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Nico Cloete and Teboho Moja Transformation Tensions in Higher Education: Equity, Efficiency, and Development H IG H ER EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA SIN CE 1994 IS braided into the bargain struck by President F. W. De Klerk and prisoner Nelson Mandela—both in terms of the baggage it carried and the promises it offered. When the new government came to power in 1994 on the basis of the "implicit bargain" (Gelb, 2001) reached between the National Party and the liberation movement led by the African National Congress (ANC), there was consensus in the government of national unity that higher education needed transformation. Not as clear was the nature of the tensions implicit in the compromises that had to be made and how the trade-offs would be negotiated. In the course of 2004 many reviews of the first decade of South African democracy were published. They can be classified into two main categories: self-congratulatory eulogies reluctantly conceding a few "challenges" that need to be addressed in the next decade, and condemnatory critiques of the new government's readiness to sell out to Washington-led neoliberal globalization in order to promote nonracial class formation. In an attempt to avoid such position taking, this review aims to show that a combination of the politics of macro social and economic processes and historical legacies in higher education led to the emergence of a number of "transformation tensions." In social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 693 this paper we identify some of these tensions and argue that problems have arisen because the tensions were not anticipated during the initial policy-making process. Two related sets of tensions in the higher education sector are identified and discussed later. The transformation of higher education and the policy decisions taken to effect it fall predominantly within the tension lines of equity and development, and equity and efficiency. These are not the only tensions; there are other veiy important pres sures such as the tension between leadership (steering from the top) versus participation, but these will not be the subject of this article. The tensions discussed do not imply a choice between the good and the bad because all the tension points are important. The real challenge is to prioritize and pay attention to what seems most urgent while not ignoring the other end of the tension line. EQUITY VERSUS DEVELOPMENT There was strong anticipation in South Africa, as there was in the sixties and seventies in many newly independent African countries, that higher education would contribute to social and economic devel opment. At the infamous Accra workshop of 1973, the Association of African Universities declared that "the university in Africa occupies too critical a position to be left alone to determine its own priorities and should therefore accept the hegemony of government" (Yesufu, 1973: 45). In many countries in Africa this line of argument was used to violate academic freedom and justify political interference, and not to provide a development agenda (Moja, Muller, and Cloete, 1996). In South Africa, the stoiy has thus far been rather different, but not unlike other countries in Africa, the government is struggling to construct a socioeconomic framework that provides appropriate signals for higher education. From the first attempts to start formulating a new policy frame work for postapartheid South Africa (the 1992 National Education Policy Initiative), the possibility of tension between equity and development was present in policy debate. Badat, Barends, and Wolpe (1994) reasoned 694 social research that higher education would be confronted with sets of contradictions, and that the most problematic would be the tension between equity and development. For example, it was argued that a transformed, expanded, and democratized higher education system could become more equitable in terms of access for large numbers of black students registered in cheap courses, such as the then popular biblical studies and language majors. But it was also foreseen that two problems could possibly emerge out of such a system. The first was a growth in enroll ment figures and a massive increase in student-to-faculty ratios with the likelihood of a drastic reduction in quality. The second problem was that the choice of cheap courses would not...
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