence whose commitment to inter-institutional collaboration is in doubt or questionable” (DoE 1999: 18). This suggests, as institutions indicated to departmental officials during the visits to discuss the first set of institutional plans, that institutional collaboration will not make any real headway unless there is direct intervention and stronger signals from government. 6.2 COLLABORATION AND INSTITUTIONAL IDENTITIES

The Ministry believes that institutional co-operation remains an important tool for addressing the broader social, educational/academic, economic and political goals of the higher education system. The goal of building new institutional identities and cultures in particular, as integral components of a single national co-ordinated higher education system arguably provides the single most compelling reason for encouraging institutional co-operation.

The end goal of a transformed higher education system must surely be the creation of higher education institutions whose identity and cultural orientation is neither black nor white, English or Afrikaans-speaking, but unabashedly and unashamedly South African. This is not to suggest that the cost benefits linked to efficiency and effectiveness are unimportant. However, in the context of human and financial resource constraints, efficiency measures, while important in leveraging additional resources, are unlikely to make serious inroads in eradicating the inequities and divides of the past. The Ministry is, therefore, convinced that institutional collaboration remains the only viable option through which to ensure the effective implementation of redress measures in a manner consistent with maintaining the existing centres of excellence in teaching and research which largely reside in a small number of historically white universities.

The importance of institutional collaboration for the transformation of the higher education system suggests that it cannot be left to a voluntary framework dependent on institutional decisions for implementation. In this regard, it is worth recalling the White Paper’s warning that “narrow self- interest cannot be allowed to preclude planning which may lead to institutional mergers and closures, and the development of new institutional forms where these are necessary” (White Paper 1997: 2.45).

The Ministry is of the view that the resort to institutional identity as a defence against institutional