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2. Affirmative Action in Education

When the final Constitution was being negotiated between 1994 and 1996, all parties to the talks, including the African National Congress, agreed on the need for a ‘soft’ form of affirmative action that would help provide redress for apartheid wrongs. This was to be done by focusing on inputs (education and opportunities) rather than outputs (targets or quotas). Towards this end, the ‘equality’ clause in the Constitution (Section 9) included a sub-clause authorising legislative and other measures designed to ‘protect or advance people disadvantaged by unfair discrimination … [in order to] promote the achievement of equality’.1

According to FW de Klerk, state president from 1989 to 1994, this sub-clause was intended to reflect the prevailing consensus that ‘the most important and effective form of affirmative action was through the provision of excellent education and training, and the creation of employment’.2 Affirmation action of this kind, so delegates to the talks agreed, would be more successful than any other intervention in opening up opportunities for black South Africans and compensating for the poor quality of black edu­cation under the earlier segregated system.

School segregation under the National Party government

Under the National Party government, education for the different races was both separate and unequal. Schooling for Africans was particularly inadequate, making the Bantu Education Act of 1953 one of the most pernicious laws introduced in the apartheid era. The revenue allocated to African education was far too little, while a rapid expansion in pupil numbers – from 800 000 in 1953 to 1 800 000 a decade later – made it still more difficult to meet the scale of need.3

Racial disparities in funding were stark. In 1953/54, for instance, spending on white schooling stood at R128 a head whereas the amount per capita for African schooling was a mere R17 – a ratio of 7.5 to 1. By 1972/3 this ratio had widened even further to 20.6 to 1. Though it then began to narrow quite dramatically, in 1993/94 it still stood at 2.2 to 1 – the state then spending R4 772 for each white pupil and R2 110 for each African one. The main reason for the remaining differential was that white teachers were better qualified and thus better paid, whereas many African teachers had no formal qualifications and their salaries reflected this.4

In a further indictment of Bantu Education, the 1970 census showed that 79% of urban Africans and 93% of rural ones had not been able to progress beyond Standard Six (now Grade 8) – the first year of high school. It also emerged that half of urban Africans and 75% of rural ones had not passed even Standard Three (Grade 5). Yet rapid economic growth in the 1960s had generated a great demand for skills that the small white population was unable to supply. This situation left the National Party government with little choice but to start taking measures to build up the skills of black South Africans.5

In 1967 the government announced that the time had come to concentrate on developing secondary education for Africans, thus prompting a rapid expansion in African high schools from 1970 onwards. Initially, the government intended to locate these secondary schools in the ‘homelands’, as this would promote grand apartheid by encouraging African resettlement in these putative ‘states’. In time, however, its stance here shifted as well – and secondary schools for Africans began to grow apace in urban townships too. By 1985 the overall school attendance rate among African children had risen to 85%. In the early 1990s, access to schooling among black South Africans became almost universal at primary school level, while black participation in secondary schooling went up by 7% a year between 1990 and 1995.6

Better access to schooling among Africans was followed by a rise in the number of African matriculants. In 1955 only 260 Africans had been able to matriculate, but by 1986 the number had risen to 52 000 (which was roughly the same as the number of white matriculants that year). By 1994 the number of Africans matriculating had virtually quadrupled to 201 000, whereas the number of white matriculants had remained much the same. Moreover, whereas in 1955 only 90 Africans had passed matric with results good enough for university entrance, by 1986 this number had risen to 13 000. Between then and 1994, it rose to 45 000, an increase of 250%. However, by comparison with the size of the African population (then 25.9 million),7 this was a tiny number, making up only 0.15% of the total.

Key changes in education since 1994

Officially, South Africa has no affirmative action policies in schooling, all pupils having an equal right (under Section 29 of the Constitution) to ‘a basic education’ from Grades 0 to 9. Hence, it is only at the ‘further education and training’ (FET) level – and especially among the country’s 23 public universities and universities of technology – that affirmative action in admissions is applied, as further outlined below. However, even at the basic education level, various changes have been made since 1994 to help compensate for past wrongs.

Access, fees, and teacher pay

The 1996 Constitution prohibits any school, whether public or private, from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race. In addition, all public schools are barred (under the South African Schools Act of 1996) from turning pupils away for an inability to pay school fees. Instead, those state schools that still charge fees – in practice, many of them former Model C schools, which earlier catered mainly for white pupils – must grant a remission of fees in whole or part to parents unable to afford them. In 2013 the fee remissions provided to poor parents (most of them black) amounted to some R1 billion. The government is supposed to reimburse schools for such remissions but this money often remains unpaid – leaving wealthier parents (mainly whites) to shoulder the burden.8

A new funding formula has also been introduced. Government subsidies to public schools are based on a sliding scale, in which the largest amounts are allocated to the schools in the poorest areas. Almost all public schools have thus been divided into five quintiles, poorer schools having a low quintile ranking and better-resourced schools a higher one. Schools with the lowest quintile rankings receive more funding, while higher-ranked schools receive substantially less.

In addition, the government is incrementally phasing out the payment of school fees in poorer schools. Schools in the poorest quintile (quintile one) were the first to be exempted from the need to charge school fees. By 2012, the ‘no-fee’ system had been extended to schools in all but the wealthiest quintile, with the result that some 80% of public schools charged no fees at all. Instead, all their financial needs, in theory at least, were met via transfers from the government. However, many schools complain that the no-fee system has left them worse off than before, as inept state administration has often left them scrabbling for money to pay for essential supplies.9

Secondly, in what was effectively another aspect of affirmative action, the government took various steps to eliminate the pay differential between white and black teachers. In June 1996 the least qualified teachers (most of them African) received a R2.5-billion pay increase, which helped put their salaries more on a par with those of better-qualified staff. In addition, a new salary structure was put in place, which cut the prior link between salaries and qualifications in favour of ‘performance’ criteria that have since proved meaningless in practice.10

In 1996 and 1997 the government also encouraged more than 15 500 experienced (and mostly white) teachers to take severance packages and leave the schooling system – thus opening up a large number of senior posts to African teachers. However, many of those who left were mathematics and science teachers who could not readily be replaced. The impact was soon evident in educational outcomes, writes political analyst James Myburgh, for ‘the number of pupils passing higher grade maths fell from 22 800 in 1997 to around 19 300 in 2000, while the number of pupils passing higher grade physical science fell from 27 000 to roughly 23 300 in the same period’.11

Infrastructure and resources

The government has further sought to provide redress by improving essential school infrastructure. This has sometimes required the building of new schools, along with the rolling out to many existing ones of electricity, piped water, and modern sanitation. However, progress has been slow and often uneven. Hence, though 79% of schools now have on-site access to municipal electricity, only a third (32%) rely on municipal flush toilets, while only 40% of them are connected to a municipal water supply. In addition, a mere 5% of schools have stocked science laboratories, while only 7.5% have stocked libraries and only 10% have stocked computer centres.12

Ironically, much of the reason for slow progress in improving school infrastructure lies in affirmative action in school management and in the public service. This has resulted in more experienced people being replaced with less experienced ones, leading to often sharp declines in efficiency and institutional memory.

By 2008 it was already evident that many schools were being badly managed by inexperienced or ineffective principals, who were failing to ensure proper teacher performance or make the best use of their limited resources. This was still the situation in 2011, when the National Planning Commission released its first draft of a ‘national development plan’ (NDP), intended to raise South Africa’s annual rate of economic growth to 5.4% over a period of 20 years. The NDP put the blame for poor schooling primarily on bad teaching, but it also linked failures in teaching to ‘the quality of school leadership’ and urged that school principals should in future have ‘minimum qualifications’. Though many of the NDP’s proposals for reform were omitted from the final version of the plan, the revised document did again stress the need for school principals to be appointed on merit.13 Implicitly, this call for merit-based appointments acknowledges the harm that has resulted from allowing affirmative action in this sphere to take precedence over competence and experience.

Affirmative action within the Department of Education and other relevant state departments has also inhibited both the provision of school infrastructure and the delivery of essential goods and services to schools. Overall, it has contributed to a significant loss of skills across the public service, as a skills audit released in 2004 by the minister of public service and administration made clear. This report found that 50% of public sector employees were lower-skilled workers, while 40% were semi-skilled workers. Astonishingly, only 2% had managerial skills and 8% had unspecified ‘other’ skills.14

Many posts across the public sector – especially those requiring scarce financial and management skills – have also been left vacant where black applicants cannot be found. As a result, even standard functions such as the procurement and distribution of textbooks and school desks are often poorly executed, leaving many schools without access to even the most basic of the resources required for effective teaching.15

In addition, the education bureaucracy has repeatedly shown itself to be unable to respond efficiently to new tasks. For example, in the 2007/08 budget, the National Treasury allocated R180 million to library grants for schools (this being the first tranche of a R1-billion grant aimed at improving public libraries in general). However, by January 2008, three months before the end of the financial year, South Africa’s nine provincial administrations had collectively managed to spend less than 25% of the allocated funds. The Department of Education also launched a Quality Improvement, Development, Support and Upliftment Programme (Qids UP), which was intended to provide poor schools with R80 000 each, specifically for books and other resources. However, implementation was again hampered by an inability within provincial administrations to spend the money made available.16

In 2012 the annual report of the Department of Basic Education found that ‘many schools did not receive all the learning, teaching and support material needed’, including textbooks, workbooks, and other resources. The proportions of schools that had received the relevant materials ranged from 38% in Mpumalanga and 52% in the Northern Cape to 84% in the Western Cape (which was administered by the Democratic Alliance, rather than the ANC). Moreover, even where schools had received workbooks, they were often in the wrong languages, making it difficult for pupils to use them.17

So poor was delivery in Limpopo, in particular, that in 2012 a non-­governmental organisation called Section27 took the Department of Basic Education to court to compel it to provide textbooks to a number of schools that still remained without them five months into the school year. The shortfall affected all grades at these schools, but the negative impact was most keenly felt in grades 1, 2, 3 and 10, where a new curriculum had been introduced but could not be taught without new textbooks. Though the North Gauteng High Court ordered the department to deliver all the necessary textbooks by June 2012, three months later many of the textbooks had still not been provided. The minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga (who was reappointed to this position after the May 2014 general election), blamed this on ‘sabotage’. But by September 2012 more than 70 000 textbooks had still not been delivered, prompting another court order for this to be done by the following month.18

Given that the government had budgeted some R6.5 billion for textbooks, workbooks, and other learner support material in the 2012/13 financial year, a lack of money was unlikely to be the key problem. Comments Myburgh: ‘The inability of government to get textbooks and workbooks to schools in Limpopo, and who knows where else, … cannot be put down to … a lack of resources … It is rather the result of extreme state dysfunctionality with the civil service no longer able to perform even the most routine bureaucratic tasks.’19

Outcomes-based education

To provide redress for the alleged ‘rote learning’ of the apartheid era, the government also introduced a new system of teaching and learning, known as outcomes-based education (OBE). This was incorporated in a new curriculum, called Curriculum 2005, which was gradually introduced into schools from 1995 onwards, beginning with Grade 1. The new curriculum did little to guide teachers as to the specific content to be taught, for the idea was that they and their pupils would ‘jointly construct the curriculum’.

Said Penny Vinjevold, deputy director-general of education, in 2009: ‘Curriculum 2005 underspecified the content and was over designed with jargon. Teachers didn’t know what to teach, there was no testing, and the idea was that all children must progress to the next grade … The experiment was disastrous. The schools with the least resources in townships and rural areas suffered the most.’20

Though a revised ‘national curriculum statement’ was thereafter phased in from 2002 to 2008, many of the corrosive effects of OBE were still not adequately addressed. According to Jonathan Jansen, rector and vice-­chancellor of the University of the Free State, many teachers fundamentally misunderstood OBE, believing that the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic had become less important as ‘kids were now expected to learn by themselves and teachers were not the centre anymore’.21

In 2010 The Times newspaper reported that the OBE system had seen ‘more than five million pupils leaving school unable to read or write adequately’. That same year, Zweli Mkhize, chairman of the ANC’s health and education committee and premier of KwaZulu-Natal, said the ruling party had been ‘pushed into rethinking its education policies because of the huge number of pupils who could not read or write. It had to act on an avalanche of complaints from pupils, teachers, and parents’.22

More reforms were introduced, this time in the form of ‘curriculum and assessment policy statements’ (Caps). These were intended to give teachers detailed guidance as to what they must teach, while also equipping them with textbooks and learning materials for every grade. Motshekga said ‘a massive training drive would be launched for teachers to enable them to handle the new curriculum’. However, these successive changes have left many teachers confused and resentful of change, further undermining commitment and morale. In 2009 Mugwena Maluleke, general secretary of the biggest teachers’ union, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu), said ‘teachers had been subjected to three major curriculum reviews in the past ten years, which had included fundamental changes in learning area definition and content, as well as new teaching and assessment methods. This had been accompanied by additional administration and paperwork, all carried out with only minimal support and training from the side of the department.’23

Jansen warns that OBE has caused the country enormous damage. Hundreds of millions of rands have been spent on training teachers, developing materials, conducting expensive evaluations, and ‘writing and rewriting learning guides’, he says. At the same time, a vital ‘window of opportunity’ to build a sound new school system has been lost – and South Africa now has to ‘undo the intertwined damage of apartheid as well as OBE’.24

Little value for money

Education is the biggest item on the national budget, generally absorbing some 21% of annual revenue. State spending on education amounts to roughly 6% of gross domestic product (GDP), which is significantly more than most other developing countries are able to achieve. In addition, South Africa’s teachers are among the highest paid in the world in purchasing power parity terms, as the National Planning Commission has pointed out. Yet educational outcomes remain dismal. In the words of Trevor Manuel, then minister in the presidency: national planning commission, South Africa ‘fails to get bang for its education buck’.25

OBE, an increasingly ineffective bureaucracy, and the various other problems earlier identified have all helped to undermine the quality of schooling. Equally important are the shortcomings in the short-cut method that was used to upgrade the qualifications of African teachers and put them on the same pay scales as their better-qualified white counterparts.

This method led to a quick increase in the proportion of qualified African teachers, which jumped from 37% in 1990 to 93% in 2009 (whereas the proportion of qualified white teachers remained very much the same). However, it also allowed these teachers to gain higher qualifications based simply on their experience (or ‘prior learning’), coupled with their completion of brief training courses. But these courses – generally offered part-time by universities – did little to improve their subject knowledge or pedagogical skills.26 The upshot, writes Nic Taylor, head of the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (Needu), is a ‘disjuncture between qualifications and competence’. The further consequence is that the quality of teaching has generally remained very poor, while accountability for performance has been undermined. In addition, these problems have not been helped by the resistance of a major teachers’ union, Sadtu, to school inspections and other attempts to monitor and improve teacher performance.

In recent years a number of studies have highlighted poor teacher performance as the key factor undermining the quality of schooling. In 2007 a report by the Development Bank of Southern Africa, a state-funded deve­lopmental institution, said that some 80% of public schools were dysfunctional – largely because teachers were absent or failed to teach. Teacher absenteeism was a particular problem in the poorest schools, where 97% to 100% of principals complained of it.27

In 2011 a ‘diagnostic overview’ by the National Planning Commission said: ‘Teachers spend too little time in contact with learners, and lack basic pedagogical ability and subject knowledge.’ The commission also quoted recent research by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), a state-­funded research body, which found that 20% of teachers were absent on Mondays and Fridays, while absenteeism rates rose to 33% at month end. Moreover, said the HSRC report: ‘Teachers in African schools teach an average of 3.5 hours a day compared with 6.5 hours a day at former white schools.’ In addition, ‘strike action … consumes as much as ten days a year; holding union meetings in school time is often the norm in townships; while procedures for dismissing teachers for misconduct are complex, time-consuming, and rare as a result’.28

These problems have yet to be addressed. In October 2011 further research by both the HSRC and the Department of Basic Education showed that ‘teachers commonly do not complete the curriculum, teach too slowly, do not develop concepts, set insufficient written work, and provide pupils with few opportunities to read. Many teachers come late to school, leave early, spend only 46% of their time teaching each week, and hardly teach at all on Fridays’.29

In May 2013 a report on ‘the state of literacy teaching and learning’ in the foundation phase (grades 1 to 3), came to similar conclusions. The report found that a large number of teachers in these grades came late to work or were frequently absent. According to the report, teachers at a third of the schools monitored were using all the sick leave available to them, while also spending a number of days at union meetings, funerals, or training courses. In addition, though teachers at two-thirds of the schools were in class for 90% of the time, many of them were unable to use this time effectively as they lacked subject knowledge.30

Despite the urgent need to overcome these problems, Sadtu – which represents some two-thirds of the country’s 390 000 teachers and is an important ANC ally – has long resisted the government’s attempts to reinstate the teacher inspections system that applied under National Party rule. In 2002 Sadtu physically threatened and removed performance evaluators from schools, once again stalling the reintroduction of an external assessment system. Yet such a system is badly needed, especially as teachers tend to give themselves high marks on the self-appraisal system that currently applies, even though their actual performance is often very different.31

In the 2009/10 budget, the then minister of finance, Trevor Manuel, set aside R31 million to improve the quality of teaching and called for the urgent establishment of an evaluation unit to monitor teaching and outcomes at schools. But Sadtu again opposed this unit, saying it sounded too much like the old inspectorate of the apartheid years. Thulas Nxesi, Sadtu general secretary, said the union would oppose any moves to ‘punish’ struggling teachers when provincial administrations had not done enough to develop their teaching skills.32

In 2011 the Department of Basic Education again tried to introduce an independent ‘teacher performance appraisal’ but Sadtu once more rejected the proposal, saying it needed ‘further discussion’. Given the ANC’s reluctance to confront Sadtu, this effectively sounded the death knell for the idea – and no such system to help assess and improve teacher perform­ance has yet been introduced.33

In October 2013 research by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), a non-governmental organisation, recommended that teacher competency tests should be introduced – not to penalise teachers for poor performance – but simply to identify which teachers were in need of further training. But Sadtu again rejected the idea, saying such tests were ‘not an option’. Added the union’s general secretary, Mugwena Maluleke: ‘We are opposed to teacher competency tests, we don’t want them. We prefer teachers to be trained to improve their competency.’34

Sadtu has even rejected attempts by Motshekga to introduce competency tests for the teachers responsible for marking matriculation examination scripts. In addition, it has vetoed performance contracts for principals and their deputies, and successfully resisted a call by the National Planning Commission for teachers’ pay to be linked to their performance. Many teachers do not even allow school principals to visit their classrooms to evaluate their performance, a practice described by Needu’s Nic Taylor in October 2013 as both ‘rife’ and ‘disastrous’.35

Poor quality of schooling

Since 1994, factors such as these have witnessed millions of black pupils, in particular, progressing through largely dysfunctional schools without ever properly learning to read, write, or do arithmetic. Yet such skills are the foundation for all subsequent learning, and also for success in the workplace.

In April 2014 the statistician-general, Pali Lehohla, was unusually frank in blaming high unemployment among Africans on ‘the poor quality of public education’ in South Africa. Lehohla said there was only one reason why unemployment levels were still highest among Africans 20 years into democracy – poor education. ‘The numbers tell the story. The grey matter needs to be fed to reap change. Education is the only way to feed grey matter. And grey matter is what makes successful countries.’36

International assessments also highlight the poor quality of education in South Africa. In its global competitiveness index for 2013/14, the World Economic Forum ranked the quality of South Africa’s primary education system at 133rd out of 148 countries. It ranked South Africa’s secondary education system at 146th, or second worst in the world. This put South Africa’s performance behind those of impoverished neighbouring states such as Lesotho and Swaziland. The World Economic Forum has also ranked South Africa last of all (at 148th out of 148 countries) for how its pupils perform on mathematics and science.37

So bad has schooling become that the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), Zwelinzima Vavi, has said: ‘South Africa’s education system is a catastrophe and the children of working class parents are being condemned to a deep black hole with minimal chances of escape.’38

In July 2012 Mamphela Ramphele, then a civil society activist and later the founder of AgangSA, blamed ‘the monumental failure’ in schooling on the ANC government, saying: ‘Children under apartheid’s “gutter” education were better educated than today’s, [as then] at least the kids could write and read.’ Soon afterwards the minister of higher education and training, Blade Nzimande (who has since been reappointed to this post) admitted that the government had failed to improve the quality of schooling. ‘In spite of continually increasing levels of spending on foundation phase education, the results of learners in grades 3 to 6 remain some of the worst in the world. A majority of pupils entering the intermediate phase remain largely illiterate and experience difficulty as they progress through the system.’39

Matric pass rate a misleading indicator

A rising matric pass rate has helped obscure these failures, allowing the government to claim successes where few have been achieved. At first glance, the schooling system seems to be functioning effectively, for the proportion of pupils writing and passing the National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations (the new matric exam introduced in 2008) has risen steadily from 61% in 2009 to 78% in 2013. Motshekga has trumpeted this 17 percentage-point increase as proof of solid gains in schooling. But many commentators caution that the National Senior Certificate has helped cloak poor standards of schooling by making the curriculum less demanding and reducing the requirements for a pass. To pass the NSC exams, pupils now need achieve only 40% in three subjects (one of which must be a home language) and 30% in a further three subjects. This means that pupils can ‘pass’ with an average of 35%.40

The government’s praise for the 78% pass rate in 2013 is also misleading, for it leaves out of account the high number of pupils who drop out of school in grades 10 or 11 and so never sit their final examinations at all. In 2011, for instance, there were 1 055 790 pupils enrolled in Grade 10, but so many dropped out thereafter that only some 562 100 full-time pupils (roughly 53% of the Grade 10 total) wrote their NSC exams at the end of Grade 12. Of those who wrote, 439 780 (roughly 42% of the Grade 10 total) managed to pass. Hence, from the Grade 10 class of 2011 alone, the schooling system ejected more than 516 000 youngsters without equipping them with a high-school leaving certificate.41

Under the National Senior Certificate system, the bar has also been set very low for pupils wishing to enter university. Such pupils must attain at least 30% in the language of instruction at their intended university and 50% in four or more subjects. In 2008, the first year in which pupils wrote the NSC exam, some 22 000 more candidates than usual attained what the government now calls a ‘bachelor’s pass’, entitling them to proceed to a degree course at a university. Most universities thus had unexpectedly high student intakes in February 2009. In virtually every year since then, the number of bachelor’s passes has increased, putting universities under great pressure to accommodate the rising number of young people ostensibly equipped to study for degrees.42

However, because the quality of public schooling has remained so poor, many of those with bachelor’s passes under the NSC have little prospect of succeeding at university. This was confirmed in 2009, when Higher Education South Africa, an organisation representing vice-chancellors at public universities, implemented a ‘national benchmarks test’ to assess the skills of some 13 000 first-year university students who had written the NSC in 2008. This test revealed that:

 ■ fewer than half the students were ‘proficient’ in academic literacy skills;

 ■ only a quarter had adequate quantitative literacy skills (such as under­standing percentages and interpreting tables); and

 ■ only 7% were proficient in mathematics.43

These results suggest that many of the black students being admitted to universities – often on a preferential basis – are being set up to fail, rather than being helped to climb the ladder to success. This has made the implementation of affirmative action at universities even more contentious than it might otherwise have been.

Affirmative action at universities

Well before the political transition, there was a rapid increase in the number of Africans passing their matric examination with grades good enough for university. In 1955 only 90 Africans had been able to achieve this, but in 1994 there were 45 000 African matriculants who passed with such grades – an increase of more than 68 000%.44 Hence, even before 1994, the number of black students at South Africa’s universities was rising sharply.

Since then, that number has accelerated still more rapidly. African student enrolment at universities (other than universities of technology) went up from 155 000 in 1999 to more than 516 800 in 2011, an increase of 234% in 12 years. In the same period, the number of coloured students at these universities went up from 15 000 in 1999 to some 47 300 in 2011, an increase of roughly 215%. Indian university student numbers more than doubled too, rising from 22 000 in 1999 to close on 50 000 in 2011, an increase of roughly 125%. White university enrolment went up as well, rising from 100 000 in 1999 to more than 165 600 in 2011, a more modest increase of around 66%.45

There has also been a major increase in the number of black students graduating from both universities and universities of technology. In 1991 some 8 500 Africans graduated from these institutions, whereas in 2011 some 34 200 did so, a rise of some 300% in two decades. The number of coloured and Indian higher education graduates also roughly doubled over the same period. By contrast, the number of white graduates fell from roughly 27 600 in 1991 to around 20 200 in 2011.46

Demand for university places among those with bachelor’s passes under the National Senior Certificate far exceeds supply. In 2013 there were some 145 600 applicants for a total of 25 000 places at the universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Stellenbosch. (At the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), there were 35 000 applicants for 5 500 places; the University of Cape Town (UCT) had 20 000 applicants for 4 000 places; at the University of Johannesburg 75 000 applicants vied for 10 500 places; while at the University of Stellenbosch there were 15 600 applicants for 5 000 places.)47

With many more people applying than can be accommodated, questions arise as to how universities are making their admission decisions and to what extent racially based affirmative action is being used.

Racial criteria in university admissions

The Higher Education Act of 1997 states that university admission policies must ‘redress past discrimination and ensure representivity and equal access’. The government also requires all universities to report to it on the race of both applicants and students. Though this much of government policy is public knowledge, it seems (from a policy document obtained in 2012 under the Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000) that the Department of Higher Education and Training also lays down racial targets for admissions, which are based on national racial demographics. Since state funding for universities depends in part on the fulfilment of these quotas,48 universities have an obvious interest in allocating as many university places as possible to African, coloured, and Indian students.

However, according to the country’s formerly white universities, it is only in faculties where competition for admission is acute that racial quotas have a significant impact on the decisions made. This racial focus is particularly evident at UCT, where the university’s admissions policy has long overtly differentiated between applicants on the basis of race and given particular preference to prospective African students.

In all faculties at UCT, African applicants qualify for admission on the basis of a lower point count than white applicants require. The difference in admission thresholds for Africans and whites varies from one faculty to another, and is particularly marked at the university’s medical school. In 2012 African applicants for the 200 first-year places at UCT’s medical faculty needed 534 points to qualify for admission, whereas white students needed 700 points. UCT also reserved an undisclosed number of its 200 places for African applicants whose point counts exceeded the 534 threshold. Only after it had made every effort to fill these reserved places with African (and other black) applicants did it offer any of these remaining places to white applicants with scores of 700 or more.49

UCT’s race-based policy has been much criticised in recent years. According to the university, its use of racial categories does not mean that ‘it accepts the notions of race that were the basis for race classification in pre-1994 South Africa’. On the contrary, said UCT vice-chancellor Max Price in 2012, the university wanted to move away from using race and was actively searching for an alternative criterion on which to base its affirmative action programme.50

Later that year, Price added that UCT was considering using socio-­economic status instead of race, but feared this criterion would work against black people. He said black pupils at private or former Model C schools generally came from fairly wealthy homes, but nevertheless tended to have lower scores than white pupils. Despite their socio-economic status, they remained disadvantaged by their race, because:

 ■ black parents were less able to help their children with English, mathematics, or science;

 ■ black pupils were undermined by persistent negative racial stereotypes; and

 ■ the school system favoured pupils brought up with ‘an intimate familiarity with Western culture’, with its emphasis on science and empiricism.51

Such factors, Price went on, helped explain why ‘this first generation of black pupils at top schools performed as a group less well than white students’. Race remained a good proxy for these subtle deprivations and was thus still ‘the most accurate indicator of disadvantage’.52

Others disagreed. Much of the criticism of UCT’s racial policy came from David Benatar, professor of philosophy at the university, who said: ‘If we assume Price’s analysis is correct, we are well on the way to alternatives to the use of race in admission decisions. We could favour those whose parents did not complete school, or don’t have university degrees, or are not fluent in English … It is unarguably the case that tenaciously adhering to “race” as the best proxy for “disadvantage” is feeding the stereotype that “blacks” are educationally inferior, and it is hard to see how this could foster self-­confidence in “black” children and students.’

Benatar added that no proxy for disadvantage would ever be perfect, but said the use of ‘race’ was ‘a particularly toxic’ one. ‘It is steeped in South Africa’s appalling past and it reinforces the racial thinking that is both morally reprehensive and damaging. There are alternatives that are much less obnoxious and they should be embraced.’53

In June 2011 Amanda Ngwenya, president of the UCT Students’ Representative Council, urged the university to recognise that ‘disadvantage was not “black”’, and that there were now many black applicants ‘who could reasonably be expected to help themselves’. She called on ‘all new students applying to UCT to refuse to declare themselves as belonging to a particular race group on the university’s admission forms’.54

In April 2013 UCT announced that it planned to revise its admissions policy, as the use of race in this way was ‘undesirable’ and ‘other criteria for determining the previously disadvantaged would have to be found’. Price said the debate at the university had focused attention on four important and inter-related problems:

 ■ whether it was possible to provide redress without reference to race;

 ■ how to cater for the fact that many black applicants were no longer disadvantaged;

 ■ the difficulty of ‘applying a system of race classification when there was no legal basis for classifying’; and

 ■ the fact that ‘many students of colour, on principle, did not want to declare their “race” [while] other students wilfully misclassified themselves – particularly whites and Indians claiming to be coloured’.55

In June 2014 UCT finally made the decision to introduce a new admissions policy, which is due to take effect in 2016. A key reason for the change, says Price, is that ‘an increasing number of black applicants are coming from top schools, and often from wealthy families’. These applicants have ‘marks high enough to be admitted in straight competition with white students, without any affirmative action intervention’. At the same time, many black students from good schools still do not perform as well as white students from the same schools, because of ‘trans-generational factors’, such as the limited education of their parents or a home language different from the language of instruction. Such factors must also be taken into account, he says.56

As Price explains it, the 2016 student intake will generally ‘admit about 75% of students based either on marks alone, or on marks weighted upwards by an index of disadvantage’. This index will consider home language, quality of school attended, and the educational levels of parents and grandparents. For the remaining 25% of places, UCT will select the top black applicants, who will be measured solely against other black applicants. Using race in this way, says Price, will help provide compensation for past discrimination and promote diversity.57

Adds Price: ‘Over the last 20 years, the old colonial and apartheid correspondence of race and class has been shifting. About a half of black students at UCT are now middle class.’ This raises questions as to ‘whether it is fair to whites … that black students should get in at the expense of white students who may even be less privileged’. UCT’s dependence on students having to ‘self-identify their race’ has also led to difficulties. Some do not want to do so on principle. ‘Other students wilfully misclassify themselves … [by] claiming to be coloured. Since there is no legislated way of classifying people, this puts UCT admissions officers in the untenable position of having to decide how such applicants should really be classified. This we refuse to do,’ said Price.58

However, the new policy will vary significantly in the way it is applied in different faculties. In the medical school, for instance, only 9% of first-year places will be allocated on marks alone, while 33% will be decided on marks weighted upwards by the university’s index of disadvantage. This means that the remaining 58% of places (rather than the 25% generally applicable) will still be ‘race-based’, says Price. Hence, these places will continue to be allocated to the top black applicants, measured only against other black applicants. In practice, the university expects the proportion of successful African applicants to its medical school to rise from 37.5% in 2014 to 40% in 2016, while the proportion of white students will diminish slightly.59

A similar debate on the need to review admissions criteria has also been evident at the University of the Witwatersrand. The university likewise applies racial criteria in admitting students to its medical school and, in the words of its vice-chancellor, Adam Habib, ‘requires students from different races to achieve different score thresholds to qualify for admittance’. Though race is only one of the criteria used and other measures of ‘social engagement and disadvantage’ are also taken into account, Habib said in February 2014 that the time had come to rethink the university’s medical admission policies.60

In June 2014 the university decided on a new admissions policy for its medical school, which is to take effect in 2015. This system will allow 40% of medical students to be admitted from the ranks of top academic achievers, irrespective of their race. As for the remaining 60% of places, 20% will be reserved exclusively for top African and coloured applicants, while 20% will go to the best pupils from rural schools – so as to tackle the shortage of doctors in rural areas – and the remaining 20% will go to the best pupils from the poorest 40% of urban schools.61

Said Habib in April 2014: ‘Many insist on the necessity of race to determine disadvantage. But the danger with differential requirements for distinct groups is that, although it enables historical redress, it runs the risk of undermining the constitutional goal of building a new national identity. This is because young white students believe they are being asked to pay for the sins of their parents. Moreover, it has the perverse consequence that privileged black students – the children of BEE [black economic empower­ment] barons and the politically connected – are put on an equal footing with the most disadvantaged.’ Hence, there is a need to ‘use criteria other than race in enrolment strategies’ and to give more emphasis to other indicators of disadvantage or suitability. Moreover, in faculties outside the medical school, ‘students compete on an equal footing’ and without reference to race. Some 70% of Wits students are nevertheless black – and this ‘despite the fact that race quotas do not exist’.62

Racial criteria are also used in admissions to the medical school at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and at both the medical and veterinary faculties at the University of Pretoria. In the veterinary faculty, this is done by dividing students into two categories: ‘open’ and ‘designated groups’. White students are placed in the open category, and must compete for some 44 places on merit within their own group, while black students likewise compete on merit for a further 44 places within their own group. AfriForum, a lobby group, has complained that outstanding white applicants are unfairly prejudiced by barring them from applying for the 44 places set aside for blacks, but the university responds that the state subsidy it receives for its veterinary science programme depends in part on ‘improvements to the equity profile’ of the faculty. According to the university, ‘its selection criteria and processes … are fair and reasonable, taking into consideration the educational history of the country, the limited resources available for veterinary training, and the needs of the country in this particular profession’.63

Outside of medical or veterinary faculties, the use of racial criteria by universities is generally not explicit. The main exception is the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where in the words of its vice-chancellor, Malegapuru Makgoba, ‘a certain number of spaces are allocated to each racial group and applicants within that group compete against each other for available places’. As a result, he adds, ‘the majority of places go to black applicants’. At the University of Pretoria, by contrast, there are no specific equity targets and the university says it ‘does not use race’ as a proxy for disadvantage. However, it does ‘strive to have a diverse student body’ and ‘a 50:50 split between black and white students’.64

At the University of the Free State the use of race is perhaps more overt, for the university seeks to ‘promote redress’ and bring about ‘equity in the race … composition of the student body’, as Vice-Chancellor Jansen puts it. Though it insists on ‘selecting fairly’, it also applies ‘access principles’ that rely not only on academic success but also help identify ‘potential students from disadvantaged groups and deprived backgrounds’.65

The University of Stellenbosch says ‘it is problematic to use race as the basis for effecting redress’, but nevertheless believes that ‘racial categories are the most relevant indicators available for groups of people previously subjected to discrimination’. It seeks to admit students from such groups ‘in line with the intention of the Constitution’, but is also concerned that ‘the use of race in admission policies is becoming increasingly problematic’.

By contrast, the University of Johannesburg says it ‘does not use race to determine who should be admitted’. Instead, it applies the parameters laid down in the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, a state bursary scheme for disadvantaged students, to identify ‘academically deserving and financially needy students’. On this basis, the university’s student population has already become 87% black, bringing it fully into line with the demographic profile of the economically active population.66

Affirmative action in staff appointments and funding

Universities, like all designated employers of 50 staff members or more, are obliged, under the Employment Equity Act of 1998, to make ‘reasonable’ progress towards demographic representivity at all tiers of employment. But this is not easy to achieve, given both the skills shortage and the extent to which experienced black South Africans have already been absorbed into public and private sector jobs. Yet universities that fail to fill their targets at professorial and other academic levels currently face fines of up to R500 000 for a first such ‘offence’. For a fifth similar offence within three years, the maximum fine that could be imposed is R900 000. Moreover, under the Employment Equity Amendment Act of 2013, these maximum fines are to be greatly increased and could go as high as 10% of annual turnover (see Chapter 3).

Wits, for one, has thus been conservative in the targets it sets for African representation at management level (30%) and among professors (4%), associate professors (5%), senior lecturers (8%), lecturers (15%), and associate lecturers (22%). African representation has nevertheless generally lagged behind the targets identified. At the professorial level, for instance, African representation rose to 2% in 2012 against the 4% target set, while among associate professors it reached 3% rather than the 5% target specified. In August 2013 Habib said ‘the principles of academic freedom’ had wrongly been invoked in the past ‘by some university leaders … to stop transformation’. He thus planned to achieve greater racial diversity among academic staff through the use of ‘explicit or implicit racial quotas’.67 More recently, however, he has modified his views, instead stressing the need for a balance between ‘addressing the disparities of the past [and] continuing to be cosmopolitan … and globally competitive’.68

At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, by contrast, 67% of its academic leadership was black in 2011, compared with 38% in 2004. As for other formerly ‘white’ universities, UCT plans to increase its proportion of black staff at the professorial and associate professor level from 12% in 2009 to 22% by 2015. It also aims to bring black representation among senior lecturers and lecturers up from 30% to 36% over the same period. The University of the Free State had a general target of 40% representation for ‘designated’ groups (black people, women, and the disabled) at senior levels, to be attained by the end of 2013. In 2010, when it adopted this target, the representation of these groups stood at 19% at the professorial level, 25% among associate professors, and 30% among lecturers and researchers. Its 55% target for junior lecturers and researchers had already been attained.69

As regards state funding for universities, there is also a strong element of affirmative action in the formula applied to formerly ‘black’ and ‘white’ universities. Though this subsidy formula is complicated, the bottom line, says UCT’s Max Price, is that ‘for any given discipline and level of study, the formerly black universities receive more per student than the formerly white ones. This is also the intention of the funding mechanism, which top-slices the higher education budget under a number of categories to give additional support to the formerly black universities.’70 Yet 60% of all research and postgraduate output comes from five of the formerly white universities, while formerly black institutions – many of which were established in the erstwhile homelands for largely ideological reasons – also have dismal academic standards in general.

This raises questions as to how well affirmative action in university funding serves the country’s needs. In addition, even with the preference that is applied, funding for formerly black universities remains inadequate, as these institutions cannot rely on the external research grants or alumni donations generally available to UCT, Wits, and other formerly white universities. This funding shortfall has prompted many of the formerly black institutions to increase their student numbers as much as possible, so as to bring in more tuition fees and a larger state subsidy. However, as Price writes, though this has generated an increase in income, the extra revenue has come ‘at the expense of quality, space, staff time for research, infrastructure maintenance, and capital development’.71

Over the past ten years the government has also reduced its overall funding for universities, putting all of them under increased financial pressure. According to a recent report commissioned by the Department of Higher Education and Training, expenditure on higher education in South Africa makes up about 12% of overall spending on education, whereas elsewhere in Africa it makes up some 20%. Universities here have thus generally lacked the funds to hire more lecturers or expand teaching facilities to accommodate rising student numbers. As a result, lecture halls are often too small to accommodate first-year classes that have grown to 600 students or more. Students commonly sit on the floor or spill out into passageways, where they battle to hear their lecturers at all. Academic staff are called upon to mark thousands of test scripts and cannot give students the detailed feedback they need, diminishing the learning experience.

According to the department’s report, the higher education system is thus ‘very inefficient’ and is ‘performing way below most of the targets set’. The report recommends that funding for higher education should be increased, but cautions that this should not be done until ‘high levels of inefficiency’, along with ‘corruption and mismanagement of funds’, have first been addressed and overcome.72

Despite the problems of over-crowding already evident, the government is nevertheless planning a vast increase in student numbers, which the fiscus will battle to sustain. All universities are thus likely to experience the pressures on quality, research, maintenance, and capital expenditure that currently dog the formerly black institutions, in particular. Moreover, without significant improvements in the quality of schooling, current high drop-out and failure rates will continue, adding to the wastefulness already evident. However, the government seems impervious to these risks. It has already established two new universities: one at Kimberley (Northern Cape) and the other at Mbombela (Mpumalanga), both of which admitted their first students in 2014. It also plans to establish a new medical university (the Sefako Ma­kgatho Health Sciences University) in Limpopo. In addition, it remains intent on increasing student numbers from 970 000 in 2010 to more than 1.6 million in 2030, a rise of close on 70%.73

High failure and drop-out rates at universities

Questions inevitably arise as to what benefits preferential admissions – and other affirmative action policies – are bringing when graduation rates among African undergraduate students remain worryingly low.

A bleak picture of student failure has recently emerged from two reports on throughput rates compiled in 2012 and 2013 by the Council on Higher Education, a statutory body charged with monitoring the state of the higher education system. According to the 2012 report, only 16% of Africans who enrolled in 2005 for three-year undergraduate degrees managed to graduate by 2007, within the regulation time, while 50% dropped out. By 2010, six years after initial enrolment, 41% of Africans from this initial cohort had graduated, while 59% had dropped out and had no further prospect of being able to gain their degrees. Graduation rates among coloured and Indian students were also low – at around 23% within the regulation three-­year period – and it was only among white students that outcomes were significantly better, 44% graduating within the regulation time and 31% dropping out.74

The council’s 2013 report found a similar pattern among students who had first registered in 2006 for three-year undergraduate degrees. Within this group, only 20% of Africans had graduated in the regulation time, as opposed to 44% of whites. Financial constraints had contributed to these outcomes, the report went on, but the key factor lay in ‘systematic academic obstacles to learning’.75

Commented The Star in an editorial: ‘When you consider it requires a scandalous 35% average in matric to gain a National Senior Certificate, it’s no wonder so many undergraduates are not doing well, and will never earn a degree or a qualification … Neither Basic Education’s Angie Motshekga nor higher education minister Blade Nzimande can show they have changed the learning landscape for the better during their years of office … While finances remain a problem, this disaster is not only about money. It’s also about a lack of academic preparedness (read poor schooling) and … an appalling lack of ambition and will to improve public education in our country.’76

Increased state control for ‘transformation’

Despite the salience of such strictures, Nzimande seems more concerned about expanding state control over universities so as to ensure their further racial transformation. This is illustrated by two recent developments, in particular: the establishment of a special committee on transformation, and the additional powers given to the minister under legislation adopted in December 2012.

In 2013 Nzimande appointed a seven-member ‘ministerial oversight committee on transformation’ to audit progress at South African universities and advise him on policies to combat racism. The Council on Higher Education questioned the need for this new body, saying it had already established a committee of its own to monitor and assess this issue. Jansen was more forthright, saying the formation of the new committee ‘did not make any sense’. Said Jansen: ‘There is no university that is not struggling with transformation or fails to understand its importance. I don’t know why we need a policeman. A university is not a prison. It is an autonomous institution with smart people who understand their duty to the future.’77

The composition of the new committee was also criticised for omitting representatives of academic staff while including two trade union representatives. In addition, the vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Malegapuru Makgoba, was appointed as the committee’s chairman. Yet Makgoba is a controversial figure, who has allegedly inflated his academic credentials and has been criticised on his own campus as ‘authoritarian, divisive, and intolerant of dissent’.78

In October 2013 the committee issued its first report on transformation at universities. The report said that transformation was moving ‘at a snail’s pace’ and that it would take up to 382 years for South Africa’s top five universities to become demographically representative in terms of students, staff, graduates, and research outputs. (These five were UCT and Wits, along with the universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Pretoria, and Stellenbosch.) At other universities, the report went on, it would take some 43 years to transform the general staff profile, while ‘a further 40 years would be required for the research staff of such universities to reflect the country’s population’. Said Kesh Govender, dean of the school of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and one of the authors of the report: ‘The study shows that it is difficult to transform privilege, especially entrenched white privilege, voluntarily and suggests that extraordinary measures are needed.’79

The report used a supposedly scientific ‘equity index’ to measure progress in transformation. It explained its approach as follows: ‘The research applied an “equity index” when examining the demographic profiles of students and staff across South Africa’s 23 universities, and used race demographics from the 2011 national census as the baseline. The index, a quantitative measure based on the Euclidian distance formula, adopted the principle that the racial … demographics of a university should be as close as possible, if not equal to, national figures.’ The equity index was also used to ‘measure … the time frame it would take each institution to attain transformation’.80

Said Jansen in response: ‘We need normal universities in our democracy that are not defined by their tragic histories of exclusion … What we do not need, however, is a report that reduces the complexities of institutional transformation to an equity index in which you use a mathematical formula to measure the distance between “national demographics” and “organisational demographics” in each university; and then rank the universities from best to worst and declare some more transformed than others. This kind of simplistic thinking that reduces transformation to pigmentation is simply the flipside of apartheid reasoning.’81

The report was also unrealistic in overlooking the skills shortage, Jansen went on: ‘Try to find a black dean of law or a black head of actuarial science or a black programme director in forensics, and you will see us vice-­chancellors outbid each other for the same one or two people already in an appointment at a university. Try to replace existing staff and you will find it almost impossible, given our labour regulation laws. Try to coax top black talent from the private sector into universities, and you will find the comrades laughing at you. Becoming more inclusive, especially with top academic talent, is very difficult and the [committee’s] report is completely unhelpful in getting us there apart from bringing out the monitoring police to blame and shame those who try.’82

Habib also criticised the committee’s report, saying: ‘There’s a kind of craziness that circulates among political figures and other people who don’t think carefully about these things, that there should be a direct match between the demographics of society and the diversity of representation at a university. You’ll never get a direct match. I’m stunned at how often people think you can, but if you go to any leading university in the world, such as Harvard or Oxford, you won’t see them representing the demographics of their society to the tee, because if they did, they would not be the kind of global institutions they are.’83

Also controversial are the extraordinary powers that have been given to Nzimande under the Higher Education and Training Amendment Act of 2012. Before the amendments were adopted, the minister already had limi­ted power to intervene in universities where there was financial maladministration, or if a university council expressly requested this. Under the 2012 Act, by contrast, the minister is empowered to issue directives to a university council if, in his opinion, the council has acted ‘unfairly or in a discriminatory on inequitable way towards a person to whom it owes a duty’.

Comments Jeremy Gauntlett SC: ‘If such a council fails to comply with any such ministerial directive, whatever the explanation and however limited either the directive by the minister or the default by the council, the minister must replace the council with an administrator with extensive powers. The council, moreover, is thereby automatically dissolved.’84

Gauntlett regards the powers given to the minister as unconstitutional. First, he says, they are too vague and discretionary to meet the requirements of the rule of law. Second, they infringe the guarantee of university autonomy in the Bill of Rights by allowing the minister to disregard all the essential attributes of academic freedom. These attributes (as famously defined by Judge Felix Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court) include the rights of every university ‘to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study’.85

However, Nzimande has brushed aside such concerns, saying the amend­ments are needed to counter corruption and maladministration – and that he refuses to be cowed by critics who charge him with ‘violating university autonomy’. According to his spokesman, Vuyelwa Qinga: ‘Institutional autonomy can never be an end in itself if you are a public institution that is subject to the national imperatives of a developmental state like ours and is sustained through public funds.’86

The extent of Nzimande’s new powers may soon be put to the test in the context of UCT’s revised admissions policy. Though this is unlikely to reduce black representation in its 2016 admissions, the Students’ Representative Council has reacted angrily, saying the new policy ‘denies the link between race and disadvantage … and seeks to maintain the status quo’. According to the UCT Progressive Youth Alliance (which includes the ANC Youth League, the Young Communist League of South Africa and the Congress of South African Students), the admissions policy has been changed to ‘keep the university white … and please white donors and affluent white families whose children don’t get offers at the university’. The ANC Youth League in the Western Cape says the shift in policy ‘undermines the spirit of our Constitution’. It wants Nzimande to ‘be able to set transformational goals for universities and to lead interventions when these goals are consistently not met, as in the case of UCT’. In addition, a civil society organisation called the Higher Education Transformation Network has urged ‘the government to act decisively to stop the implementation of this sinister policy’, which the network describes as ‘the worst form of racism’ and an attempt to ‘punish the historically disadvantaged’.87

If Nzimande decides that the Council of UCT has acted ‘unfairly’ in adopting the new policy, he is fully authorised under the amendments to dissolve the council and replace it with an administrator appointed by him.

Nzimande may also be planning to accelerate affirmative action in admissions via a new centralised system to be implemented in 2015. Once this takes effect, students will send their applications to one central point, from which universities will supposedly be able to make their own choice as to which students they want. According to Nzimande, universities will thus retain their autonomy in student selection. However, he stresses, universities will not be allowed to ‘hide behind their autonomy and use it to exclude students who want to study at these institutions … The universities will retain their right to choose students, but they must do that within the transformation framework. We must ensure that autonomy is not vulgarised and used as exclusion.’88

Nzimande explains his increased powers as vital to the racial transformation of the country’s universities. However, this obscures the fact that both the ANC and the South African Communist Party (of which he is the general secretary) have long wanted to increase their control over universities because they see these as a key ‘lever of power’. In 1999, for instance, an article in the ANC journal Umrabulo urged the ruling party to strengthen its policies of deploying cadres, or party loyalists, to universities and similar institutions to help bring them under the ANC’s wing. It also called on the ANC to give greater priority to ‘transforming … key ideological centres, such as universities, the privately-owned media, [and] research and policy institutes’. This, the article said, would have the advantages of increasing ‘political cohesion’ and limiting ‘public debate’ about the transformation process.

In 2007 the Strategy and Tactics document adopted by the ANC at its Polokwane national conference had a similar message. It began by stressing the need for the ANC to advance the national democratic revolution by deploying its cadres to all centres of power. In addition, it went on, the ANC should use its cadres to influence ‘the intellectual and ideological’ terrain and ‘promote progressive traditions within … universities and the media’. In 2012 the Mangaung national conference reaffirmed these goals.89

Initiatives supposedly aimed at redress provide a useful fig leaf for the ruling party’s determination to control autonomous universities. An undiluted power grab would be likely to attract domestic and international opprobrium. By contrast, state efforts to help ‘normalise’ the demographic profile of university staff and students are likely to win broad endorsement – even if the effect is to leave universities with only the outer shell of the independence they once enjoyed.