University transformation should build unity, collegiality and trust — not create angry victims

South African universities have been grappling with what is generically called transformation for quite some time. An element of this is the gendered and raced composition of staff and student bodies.

A related question concerns the process of academic promotion. The legacy of apartheid has meant — especially for the older, better-resourced, urban universities — that the ranks of professors are dominated by white men, mostly older white men.

In a country committed to redress, this has been considered a challenge for university management and for the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).

The problem however is not easy to solve. Invariably, the professors are the most research-productive employees in a university. They have the experience and have generally risen to the rank of full professor largely based on their research and publication achievements. In other words, simply firing them might damage a university’s performance, especially in a climate where university rankings rest heavily on research output.

Another difficulty is that university tenure remains well entrenched in South African universities. Once an academic has had probation confirmed, one’s tenure till retirement is essentially secure. Yes, staff are fired for disciplinary infractions, but this is rare.

A way to accelerate the departure of white male professors is to lower the retirement age. This approach was tried, notably at University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in the reign of Professor Malegapuru Makgoba when he purposefully tried to change the racial composition of the professoriate by lowering the retirement age to 60 from the normal 65, thus hastening the departure of a large number of male professors.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Leadership for Transformation since the Dawn of South Africa’s Democracy – An Insider’s View

However, a different approach to retirement has been taken when the retirement age is extended beyond 65 to encourage retirees to remain on and contribute to the university’s research outputs and to the growth of the next generation of scholars.

Demographic targets

Impatience regarding the optics of staffing is a factor in how the State and universities respond. The drum loudly and frequently beaten to berate universities for a lack of transformation often focusses on the “unchanging” composition of the academic staff. This is held to reflect a racist and or sexist approach by a university.

Seeking to show its transformation credentials, in 2019 Unisa proposed that “race” should be given “extra points” in promotions processes to ensure a rapid, racially-driven rise into the professoriate. Jonathan Jansen described this approach as having a “race problem”.

While few universities have the gall to set merit aside that readily in promotion and appointment processes, demographic targets determined by the Department of Employment and Labour influence appointments at all universities.

At the University of Cape Town, for example, a “Practice note” issued by the Human Resources Department regulates the appointment process. When a post is advertised, only those South Africans of designated categories (by race and gender) may be shortlisted. If no appointable candidate can be found, then a second round of advertisement and selection occurs that is open to all South Africans. At this stage, no “foreigners” (including Africans from the rest of Africa) may be appointed. Only in a third and final found may “foreigners” be considered.

Another approach to transformation is to provide resources to better capacitate existing academic staff in designated groups to improve their portfolios in order successfully to apply for promotion. This process takes much longer to impact the optics, but I would argue is much more effective in creating sustainably transformed institutional capacity. In fact, such initiatives are often part of attempts to grow a new leadership cohort and to ensure continuity within universities.

This developmental approach is now widely used globally. Sometimes it takes the form of appointing mentors to ensure that early- and mid-career staff have support on an individual basis to advise and guide them. At other times it seeks a more collective approach, bringing together cohorts of people at a similar point in their careers to work towards the goal of promotion.

Future Professors Programme

This approach has been pursued in South Africa. The Future Professors Programme (FPP) is an initiative of the DHET that focuses on mid-career academics.

In 2020 funding for a first phase was awarded to Professor Jonathan Jansen at Stellenbosch University. In his time as Vice Chancellor at the University of the Free State, Jansen had initiated the Prestige Scholars Programme (PSP) which worked with a group of UFS staff to raise their academic performance. One of his goals was to ensure that PSP scholars had exposure to international experience and money to enable a stay at a foreign university. The programme was spectacularly successful, gaining promotions and ratings by the National Research Foundation (NRF).

The staff who implemented PSP, Professors Jackie du Toit and Neil Roos, have also been working with FPP. They have ensured, despite the constraints imposed by Covid, that FPP members selected from all South Africa’s universities felt themselves to be part of something, a brave, energetic and constructive effort to build a road to promotion.

It features regular face-to-face and online meetings and offers regular coaching to those who seek it. As with PSP, this approach has borne fruit with most members being promoted on the basis of their improved performance, itself a measure of the impact of the programme.

Mind the nGAP

One of the earliest government interventions to produce a national pipeline of largely black South African academics was the New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP). Implemented in 2016, it responded to a reported under-production of doctoral graduates. DHET has invested massively in nGAP.

The model is to create posts for early career staff and to give responsibility for these posts to all the country’s universities. By 2022, it had created 760 posts, 98% of which had been occupied by “African” and 58% “female” academics, an investment of over R150-million.

A decade before this, the University of Cape Town had begun its own programme, the Emerging Researcher Programme (ERP). In 2003 funding from Atlantic Philanthropies and the National Research Foundation supported the programme which continues to operate successfully, projecting junior staff onto stellar careers, including Professor Shadreck Chirikure, now Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford.

A further national initiative in 2023 aimed at early-career academics was launched by Universities South Africa (Usaf). Based on a survey of all South African universities, it identified a need and established the Advancing Early Career Researchers and Scholars Programme (AECRS). This provides a variety of support interventions, many accessible online, which acknowledges the major challenge of South African universities being widely dispersed.

At the University of Pretoria, Professor Stephanie Burton is leading an Africa-wide programme, Future Africa Research Leadership Fellowship. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation in 2022, it seeks to build leadership capacity and create networks. As with other similar programmes, a large part of this initiative is focused on building leadership. The need for such a programme can be assessed by the 600 applications received for the 25 available places. Selection was strictly meritocratic with the aim of representing as much of the continent as possible.

In 2015, UCT launched its Next Generation Professoriate (NGP). I was centrally involved in this initiative, which had grown from my previous work in UCT’s Research Office. The initiative was supported by Vice Chancellor Max Price and funded by the VC’s Strategic Fund. It used NRF criteria to determine membership eligibility — targeting mid-career academics and prioritising black and female members. Membership was very cosmopolitan. Included in the initial group of 35 were over a third from foreign countries (mostly the rest of Africa), and about half female. Members were drawn from all seven faculties.

Fostering trust and unity

As a former member of the United Democratic Front (UDF), my commitment was to non-racialism and democracy, and I placed a high premium on collegiality. At this time UCT was experiencing #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests. Animosities and distrust were on the rise. Commentators like David Benatar identified weak management and racially defined lobbies as the primary cause of the dramatic decline of morale.

Under these circumstances my approach was to bring people together as often as possible, to develop friendships, build networks, foster collaborations and address a growing trust deficit in the university. This approach worked. One member commented that in NGP she had “found her people”. By the time I retired (end 2021), 80% of NGP members had been promoted to Associate or Full Professor.

What is the key to success? A 2018 US study about an initiative at Berkeley University, and reported in Nature, argues that one needs to grow trust and create collegial supportive conditions, among other things. The human dimension has to be taken seriously; relationships have to be fostered.

In other words, simply throwing money at a problem like the under-representation of certain demographic groups will not necessarily produce a solution. The key to successful programmes lies in intent, method and implementation.

Where the intent is to create unity, collegiality and trust, to plot out career paths, to imagine the possible and make this happen, success is likely.

But success is not guaranteed. If these programmes become vehicles for political agendas, including mechanically changing the optics of university staff complements, they are less likely to contribute to inclusivity, collegiality and healthy, productive universities.

In a disturbing footnote, the NGP has now changed its membership eligibility criteria. Only black (African) South African academic staff are eligible. This is likely to torpedo a message of inclusivity and collegiality but comes as no surprise as leadership of the programme now lies with Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Transformation) Professor Elelwani Ramugondo.

Ramugondo was not only one of the most ardent supporters of Fallism but also somebody who was accused of posting a racially offensive message, and of dishonesty by the Mpati Commission set up to investigate UCT’s leadership crisis in 2023.

It could be argued that all transformation initiatives need to strike a balance between growth of individuals, the collective well-being of the body politic and a wider responsibility to reckon with past injustices. A danger will always exist that one of these imperatives trumps the rest. Ideally, the process of transformation should have no favourites and create no victims. DM