Mala Singh

Quality Assurance in Higher Education: Which Pasts to Build on, What Futures to Contemplate?

ABSTRACT The paper is a reflection on the pasts and futures of quality assurance in higher education. It poses questions about the correlation between the geographical and political spread of quality assurance on the one hand and the resulting educational benefits on the other; about the divergences between critics and practitioners on the likely impacts of quality assurance; about centres and peripheries in quality assurance and the power of ‘good practice’ templates from the former over the latter; and about the possibilities for connecting quality assurance to broader social purposes beyond economic and consumerist notions of accountability. It concludes by raising the possibility that current versions of quality assurance may well cede ground to more metricated evaluation instruments as the economic and reputational ‘wars’ in higher education intensify and the added dangers that this would pose to any quality assurance interest in strengthening reflexity in the academic project.

The place of social justice in higher education and social change discourses

A familiar discourse about higher education and social change today relates to higher education’s socio-economic role within knowledge societies in a globalizing world. This paper addresses how issues of social justice feature in such discourses; whether social justice in higher education has been appropriated into a neo-liberal strategy for growing competitive economies; and whether it is possible to deploy an instrument of new public management for advancing the purposes of social justice in higher education. The paper reflects on some of the normative, policy and strategic ambiguities in the notion of social justice as currently invoked in higher education and social change discourses.

Universities and Society: Whose Terms of Engagement?

The idea of a socially engaged university belongs in a long line of moves to assign or appropriate the university for socially preferred purposes. Modernization, national development and nation building, manpower and human capital development, democratization and social transformation, and economic growth and competitiveness have been among the imperatives that have underpinned the arguments for the university to transcend its inwardly defined core functions of teaching, learning, and service and become more socially embedded. See Kerr (1995) on the Land Grant Movement of the 1860s in the United States; and war-related research at U.S. universities during World War II; or Coleman (1994) on Japanese universities in the 1880s supporting “modernization” through their teaching and research; and the political and human resource requirements in the Soviet model of universities. In the current conjuncture, the call for university engagement is part of the discourse of the “knowledge society,” which has seen higher education assume a new prominence within the requirements of a “knowledge-driven economy” but also subject to a sharper accountability discourse driven by governments, global financial institutions, donors, and other social forces.

Re‐orienting internationalisation in African higher education

In both policy and research contexts, internationalisation in African higher education is welcomed for its potential to strengthen local capacity and cautioned against for its potential to extend long‐standing asymmetries of power in international partnerships. This paper examines two sets of developments which seek to re‐orient internationalisation to allow for greater local control, local focus and local benefit. The one relates to a more formalised policy, planning and research approach to internationalisation and the other pertains to an intra‐regional form of internationalisation under the influence of the Bologna process. The paper explores prospects for internationalisation on the continent to yield more equal North–South partnerships and to support the revitalisation agenda and its development priorities in higher education. It suggests that continuing lack of local capacity, continuing structural inequalities in partnerships, and insufficient interrogation of dominant concepts and models of internationalisation may still pose problems in moving towards an alternative internationalisation politics in African higher education.

Evaluating the MBA in South Africa

The Higher Education Quality Committee of the Council on Higher Education in South Africa recently carried out an evaluation of all MBA programmes offered in the country by South African as well as foreign higher education institutions. The MBA review is located within the context of the implementation of a comprehensive external quality assurance system in South African higher education, which is itself in a phase of radical restructuring. The article sets out the rationale for evaluating the MBA as well as the process and methodology that was followed by the HEQC. It also indicates some of the follow‐up steps that are being taken by the HEQC beyond the accreditation process, for example, the preparation of an analytical report on the State of MBA Provision in South Africa. The article concludes with reflections on some of the political, methodological and educational issues relating not only to the MBA but to quality assurance in a developing country context.

10 – External quality audits in South African higher education: goals, outcomes and challenges

: This chapter focuses on the implementation of external quality audits in South African higher education during the post-apartheid period. The authors point to the difficulties of establishing direct correlations between external audits and their supposed impacts, both as a general methodological challenge as well as the fact that the introduction of quality assurance was part of wide-ranging reforms that impacted on all aspects of the higher education system in the country. Drawing on research commissioned by the national agency itself, as well as other research analyses of the external audits, the chapter concludes with an assessment of the outcomes to date. The authors offer some reflections on old and new challenges to thinking about the impact of external audits, especially in trying to establish a connection between making institutional quality assurance more efficient through audits and actual improvements in the quality of teaching and learning.

Equity and Quality in the Revitalisation of African Higher Education: Trends and Challenges

The revitalisation of African higher education has been a policy imperative on the agenda of many international and African organisations in the last decade, as well as a focus for research and debate. Revitalisation is a theme which is itself framed by a larger set of current discourses about the powerful role of knowledge in society and in the economy, and about the possibilities and conditions for knowledge-based development. Central to the success of both the revitalisation and knowledge-based development agenda is a systematic and sustained approach to a package of issues relating to access, equity and quality in African higher education. This article examines trends and developments relating to these three issues in higher education in sub-Saharan Africa and reflects on their implications for a successful revitalisation strategy, as well as for knowledge-based development.