MULTINATIONAL WORKING GROUP ON HIGHER EDUCATION

Call for Proposals

Theme: Higher Education in Africa: Transforming Within, Preparing the Future

Introductory Background

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
(CODESRIA) invites proposals from researchers for possible inclusion in its
new multinational working group (MWG) on the theme of Higher Education in
Africa: Transforming Within, Preparing the Future. Higher Education is one
of the thematic areas at the core of the current intellectual agenda of the
Council. The MWG is the flagship research vehicle employed by CODESRIA for
the promotion of multi-country and multidisciplinary reflections on critical
questions of concern to the African social research community. Each MWG is
led by two to three coordinators and includes a maximum of fifteen
researchers. Three senior scholars are designated as independent reviewers
who serve as discussants during the meetings of the group. The lifespan of
the average MWG is two years during which time all aspects of the research
process are expected to be completed and the final results prepared for
publication in the CODESRIA Book Series. More details on the MWG and
CODESRIA activities are available on the Council's website: www.codesria.org
. Through the MWG that forms the object of this
call for proposals, CODESRIA seeks to promote a critical reflection on the
challenges of the regeneration of Africa's higher education institutions and
systems after the prolonged crises which they have faced and in the context
of the innumerable problems confronting the continent.

Crises, Reform and Renewal in African Higher Education

Crises, reform and renewal have not only been successive but also almost
simultaneous moments and states in the recent history of higher education
(HE) in Africa. Beyond the African continent itself, higher education
systems (HES) all over the world have had to grapple with pressures from
within and without that have produced dramatic shifts over the last half
century. The scholarly and policy debates over these complex processes of
crises, transition and change, as well as the struggles for survival,
adaptation, innovation and relevance vis-à-vis anticipated national and
global trends, are often cast in terms of the quality and relevance of the
HE being dispensed. In Africa, the question is frequently asked as to
whether higher education institutions (HEIs) and systems, such as they are
structured, are enhancing the capacities of the continent and its peoples to
deal with the challenges of globalisation, or to transform society for the
better. One reading of global trends informed by the prevailing neo-liberal
frameworks has led many students to answer this question in the negative.
Such a reading has led to wholesale criticisms of traditional forms of HE,
and an uncritical, one-sided celebration of the so-called new modes and
types of HE and HEIs, most of which are private and are largely driven by a
market logic. A careful examination of the history and roles of higher
education and HEIs in Africa, particularly the universities, is however
likely to lead to a more nuanced assessment of the contributions which the
traditional HEIs have made and/or are still capable of making to the
advancement of society. In order to gain this nuanced understanding, and
grasp the nature and magnitude of the multifaceted crises confronted by the
tertiary level of African educational systems, the variety of reforms that
have been implemented, and the multi-layered changes that are taking place,
it is important that HE be looked at more in a holistic manner and less in
an instrumentalist fashion. This will, of course, involve a close study of
the emerging new modes and types of HE without leading to an out-of-hand
dismissal of the traditional system; it will also call for an examination of
the ways in which the two systems connect and inter-face.

The proposed MWG is designed partly to initiate studies on African HE and
HEIs and systems with a view to highlighting the multiple ways in which HE
has not only been affected by crises of varying origins and dimensions, but
has also been shaped by the reforms that have been implemented or are
on-going, whether internally driven, both within institutions and countries,
or externally imposed as part of IMF/World Bank structural adjustment or
other donor conditionalities. Crises and reform have generated a variety of
adaptive strategies and responses which have fed into the contradictory and
uneven processes of regeneration and renewal taking place within and around
HEIs and HES (Higher Education Systems). These processes of regeneration and
renewal deserve to be studied in their own right and in all their unevenness
and contradictoriness; they also need to be understood in terms of the ways
in which they may or may not be linked to similar processes taking place in
the larger society. Indeed, one of the most critical questions that social
research in Africa is required to address is the role of HE in on-going
efforts to deal with the current, multi-faceted challenges facing the
continent. These challenges vary across countries and include such basic
concerns as the formation, reconstruction and sustenance of the kinds of
cohesive communities within which the core humanity of the continent's
diverse peoples can be protected and promoted, the exercise of full
citizenship rights by all, the reversal of poverty, material deprivation,
and mass exclusion, the forging of coalitions against foreign political and
cultural domination, the management of diseases such as HIV/AIDS and
malaria, the re-conquest of the African public policy terrain from donor
usurpation, the re-establishment of the foundations of the dignity and
prestige of the continent as a whole, and the mobilisation of its diasporas
for a collective vision of turning the table of underdevelopment.
Furthermore, higher education institutions in Africa, conceived as a
microcosm of broader society, refract and reproduce local and global
developments at different historical moments. Indeed, developments in the HE
systems in Africa are closely linked to those in the societies in which they
are located, and the fortunes of the universities, in particular, have been
very closely tied to those of the state. The universities have, therefore,
had their own share of the developmentalism, structural adjustment, and
post-adjustment experiences of the post-colonial period in African history,
and their position in the order of public priorities has changed
accordingly. However, it is instructive that even in the midst of the crises
years of the 1980s and 1990s, universities were always present as key sites
of public concern and debate in most African countries.

While the terms "higher education" and "university" may in some contexts be
used interchangeably, they do not necessarily cover the same reality. The
university is a subset of the HES of any given country. Higher education has
a holistic, all-encompassing resonance which embraces all post-secondary
institutions. Indeed, the scope for HE as defined by institutions such as
UNESCO, for instance, is very broad: In their conceptualisation, higher
education is taken to embody all organized learning and training activities
at the tertiary level. Professional institutions are also covered under
this umbrella. And yet, even this wide spectrum does not exhaust all the
possibilities that exist or which are possible in terms of the forms of
higher education. The ICT revolution has brought along new kinds of
institutions such as the virtual universities; it has also created new
possibilities for distance and open learning. The pluralisation of knowledge
production institutions and sites has become one of the key features of the
current era, accelerated by the growing trade in educational services for
which the World Trade Organisation has established a regime. Teaching,
learning, research, documentation and dissemination activities are all, to a
certain extent, taking new forms which the African academy is challenged to
track and assess in the light of the project of society to which its
different constituents are committed. In doing so, questions inevitably
arise about the coherence of the HES that is in place or which is in the
making, the relevance and efficacy of the system of quality control that is
in use, the appropriateness of the curriculum to local concerns, the
viability of an African knowledge system in the age of contemporary
globalisation, and the types of cultural and civic values that are
transmitted. Furthermore, it will be important to examine the ways in which
the pluralisation of HE may be fundamentally transforming the university
itself as a concept. Or are the changes which are taking place merely
marginal, with the new institutions and forms that are emerging also serving
as simple add-ons to the centuries-old traditional concept of the
university? This is as much an empirical as it is a conceptual question.

Universities have historically played and are likely to continue to enjoy
the most central role in higher education. With a few exceptions, such as
the French grandes écoles that occupy a key position in the Francophone HE
tradition, universities have generally been considered to be more
prestigious than other institutions of higher learning. The high numbers of
jobless university graduates notwithstanding, there has been a tendency to
treat the university learning experience as the one that truly deserves to
be considered seriously in reflections on higher education, in contrast to
technical/vocational training which is assumed to provide only technical
skills for the performance of specific tasks but without the opportunity for
the acquisition of a critical scholarly culture. This notwithstanding, it is
important to include the different types of HE and HEIs in a study of this
nature in order for the prospects for a more rounded and comprehensive
analysis of the crises of HE in Africa to be increased. Indeed, in the
search for solutions to the crises of the HES, it is necessary to cover the
different types of higher education institutions that are in existence if
only because there are inter-linkages among them and it is the totality of
their work and exchanges that underpins any given knowledge system. In,
therefore, charting the terrain and sites of change in African higher
education, the composition of the sector itself will constitute an
interesting research question, as will the shifting structure of incentives
for tertiary education and what these mean for the short and long-term
futures of the different categories of institutions.

The multi-dimensional crises that have afflicted African higher education
and the intensity which they have been felt have, invariably, been linked to
the main issue of funding. The exercise of the power of allocation of
financial resources for education, or for that matter any other social
institution, translates into full decision-making powers over all the
aspects of the institution. The quantity, nature, and sources of the
financial resources for African higher education institutions inevitably
carry major consequences for the process of production of knowledge, the
exercise of academic freedom and access to publications. The sharp decline
which was experienced in the 1980s in the supply of these resources led to a
book famine whose repercussions included decaying libraries, declining
levels of staff and student motivation, the collapse of curriculum
development, and, more generally, the emergence and consolidation of
authoritarianism in the governance of the university and of university life.
In many parts of Africa, the principles and practice of scholarly liberty
came to be emptied of their significance not only as a result of state
harassment and other kinds of restriction emanating from within and outside
the academy, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, by the fact that the
very dignity of university professors, lecturers and students was called
into question as they were obliged to engage in various kinds of menial jobs
to supplement devalued and increasingly meagre wages or stipends. Similarly,
the challenges of hiring, retaining, and renewing the teaching staff; the
relapse across many campuses into a culture of routine that is built on the
principle of doing the barest minimum in the performance of tasks; the
collapse of the innovative impulses of students and staff; the frequent
disruption and abridgement of academic calendars and programmes by a variety
of conflicts and strikes; the generalised decline in the environment of
learning; the impact of the wider context of political instability and
diminished state/governmental legitimacy; and an overall shift in the
structure of incentives in the wider economy and society that is tilted
against higher education in general and the pursuit of advanced learning in
particular all point to the impoverishment of the social, cultural, economic
and academic environment with consequences that span the short-term and the
long-run.

Higher education everywhere has different stakeholders including, families
and students coming from different social backgrounds; states; teaching,
administrative, and technical staff; policymakers from within and outside
the higher education sector; and public and private employers. Donors, too,
as a result of their contributions to the funding of education in Africa,
have de facto and sometimes de jure acquired the right to participate in, or
even lead, the formulation of African domestic/national policies. This
multi-stakeholder framework has produced its own politics of crisis
management and reform which will be interesting to study in terms of the
strategies pursued by different players, the alliances which they forge,
dissolve and reconstitute, the issues around which interests coalesce and
dissolve, and the implications of all these for a root and branch
re-engineering of the terrain of higher education in Africa. Similarly, the
multi-stakeholder nature of the higher education community has attracted
domestic and external responses to the crises of the system, these responses
themselves being presented in different forms and originating from various
sources at different points in the evolution of the challenges confronting
African institutions of higher learning in general and the universities in
particular. Perceptions of the nature of the problems facing the higher
education system and assumptions about the most appropriate solutions for
resolving them have also shifted over time. Tracking the shifting
perceptions and responses of different actors to the crises of African HE
will be an important aspect of the work of the MWG during its lifespan, and
it is hoped that this issue will be approached in the full understanding
that the different stakeholders are endowed with unequal powers that play a
critical role in determining their influence on the content and direction of
the agenda for the reform of the system.

One of the most radical assumptions about the best way for tackling the
problems of the African higher education system came in the 1980s in the
form of a proposal for the dismantling of African universities. Associated
with the World Bank and some of its academic satellites which,
paradoxically, are themselves well-endowed universities of the North that
boast a plethora of Africanist experts, this proposal took a huge toll and
stirred a sustained resistance across Africa from which the higher education
system is yet to fully recover even though the World Bank has recently
reversed itself and proclaimed that the university, does after all, have a
place. But it was not the only proposal that was on the table. Various
solutions emanating from other stakeholders or targeting particular domains
of the work of universities have been proposed and, in several cases, have
even been adopted and implemented at different periods. The proposals have
varied in their ambition, from targeting the entire higher education system
itself to focusing exclusively on the university as whole or particular
academic units at a time. Critical cross-cutting issues such as the mission
and role of HEIs, their funding and relevance, the quality of their
curriculum, their structure of governance, their staff development strategy,
access and equity issues in their planning, the quality of student life
which they offer, their management systems, their system of decision-making,
and their (formal) linkages with the socio-cultural and business communities
have all been the subjects of proposals which participants in this MWG are
invited to reflect upon. Little assessed, however, is the changing
demographics of the higher education system, particularly in gender and
generational terms; this is an area to which research attention clearly
needs to be paid.

The contents of many of the reforms which have been proposed have been as
much in contention as their timing, phasing, and sequencing. The reforms
have been at the heart of numerous contentions that have translated into
passive resistance, if not outright protests and strikes by staff and
students. They have also resulted in the prolonged closure of institutions,
and the massive exodus of experienced and qualified staff in what will
surely go down as an historic drain of talent from the HES and the
continent. Although the scarcity of resources and the proliferation of
numerous social constraints leave little time for the innovative impulses of
the national higher education community to be stimulated and to bear fruit,
still even in the most extreme cases of deprivation, as, for example, when
central governmental authority has fragmented and collapsed or armed
conflicts have impeded the normal functioning of all institutions, coping
strategies have been devised by the universities and their staff and
students to enable them survive the hard times. These strategies have had
and still do carry direct implications for past practices, future
strategies, and the philosophical underpinnings of higher education in
Africa. What lessons can these practices, in their varieties and
complexities, and invented as they were out of desperation, offer as
inspiration to be harnessed and emulated in the development of reform
strategies and the building of the African university of tomorrow? More
substantively, how can one integrate these practices into the re-thinking
that has to occur on the philosophical foundations of higher education in
contemporary Africa and refract them into the regular functioning of the
system? What are the challenges and opportunities associated with
"marketization" and "massification" that have been twin pressures and
processes in African higher education at the height of its systemic crises?
In the re-thinking which is called for, what are the minimum conditions
necessary for building a credible academic community, the prospects for the
emergence/advancement of a distinctly African knowledge system, and
sustaining the university as a public good? How should one factor in the
emergence of private universities and the proliferation of nongovernmental
research centers? What role can information and communication technologies
(ICTs) play in facilitating knowledge transmission? What kind of higher
education ought to be fostered so as to resist the disorienting impact of
the vagaries of contemporary globalisation? How is globalisation manifesting
itself in the field of higher education itself? These are some of the
guiding questions which it is hoped the MWG will address.

BM__Toc41356328Proposed Thematic Areas for Research Focus

Some of the specific questions for which proposals are invited by CODESRIA
for its MWG on African higher education include:

1. Shifting /Competing Perspectives on the Philosophical Foundations
of Higher Education in Africa
2. Shifting/Competing Perspectives on the Role of the University in
Development and Social Transformation
3. The Changing Roles of the State in HE
4. Shifting Perceptions of the Crises of the Higher Education System
5. The Content and Direction of Competing Proposals for Reform in the
HE System
6. Coping Strategies Evolved by Universities and University
Communities
7. Trends in Curriculum Development
8. The Evolution of Campus Life and Academic Freedom
9. Trends in the Revival of International Exchange Programs and
internationalisation of HE
10. The African Academic Diaspora and the African University;
11. Issues in the Governance of the African higher Education System
12. The Changing Nature of Student -Staff Relations
13. Gender, Generational, and Disciplinary Issues in the Re-composition of
the African Academy
14. University Autonomy and the Challenges of Financing Higher Education
15. The Rise of the Private University in Africa
16. New Forms and Types of Higher Education Institutions
17. Higher Education as a Public Good
18. ICTs in Teaching, Research and University-Industry Relations
19. The Changing Notions of Community Service
20. The Status of Basic Research in the African Academy
21. University Libraries
22. Regionalisation of University Education
23. The University and the Transformation of the Public Sphere
24. The University and Contemporary Globalisation

The list of issues presented in this call for the members of the proposed
MWG to tackle is not exhaustive. Indeed, lingering concerns such as the
language factor in the higher education equation remain important. Related
to the question of distance education and the open university system is the
issue of lifelong learning whereby those who voluntarily or by force
interrupted their studies can resume them at different stages of their
personal and professional lives. Moreover, the rapid changes going on in
every field make learning a lifelong necessity for all. In connection to the
question of gender and access, the recent creation of new women's
universities raises new sets of questions that deserve focus. So do the
confessional and corporate universities. Issues relevant to socially
marginalized groups-ranging from people who are physically challenged to
populations with non-mainstream lifestyles like nomads who stretch across
national borders throughout the continent-must also be considered in the
work of the MWG. The various questions which have been identified in this
call for proposals need not only be studied under the individual subheadings
that have been listed; in fact, the Council hopes they will be addressed
within frames of analyses that capture the inter-locking nature of most of
the issues. Furthermore, participants in the MWG will be encouraged to apply
multidisciplinary approaches to their research, grounding their studies
historically and exploring all the critical social questions, including
gender, that are posed by the terms of reference that they define for their
work.

CODESRIA invites proposals for research on any one of the issues raised in
this announcement, or on related questions not explicitly identified in this
call but which are germane to the theme either regionally or in specific
national or sub-regional contexts. Scholars wishing to explore comparative
dimensions of the issues identified are also strongly encouraged to do so,
including drawing on experiences from other regions of the world other than
Africa itself to shed light on the questions which are of concern to this
MWG. The authors of proposals selected will be invited to be part of the
CODESRIA MWG that is to be established. Proposals for consideration for
inclusion in the MWG should comprise:
1. A clear statement of the purpose of the project and the problematic
to be researched;
2. A thorough review of the literature on the sub- theme selected;
3. A description of the research methodology to be used;
4. A detailed work plan;
5. A draft budget;
6. The Curriculum vitae of the author(s).

All proposals must be received by 31 January, 2005. Proposals submitted
will go through an evaluation process the results of which will be made
available by 20 February, 2005. The selected applicants will be invited to
participate in a launch/methodological workshop to be held in the second
half of March 2005. Proposals should be sent to:

The CODESRIA MWG on Higher Education,
Research Department
CODESRIA,
Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop x Canal IV
P.O. Box 3304, CP18524
Dakar, Senegal.
Tel : +221 825 9822/8259823
Fax: +221 824 12 89/825 66 51
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.codesria.org