Rethinking agency in university development: The Association of African Universities and Higher Education in Africa (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Agency in University Development: The Case of the Association of African Universities
International Perspectives on Education and Society, 2013
This chapter grapples with questions of agency in the development of African higher education, with a special focus on the Association of African Universities (AAU), an organization outside of formal education policymaking on the continent. Through the lens of rhetorical institutionalism, findings illustrate how the AAU has adopted and adapted competing institutional logics to exert influence over development policymaking. Next, I will discuss how systems of persuasion were cultivated and symbols employed to establish the legitimacy of the organization in a heterogeneous institutional field that includes universities, development agencies, nongovernmental organizations, supranational arrangements, and the influence of international financial institutions. This enabled the AAU to extend institutional logics into African higher education. This case study seeks to upend the pervasive crisis narrative that perpetuates both the impotence of African institutions
Africa Development, 2011
Throughout the African continent, albeit a product of imperial domination, every state at independence conceived a national project, which aimed at building a nation-state with a clearly articulated development agenda. Education as a social institution was considered requisite toward the actualisation of the national project. The sub-sector of higher education, and particularly the university, appeared as an indispensable agency. Given the general colonial policy of exclusion of Africans from university education, the right of African states to build their national/public universities epitomised self-determination at independence. The independence movements in the 1950s-1960s coincided also with the regained popularity of human capital theory that stipulated that education, especially the highest levels, constituted an investment for individual socioeconomic attainment and social mobility as well as national and structural development. From its inception, the Western style of university that was conceived out of the colonial experience represented a special site for contention and affirmation of the Africans to realize their national projects. In the context of globalisation, international organisations and programmes such as the World Bank and General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) have emerged as proxies of the old colonial powers with the same goal of influencing the policies that restrict or shape higher education in African countries. Key constituencies of African universities, namely students and teaching staff, have resisted such infringement on Africans' rights to university education and autonomy in determining their domestic policies. The main objective of this article is to analyse the evolution of the African university as a site for the continued struggle for self-determination. It will be argued that, in spite of the history of a few institutions 7-Assié-Lumumba.pmd 19/10/2011, 14:48 177 Assié-Lumumba: Higher Education as an African Public Sphere le personnel enseignant, ont résisté à de telles violations des droits des africains à l'enseignement universitaire et à l'autonomie dans la détermination de leurs politiques nationales. L'objectif principal de cet article est d'analyser l'évolution de l'université africaine en tant que site de la lutte continue pour l'autodétermination. Nous soutiendrons que malgré l'histoire de quelques institutions dans un petit nombre de pays, l'université africaine au XXIe siècle est essentiellement le reflet des rapports coloniaux. Ainsi, par exemple, les nouveaux programmes de Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (TIC) et d'enseignement à distance, et les universités privées émergentes dans le contexte du mantra de la libéralisation, seront également analysés dans le cadre des politiques de libéralisation qui ont été promues par les mandataires coloniaux mondiaux. Dans cet article, la mission publique de l'université, qu'elle soit publique ou privée, sera examinée. Nous adopterons une démarche fondamentalement historique, évaluant les acteurs et leurs transformations et mutations dans la même réalité de l'inégalité structurelle de pouvoir dans le système mondial, et diverses réponses africaines à travers la résistance et l'affirmation continues. Nous traiterons la question fondamentale de la recherche de l'université publique ou de l'université ayant une mission publique pour la production de connaissances pertinentes dans les diverses disciplines, la pensée critique et les nouveaux paradigmes, ainsi que les méthodologies visant à promouvoir le progrès social au milieu des défis de la mondialisation libérale dominante et des conditions objectives des États, des sociétés et des peuples africains.
CIES Conference 2022 (poster), 2022
Catherine Odora Hoppers and Howard Richards (2012) have explicitly relayed the mission of universities as 'agents' or tunnels for cognitive, social justice, and inclusive human development. The Association of African Universities (AAU) is an international nongovernmental organization or institution established and powered by the universities in Africa to promote cooperation among themselves and within the international academic community. It is recognized as an international actor or agent empowered to attain its mission as higher education institutions (HEIs) in Africa to meet international and global standards. Schmidt (2012) posits that agents within institutions teach two forms of abilities: background ideational abilities and foreground discursive abilities which strengthens the power of an institution as an existing institutional actor or agent.
Roles Of Universities And The African Context
2017
Chapter 6 is an edited version of 'Chapter 1: The Roles of Universities in the African Context', originally published in Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education (see Cloete & Maassen 2015). The chapter traces how African universities have been grappling with the Castellian functions by situating them in the historical context in which African universities were established and steered.
Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education, 2008
This paper's principal purpose is to explore the range of ways in which African universities act as public institutions -i.e. how they both are shaped by and influence the social, political and economic contexts in which they are situated. In particular, it considers the multiple dimensions, often resulting in tensions in contexts of poverty, instability and radical transformation, of African universities as actors in politics, civil society and the public sphere. Drawing on recent projects and discussions in which the author took part, the paper tries in particular to explain how the degraded state of most universities in the region which began in the late 1970s and into the 1980s should not be taken to mean that they had become irrelevant to the societies and polities in which they were embedded. Examples are offered of how higher education institutions, and especially the major public universities (often of colonial origin), have often remained key sites for upward mobility strategies, critique and mobilisation on behalf of political change even in the face of authoritarian and corrupt regimes, in contexts of weakened national economies, and even when higher education (primarily encapsulated in public universities) fell out of favour of multilateral and bilateral cooperation agencies. In conclusion, the paper discusses current initiatives by international donors and development agencies to revitalise higher education in Africa, and ensure an 'expansion of tertiary institutions constructed as sites for personal advancement and private benefit' (The World Bank 2002) and how their managerial and cost-effective orientations may thin out the crucial public good dimension of African universities.
Revitalising Higher Education for Africa’s Future
2015
Over the last two decades, funding pressures have forced reforms in the legal framework of public universities in Africa. ‘Acts of Parliament’ and strong government direct control that dominated governance regimes of higher education institutions have given way to broad-based councils with wide representation in university governance organs. The strong emergence of private higher education institutions in the continent has led to the development of alternative forms of institutional management different from those that previously dominated in public institutions. But most of these reforms have resulted in new governance concerns revolving around financing and management, quality of teaching and research, and institutional autonomy. Prompted by the implications of these new concerns, guided by a strong belief that governance frameworks should respect institutional autonomy and institutional management, and that tenets of shared governance are critical to building quality higher educa...
4 - Revitalising Higher Education for Africa’s Future
Journal of Higher Education in Africa
Over the last two decades, funding pressures have forced reforms in the legal framework of public universities in Africa. ‘Acts of Parliament’ and strong government direct control that dominated governance regimes of higher education institutions have given way to broad-based councils with wide representation in university governance organs. The strong emergence of private higher education institutions in the continent has led to the development of alternative forms of institutional management different from those that previously dominated in public institutions. But most of these reforms have resulted in new governance concerns revolving around financing and management, quality of teaching and research, and institutional autonomy. Prompted by the implications of these new concerns, guided by a strong belief that governance frameworks should respect institutional autonomy and institutional management, and that tenets of shared governance are critical to building quality higher educa...
Realising the Vision: The Discursive and Institutional Challenges of Becoming an African University
2005
At the 1992 General Assembly of CODESRIA, Archie Mafeje,the South African social scientist, presented a paper with the sub-title: ‘Breaking bread with my fellow-travellers’. The paper itself was vintage Mafeje: an eloquently written tour de force, which took no prisoners; but (and this is my point of departure) it was a discourse defined by its sub-title. It was ‘breaking bread’ with people with whom, as academic and public intel lec tuals, he shared common cause and aspira tions about the continent and its peoples. I could well sub-title my presen tation ‘Breaking bread with my fellow-travellers’ but that would not be quite original. If not as subtitle, at least as sub-text, I would like to engage in breaking bread with fellow-travellers. Breaking bread with one’s fellow-travellers may suggest different entry-points and takes on a subject but there is a shared concern with nourishing all those who partake in the meal. Like a Bedouin evening meal, it is also not something to be rushed.
Development priorities for African universities
International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 2015
African knowledge remains at best on the margins, struggling for an epistemological foothold in the face of an ever dominant Western canon. At worst, African knowledge is disparaged, depreciated, and dismissed. It is often ignored even by African scholars who, having gained control of the academy in the postcolonial context, seemingly remain mesmerized by the Western canon in most dimensions of thought, inquiry, theorization, culture (classical as well as popular), and ideology. Such is the hegemonic influence of historical legacy and current power relations in the production and dissemination of knowledge. This paper argues that African knowledge, given appropriate impetus, can serve as a powerful stimulus to development. Against the backdrop of intractable development challenges, the paper will explore the role of African universities in the creation, dissemination, and support of African knowledge; and the preservation of indigenous knowledge. Since a scholarly effort towards int...