8 May 2001
Director of Ceremonies
Colleagues and Friends
Ladies and gentlemen
I start with a quotation from that wonderful 70’s book, The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“Quality … you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do we know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others .. but what’s the ‘betterness’? So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding any place to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?” (Robert Pirsig,Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 1974).
I am glad that the CHE will be giving this question its considered attention through the work of its Higher Education Quality Committee. However, the quest to define quality and more importantly to institutionalise it in higher education practice will have to go beyond the engagement with an intriguing philosophical conundrum. The next phase in the journey towards the achievement of White Paper goals now has a decisive implementation platform in the form of the National Plan, with targets and timeframes intended to produce an effective and efficient higher education system. How will the work of the HEQC support and contribute to the restructuring trajectory outlined in the National Plan? The issue of quality is at the heart of the work of the National Plan both in general and specific terms. One of the central purposes of the National Plan is to ensure that the quality of academic programmes including teaching and research is improved across the system. However, the National Plan also prioritises efficiency outcomes for the entirety of the higher education system and the need to link improvements in efficiency to improvements in quality. I have great expectations that the work of the HEQC will forge a greater awareness of the need for high quality and the pursuit of excellence at all levels of operation of the higher education system. Whether we are talking of governance, management and financial administration or of research and teaching, or of support services or of community outreach programmes – the quest for quality should energise all our actions, notwithstanding the challenge of arriving at a consensual understanding of quality among different stakeholders in the higher education system.
The HEQC's founding document has provided a useful starting point in proposing an approach to quality that includes
In the light of this understanding of quality, I would like to outline five critical challenges for the HEQC as it commences its work. All of these have to do with the big picture rather than with the micro details of quality assurance mechanisms. As our guest speaker has correctly pointed out in one of his articles, external quality assurance is a ‘second order phenomenon’ whose validity depends on the extent to which it contributes to the success of higher education. In the early phase of social reconstruction that we find ourselves in South Africa, the success of higher education must be judged in terms of its contribution to the achievement of social and economic goals to which we all aspire.
What are these challenges?
1. Equity and Redress
The legacy of discrimination and exclusion has given us a higher education system in which high quality and excellence is not uniform. The HEQC must uncouple the link (real or imagined) between excellence and privilege, and foster a commitment to high quality as a common and binding value for all higher education institutions. The issue of quality must not become a new dividing line between first and second or even third class institutions. The development of capacity to aspire to the highest standards of excellence in higher education – both at an individual and institutional level - is the only lasting foundation on which the equity and redress battle can be fought and won. Another dimension in terms of which the HEQC can serve the equity imperative is through ensuring that the claims of existing and new distance education programmes to enhance access, especially to the formerly disadvantaged, are not rendered hollow through shabby poor quality provision. Access with quality must be a non negotiable in the work of the HEQC The developmental focus in the founding document of the HEQC is an interesting signal that the HEQC plans a quality improvement drive whose objectives can address the equity and redress imperatives of our system. The HEQC can play a critical steering role in developing quality benchmarks and supporting higher education institutions to work towards their achievement, thereby serving the needs of their learners and becoming more competitive in chosen fields of provision. This brings me to the second set of challenges.
2. Differentiation
The White Paper on Higher Education sets out a range of different but interconnected goals for higher education. These span a number of public and private goals and include the social, economic, intellectual and civic dimensions of human life, all of which are necessary and important. A differentiated system where institutions with different missions and niches contribute uniquely but collectively to the achievement of the diverse purposes of higher education is what is envisaged in the National Plan. How can the HEQC use the quality imperative to facilitate the development of a more differentiated higher education system? The notion of fitness for purpose is clearly critical to the debate about a differentiated system. Definitions of quality and quality outcomes do not need to be tied to some abstract gold standard but to stipulated missions and purposes which are appropriate and achievable. The HEQC will have to ensure that higher education institutions achieve acceptable levels of operationality required of all institutions while striving to be the best that they can be in relation to their chosen missions. This bring me to the third set of issues.
3. Efficiency and Effectiveness
For its substantial investment in higher education, government expects the higher education system to contribute to national reconstruction through producing an increasing and representative flow of successful graduates with the necessary knowledge and competencies to meet the human resource development needs of our society, and through producing knowledge and information that will contribute to social well being and economic growth. Inefficient, poorly governed and managed institutions which squander public resources and retard the life chances of students cannot yield high quality graduates and excellence in scholarship. The HEQC will have to signal clearly that its developmental approach to the fostering of quality will not tolerate sustained inefficiency and the continued absence of internal quality checks and balances for which institutional leadership must take responsibility. The quality improvement sought by the HEQC in the domains of teaching, learning, research and community will have to dovetail with the efficiency drive which my department has already initiated through the three year rolling plan process.
4. Innovation, Risk Taking and Freedom of Inquiry
It would be a sad day for intellectual life in South Africa and for the health of the body politic if the quality assurance systems developed by the HEQC fostered a dull and boring uniformity in our higher education system and a social compliance which ruled out risk taking and social critique in the quest for truth. In our drive to develop benchmarks, performance indicators, level descriptors and the like, we must be careful not to let a justified demand for accountability descend into a soul destroying over regulation and over stipulation of what can and cannot be done. This will be the quickest way to lose the interest and engagement of our most creative, courageous and innovative intellects – whom we need more than our compliant plodders if our higher education system is to provide cutting edge knowledge and visionary insights which can only enrich our society even if they make us uncomfortable occasionally. We want a quality assurance system which guarantees at least some minimum standards but which also creates a climate for the pursuit of creativity and excellence in a way that allows for diverse mission identities (and diverse routes to the same mission identity!) and the development of an innovation mindset as well as the values of free intellectual enquiry. I will watch with great interest the HEQC’s attempt to construct a quality assurance system that is necessary without being excessive or regimental. The allegations against the QAA by a number of leading universities in the United Kingdom should be instructive in this regard.
This brings me to my last set of issues.
5. Internationalisation.
I am very pleased that this launch of the HEQC has the participation of colleagues from a number of quality assurance systems in other countries. The growing internationalisation of higher education requires us to take into account global reference points for the development of higher education – we need to take issues of context and history very seriously in our country but not in a way that is parochial or limiting. The information and communications technology revolution as well as the increase in trans-national education opportunities requires local higher education institutions to incorporate good practices from a global higher education arena, thus making themselves and their graduates and staff more competitive in their mission accomplishments. The sharing of comparative information about quality assurance systems, the development of a common vocabulary for quality assurance and the attempt to develop criteria to testify to the equivalence of higher education qualifications from different national systems are of growing concern to a number of regional and international quality assurance organisations.
The HEQC will have to ensure that the benefits of internationalisation are part of the transformation trajectory of higher education in South Africa but in a way that balances the demands of the local and global. Our quality benchmarks and indicators and our understandings of good practice in teaching, learning and research must produce a spectrum of graduate competencies that serve national and regional needs as well as facilitate international mobility. This will require the HEQC to be very creative in identifying a suite of quality practices and criteria which address local challenges as well as international credentialing demands.
I have noticed a trend among some higher education institutions in this country to seek international credentials for themselves or for some of their programmes, often at great financial expense. I would like to make it clear that this desire for international recognition should not drive us to reposition our higher education institutions solely in relation to international demands. The credentials, and methodology of some foreign accrediting agencies themselves need close scrutiny. In any case, international benchmarking exercises, though potentially valuable in improving local capacity, is not a substitute or alternative to the evaluative judgements of the HEQC unless the international exercises are done in partnership with or with the involvement of the HEQC.
With the launch of the HEQC, a fundamental component of the regulatory framework for higher education is now in place. The issue of high quality in education is not an indulgence for the advantaged sector of the higher education system or an add-on to our existing planning initiatives. It is a critical part of the transformation trajectory in higher education – a goal as well as a developmental instrument for the achievement of social justice and economic well being in our country. My Department will be working closely with the HEQC in ensuring that the next planning phase includes an explicit commitment to and demonstrated initiatives by higher education providers to enhance the quality of provision in all their programmes and activities.
I thank you.