N Pandor: Knowledge Management in Higher Education conference

22 February 2006

A TRADITIONAL BALANCE BETWEEN TEACHING AND RESEARCH

Chairperson, Dr Patrick Ngulube
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, Prof Ahmed Bawa
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen

I am pleased to address you at this conference on knowledge management in
higher education.

As Manuel Castells, the pre-eminent theorist of the knowledge society, has
suggested, the crucial role of information and communication technologies in
stimulating development is a two-edged sword. On the one hand new information
technologies allow countries to leapfrog stages of economic growth by being
able to modernise their production systems, and to increase their
competitiveness faster than in the past. On the other hand, countries that are
unable to adapt to the new technological system are destined for
marginalisation.

In the context of globalisation, the key challenge facing higher education
in South Africa is how to ensure that it simultaneously develops the skills and
innovation necessary for addressing the national development agenda, as well as
for participation in the global economy. In short, the issue is not whether to
engage with globalisation but how to engage with it. In the words of the global
justice movement, we need to “think globally but act locally”.

The need to strike an appropriate balance between the global and local is
critical. Unless the engagement of our higher education system with the global
order is guided by national objectives, we risk the danger of entrenching the
unequal power relations between the developed and developing worlds.

In June last year the Department of Education and the Department of Science
and Technology held a conference on “human resources for knowledge production”.
It was a huge conference and there was a meeting of many minds. Among many star
speakers, Dr Ramesh Mashelkar, Director General of the CSIR in India
particularly impressed me. He is a close friend to our country. He has worked
with the Department of Science and Technology extensively in the past. He spoke
about the conditions that had facilitated the phenomenal growth in science and
technology in India in the past thirty years, the growth in the number of
doctors and engineers, and the growth of Indian scientists in a Diaspora
centred on the US. His message to us was that government is not a passive
financier of education programmes. We need to carefully focus and target our
research on national objectives.

That was the first point that he hammered home to his audience: set the
objectives, drive the research. The second point he made, that bears repeating,
is that scientific creativity is highly concentrated in the population of any
country. He pointed out that creativity is concentrated in a small number of
highly talented individuals. And they need to be nurtured. Not only that. They
need to be retained in a country’s national system of innovation. We need to
provide the conditions in our universities in which they are both nurtured and
encouraged to remain to promote the aims of our developmental state.

Those insights concentrated our minds and helped us to reach an assessment
of the state of our national system of scientific innovation.

On the plus side, we have made significant progress since the advent of
democracy. We have improved access to higher education, we have improved re
presentivity, and we have developed a better system of funding for innovation
and creativity. There have been improvements in the overall investment in
research and development. Our target is a modest 1% of GDP by 2008. We are not
there yet, but the target is within our reach.

On the minus side, we know that we are nowhere near our competitors in
developing countries like Brazil, India and China in regard to training new
researchers and that this hampers our ability to enter new and important global
areas of innovation.

The conference then proposed a plan of action and I want to say a few words
about this plan, some of which has already been given practical effect.

First of all, we need better-qualified researchers.

A concerted national effort is required to generate an interest in academic
research, particularly among our young people. We need to develop strategies
for attracting and retaining young people in a national research network that
will not only benefit our national research and development agenda, but will
also benefit social and economic development in our country.

Some universities have established emerging researcher support programmes
and these should be emulated through the sector. Emerging researchers need to
be encouraged to study for higher degrees. We are short of researchers with
PhDs in our universities. Our new universities have learned that if they are to
compete for research contracts they have to upgrade the degree qualifications
of their staff. And some of our new universities have been extremely successful
in doing this.

A better-qualified cohort of researchers will be able to benefit from the
many important global networks that exist within and between universities in
the developed and the developing world.

We need more PhDs, but perhaps we also need to “re-imagine” the type of PhDs
that we produce. Is the traditional three-year thesis the best way to produce
original knowledge?

Certainly we need to promote, in the words of the plan, “larger groups
focusing on more relevant research questions and themes that are linked to a
high potential for future employment and long-term research career
planning”.

One of the mechanisms to ensure this was a proposal to introduce research
chairs, specialized units, and centres of excellence. We already have a number
of specialized units and centres of excellence. What we lacked was the third
leg to the pot. Last month, the Minister of Science and Technology announced
that funding was available to fund 200 research chairs. This should give our
research capacity an immense boost.

Second, we need to renew our research infrastructure.

If we are to meet the development challenges we face in our country and on
our continent, it is critical for the higher-education sector to renew its
infrastructure. Recently I spent an illuminating day visiting the School of
Mines at the University of the Witwatersrand, and I was shocked to discover how
ancient the machinery was on which our budding mining engineers were being
trained.

And engineering faculties are not alone. The higher education sector as a
whole is in need of a capital-funding programme. Projects qualifying for
capital funding should include the erection of new building, the renewal and
upgrading of existing buildings, and major equipment items required primarily
for research purposes.

Last week the Minister of Finance announced that an additional R2 billion
would be available over the current MTEF for higher education. This is part of
government’s broad commitment to boost the funding of universities. In the
current financial year 2006/07 universities find themselves with R11, 8 billion
to spend. Total government funding of the higher education system has more than
doubled since 1996.

Third, we need to broaden the participation of women and blacks in
scientific research.

Gains have been made in postgraduate enrolment and graduation particularly
among black and female students.

However, our higher education institutions and science councils have to
ensure that conditions are created in which black and women students are made
to feel like valued members of the research community.

Existing research agencies need to make an effort to make working
environments attractive to postgraduate students and junior researchers. The
research community needs to be responsive to the needs of emerging researchers
in a way that enables them to carry out and communicate their findings so as to
make a place in existing research networks.

Fourth, government needs to give greater and closer attention to
public-private partnerships.

Expanding research capacity will increasingly involve an expanded role for
the private sector in research investment. In fact, business already
contributes more to research and development than universities. Clearly,
universities are no longer the only knowledge-based organizations in society.
They need to establish new partnerships with industry, so that they share
knowledge and development and jointly pursue our national objectives.

We also need to be more creative about the partnerships that universities
enter into with other universities in Africa and abroad and also those
partnerships that universities enter into with industry.

South Africa needs to consciously develop a vanguard role in African science
and technology and this includes the development of specialised funding
instruments that will facilitate partnerships with African institutions and
researchers.

Universities have already established a wide network of strategic
partnerships. We need to take advantage of the networks that NEPAD and the AU
have begun to forge. We need to support the Association of African
Universities. National, continental and global partnerships will feature more
in ensuring skills development, and a concerted effort must be made to ensure
the transfer of skills and the retention of researchers produced in such
partnerships within the continent.

Science and technology boffins use the term “sticky mobility”. Researchers
need to study abroad but find the encouragement to return to home.

In the words of the plan, “This will include a major open post-doctoral
fellowship scheme, “sandwiched” doctoral bursaries, and active “hubs” to
provide competitive local research opportunities, including centres of
excellence as the primary gateways for international collaboration and
partnership.”

Last, we need to retain in universities (the science councils are dedicated
to research) an appropriate balance between research and teaching.

Recently a study revealed that only one in five UK academics in universities
teaches – the other four concentrate on research. And that one teacher is
likely to be working part time. This has fuelled concern over the traditional
link between teaching and research, that is, the belief that good research
should be informed by teaching and vice versa. What this also suggests is that
weak researchers are being placed on teaching-only contracts. [1]

I don’t know how far down this path our universities have gone, but I do
know that the concentration of research capacity in our universities is similar
to the concentration of capital on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Only 11 of our 23 higher-education institutions account for 90% of the
research output.

An important measure of research output performance is the ratio between an
institution’s research publication unit total, and its total of permanent
academic staff.

A ratio of at least 0.60 publication units per permanent academic staff
member could be regarded as the minimum needed for any institution wanting to
be classified among the leaders in research in South Africa.

In 2004 only 6 institutions had ratios above this threshold. These ratios
ranged from 0.62 to 1.09. Five institutions could be classified as having
research potential on the basis of having publication to permanent academic
staff ratios in the band between above 0.30 to 0.59.

Even so, I have reservations about leaving teaching to the youngest and most
inexperienced members of staff. Junior lecturers get lumbered with the heaviest
teaching load. Because that is the way the pecking order works in university
departments. There is already a laissez faire approach to teaching in our
universities that needs attention; there is this strange notion that because a
student was an A-student or an excellent researcher, which she will
automatically be a good lecturer.

We know that drop-out and through-put rates are bad. They can’t be blamed
purely on poor school education – which is what I hear from academics all the
time.

Poor performance at university is also due to poor teaching.

So I would look to retain the traditional balance between teaching and
research. And you should not to forget the third leg of the tripod on which the
pursuit of knowledge and truth at universities is supposed to rest: the
community. Because that is where the research conducted at universities is
traditionally undertaken: in the community. Most of our universities have a
long tradition of engagement with the community. But the challenges change, the
landscape shifts, the pressures mount and we need strong leadership in our
universities to guide the engagement with communities so that the “fine
balance” between teaching and research does not tip the one way or the other.
In some disciplines this is more important than in others. It is particularly
true in the health sector. But it is true for all.

In closing, I would like to compliment the National Research Foundation, and
the Information Studies Programme for bringing us together today to discuss
this very important subject.

I wish you well in your deliberations over the coming days, and I hope that
at the end of this conference, you would all have gained useful insight and
experience into how to manage knowledge, not only for yourselves, but also for
society and national development.

[1] Claire Sanders, “20% of staff now just teach”, Times Higher Education
Supplement 24 June 2005.

Issued by: Ministry of Education
22 February 2006