On Wednesday, March 30, Sowetan's sister publication the Daily Dispatch published another negative take on Walter Sisulu University (WSU). This time it was about the alleged illegitimacy of its academic qualifications.
This article follows a thread of similar articles published by this newspaper about this specific university. If it’s not about student protests, it’s about irregular use of funds – among many other devastating revelations about the place.
At least today we know the real facts. The title of the article and the promo that was published about it the previous day was all an exaggeration.
The article seemed to suggest that all WSU qualifications are of poor quality and are illegitimate whereas the actual story was about the normal administrative processes that universities and professional bodies are supposed to meet.
To simplify this, when a university is offering an engineering degree, graduates are expected to register with the national engineering body once they become professionals in order to practice.
In addition, this national engineering body must be notified consistently about the curriculum the university provides to its engineering students.
This is done to ensure that high standards are maintained so that we don’t produce engineers who will build bridges that collapse a week later.
Some professional bodies require this notification annually. Others want it every three or five years.
Sometimes, professional bodies require universities to demonstrate how they have met equity targets in the process of producing graduates.
All these regulations determine the quality of the course and its professional outputs.
Some bodies change their licences or requirements and universities are required to register for their status afresh or change their requirements accordingly.
This happens mostly when there is a game-changing moment in the industry that requires upcoming graduates to be equipped differently.
For instance, when accusations of racism in the engineering industry began to emerge at the height of the 2015/16 #FeesMustFall protests, the industry and universities requested that the curriculum include courses in diversity management, human rights and social sciences.
Some universities only started to implement these changes in 2018 – three years later.
When I was teaching a third-year sociology course in Human Rights at Nelson Mandela University in 2020, I realised that half of my class consisted of students from the science engineering faculty. This was difficult to imagine two years before that.
What this demonstrates is that universities sometimes move slower than industry in changing their curriculums. The economy moves and changes faster than the education system.
Therefore, when universities are required to submit their training curriculums to industry, they are sometimes delayed by internal administrative systems that are time intensive.
Changing a curriculum or a course structure in a university is a slow process that involves various committees and consultations. These processes can sometimes take years, especially at universities where these structures are weak.
In the process, universities sometimes miss their deadlines to submit their updated curriculums and training methods to the industry.
This happens at all universities in SA at different scales and intensities. It is a normal administrative nightmare for higher education everywhere.
What the Daily Dispatch has done though was to target WSU as an easy victim for its headlines. The newspaper knows how the political economy of higher education is structured and it knows who to target.
South African higher education has a racism hierarchy in how it measures universities. This hierarchy was designed by the apartheid Universities Extension Act of 1959 and it was further accelerated by the post-1994 democratic government.
This Act divided South African higher education into two: one corner consisting of white, urban, privileged, and research intensive universities that are massively funded and highly desired. The other consisting of black, rural, poor and underfunded universities that are only meant to be undergraduate teaching institutions with no research profile and nobody wanting to be anywhere near them.
The Daily Dispatch is part of this cruel system that seeks to keep WSU in its dark place of illegitimacy. This means that everyone associated with WSU falls in this landscape of illegitimacy.
Beyond this point though, WSU has a lot of institutional work to do and nobody else is going to change its trajectory than itself. It needs to be managed better with high standards across all its levels.
It needs major investments and improvements in its research profile, and it needs to articulate its socio-academic project in bold terms with a highly capable executive leadership that has an excellent and productive professoriate supported by an effective and responsible administrative regime.
For us watching on the margins, we need to intensify our activism and fight to destroy the racism that is holding hostage our higher education system, dividing it into apartheid hierarchies and encouraging opportunistic journalism that feeds on it.
The generational work of the #FeesMustFall movement remains unfinished.
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