Chapter 5: Universities, internal restructuring and mergers – academic freedom
3. A case study of restructuring at the former University of Natal and University of
3.4 Merger-related restructuring
and also to use the limited management capacity in higher education to its greatest effect.
chairs (reinstituted in the new institution) and heads of schools, with the discipline authorities and programme coordinators arguing that their academic leadership is compromised by lack of authority and direct access to budgets. In the main, the tensions highlight a university in transition from strong discipline-based identities coupled with individual authority over curriculum, to a more corporate culture, emphasising rationality and efficiency in the management of a large-scale, very complex multi-campus, multi- college institution.
That the tensions in the new institution were deep is evidenced by a two-week strike at that institution in 2006, in which unprecedented numbers of academics, generally conservative by nature, joined with the support staff in the protests. The ostensible issue was salary negotiations; however, it soon became clear that the issues were broader, revolving around academic unhappiness at a perceived authoritarian management culture, the erosion of academic authority in the decision-making structures of the institution and perceived management threats to academic freedom.464 In many senses, the critique that Bertelson found missing in 1998 had, at least at UKZN, arrived. In the strike, many forces coalesced. It could be argued that what appeared at first to be a simple case of academics versus management was far more complex. In part it was the culmination of years of perceived erosion of individual academic identities and authority,465 beginning with the restructuring of the institution into larger management entities rather than discipline-based departments, the introduction of a programmes- based approach to higher education (in response to national policy signals and drivers
464 A local newspaper editorial at the time read as follows, “More serious still is the perception among many at the university that the management style … is cold, remote and dictatorial. This is deeply prejudicial to the spirit of a university which thrives on open debate in the pursuit of truth. Usually academic freedom is assaulted by forces outside the university. It seems that this treasured liberty at the UKZN is now under threat from within the establishment itself.” The Witness, Thursday, 23 February, 2006.
465 One ex-Professor of UKZN locates the origins of the 2006 strike in the 1999 restructuring thus, “In the 1999 restructuring, the body of professors was largely stripped of power” and this he sees as the beginning of the battle for the “soul of the university”. He attributes the 2006 strike to a collapse of a sense of collegiality and argues that “it was basically about the staff crying out to be valued, not really about the money.” Clive Dennison, “UKZN: how did we get here?” The Witness, Thursday, 23 February, 2006. Others write that staff were angry about “the growing corporatist culture of the university” and the deleterious effects of fiscal discipline on staff conditions and teaching and learning. Janine Jellars and Shirley Jones, “Varsity strike hits lectures”, The Witness, 14 February 2006.
such as the NQF) that necessitated team-based setting of outcomes and a move towards applied or vocational orientations in curriculum, as well as the introduction of a more managerial culture to manage an enormous change in scale of the institution. All of these in different ways served to erode academic senses of identity. These changes were not unique to South Africa – indeed they came later than elsewhere, but, as Bundy argues, they all happened in a very compressed time-scale.466 Add to these larger forces, an entirely new management cadre post-merger, determined to deal with the inconsistencies and problems inherited from the constituent institutions that appeared to require radical intervention, sometimes in ways that were interpreted as demeaning individuals or not valuing their past contributions, and sometimes interpreted as racially motivated, and the stage is set for the outpouring of emotion that the strike became.
One of the outcomes of the strike was the introduction of processes to reassert the more parliamentary structures in the institution to temper the power of the executive ones.467 A number of task teams looking into management and finance issues were established, and an ad hoc committee of Senate conducted a process of gathering opinion from the staff body around the issues of academic alienation and anger at loss of individual autonomy.468 An e-mail list was set up by staff to discuss pertinent issues across the university, and in the contributions to this list, feelings of not being valued, suspicion of management and the effect of challenges to academic identities have been evident. One of the major themes in this writing has been academic freedom, and perceived transgressions thereof in relation to the disciplining processes around particular individuals that have been viewed as part of a concerted management crackdown.
Much of what has been described above follows similar patterns and experiences of institutions caught in the throes of globalisation elsewhere, and this is indeed the subject
466 Colin Bundy, “Global patterns, local options? Changes in higher education internationally and some implications for South Africa”, Kagisano, 4, 2006.
467 A number of Senate sub-committees dealing with areas of concern in the strike have since been established, as recommended by the Report of the Senate ad hoc sub-committee looking into the causes of the industrial action of February 2006, Durban, UKZN, 23rd October 2006, unpublished document.
468 Some 600 staff members were interviewed or supplied written submissions.
of the next chapter, but the focus here is the effect on disciplinarity and academic freedom of restructuring to accommodate the new focus on programmes. In a study of responses to curriculum restructuring policy in South Africa, Moore notes that the most common response is resistance, with a few enthusiastic efforts at creating appropriately integrated multidisciplinary curricula.469 He writes of the South African higher education policy focus on the introduction of programmes, that it was
anticipating significant shifts in the nature of academic practices, in the professional identities of academics, and in the forms of authority that are invoked to regulate curriculum decisions. In particular it anticipates a weakening of the insulations between disciplines, and it suggests that academics will participate in new forms of social organisation, programme-based collectives which cross disciplinary boundaries. It expects that academics within these new collectives will relinquish a measure of autonomy to a process of collegial democracy and mutual surveillance, in order to produce curricula which serve external accountabilities.470
While some of these outcomes are evident in the study on the former University of Natal, at UKZN the strike would attest to academics resisting en masse a perceived erosion of their autonomy and academic freedom.