The seed for a Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) was incubated in what Dick Fehnel called the ‘coffee grounds of Braamfontein’. During that percolating period of the mid-1990s Braamfontein was being rejuvenated by the anti-apartheid NGOs, in close proximity to the post–apartheid development aid agencies, and the still politically incorrect but ever present, Wits University.

The idea for CHET received its political approval in mid-1996 at a Magaliesburg retreat which was attended by a plethora of ‘new heavy weights’ – Sibusiso Bengu, Blade Nzimande, Sipho Pityana, Nasima Badsha and Naledi Pandor. From the very start there was a negotiated tension between two possible configurations for CHET – as a capacity-building agency (the funder view) and as a policy/research organisation (it was evident that policy development was not going to end with the National Commission on Higher Education). As with the outcome of the ‘implicit bargain’ between the African National Congress and the National Party in the early 1990s, CHET’s work would be both empirical and symbolic.

The first tranche of funding for CHET from the Ford and Kellogg Foundations arrived prior to the completion of the NCHE. Thus, in order for the Executive Officer and the Research Director of the NCHE to complete the NCHE report and establish CHET, the first offices were located close to the NCHE offices in the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) building in Pretoria. CHET was launched with the moral, and some infrastructure, support from the then president of the HSRC, Rolf Stumpf.

The first CHET staff members included Charmine Chetty who set up the office, Maya Kirkhope who established the Governance Capacity Building project, and Bridget Nichols who developed the website. Currently, Charmine is in the South African embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Maya is the special assistant to the President of the Association of Governing Boards (Washington) and Bridget has moved to Australia after ten years with CHET.

In 2000, CHET moved into the beautifully restored historic building on the Unisa Sunnyside campus (with Antony Melck as landlord) on a site where it was rumoured that Winston Churchill had been held captive during the Anglo-Boer war. (According to Churchill, he talked his captors into untying him and then escaped by swimming across the mighty Apies River which is about two metres wide and thirty centimetres deep.)

An analysis of the workshops and seminars conducted by CHET offers an insight into CHET’s activities and preoccupations over the past ten years. In total, CHET organised 326 meetings between 1997 and 2006. Taking into consideration that very few meetings were scheduled during the months of December and January, CHET hosted an average of 3.3 meetings each month over the decade. But averages are deceptive. During 2000 and 2001 CHET experienced a peak period when it held 150 workshops/seminars, or 7.5 per month over a 20-month period. This was at the time when the USAID-funded Governance Capacity Building project was at its height. It also coincided with Manuel Castells’ South African ‘globalisation’ tour. In contrast, between 2005 and 2007, CHET hosted an average of 10 events per year, or roughly one event per month. Approximately 30 people attend each CHET event which means that about 10 000 participants attended CHET workshops and seminars over the ten-year period.

 

 

The spread of the workshops and seminars bears testament to CHET’s shifting interests and priorities over the past decade. Capacity building is the activity for which CHET organised most events (130) and was the activity that made CHET a household name in South African higher education. It was also the most unsatisfying and most problematic aspect of CHET’s work. USAID and its Department of Education partner applied great pressure for immediate training. But it was capacity building based on ‘practitioner story telling’ and hasty United States adaptations. (No wonder Maya moved effortlessly from running workshops for governing bodies in South Africa to doing the same in the United States.) There was neither the time, the funds nor sufficient expertise to develop a proper South African knowledge base to underpin the capacity building exercises. These workshops made little difference to the high-capacity institutions, while the low-capacity (crisis) institutions had no ‘capacity’ to implement whatever insights they gained from the workshops. (It was the mid-level institutions that most often rated the workshops highly, but that was not what the ‘sponsors’ wanted!)

The most satisfying aspect of the capacity building work was the Planning/Performance Indicators component. From 1998 to 2001, 17 workshops were held in order to link the
planning efforts of the Department of Education to institutional planning. Although these workshops did not provide technical skills training, they served as forums for sharing expertise and
expectations.

Starting with the highly controversial Best in Higher Education study in 1998, to the 2007 Cross-National Higher Education Performance (Efficiency) Indicators project (seven countries in Africa), a systematic investigation into system and institutional performance has been undertaken which has resulted in the publication of four books. The latest national workshop (2 November 2006), held in partnership with the Department of Education, Higher Education South Africa and Integrated Tertiary Software (ITS), used parts of this research to present a model on how institutions can improve governance by using indicators that are peer-referenced and linked to national targets. The lesson learnt: capacity building is a long-term, systematic enterprise that requires an ‘organic’ knowledge base.

The other negative experience of the capacity building exercise was that it resulted in a large staff complement (11) and plush offices. During 1999 alone, chet employed 45 consultants and had 8 steering committees involving 50 high profile members. Overheads of more than a R100 000 per month, frequent staff tensions and endless time spent on monitoring delivery and finances, was exactly what CHET had not set out to be. This confronted chet with having to move from theorising about transformation to practising it. A serious rethink during 2002
culminated in a memorable Kruger Park weekend where it was decided to abandon the ‘Big CHET’ phase, as well as the initial CHET Board decision that in order ‘to work with government, one has to be in close proximity to government’.

After 2002 CHET stopped organising ‘on request’ capacity building or diversity/equity workshops. The post-2002 meetings were more closely related to the Ford- and Carnegie-funded Policy Dialogues that bring together institutional and government decision-makers and academics to discuss contentious policy issues in higher education.

The higher education studies expertise network meetings only started in 2002. The two areas in which chet held at least one meeting a year over the decade included assessing change (mainly institutional and system indicators), globalisation, knowledge and development. Although CHET is quite well known for working in the area of government–institutional relationships, only four specific meetings were held to address this issue directly. In March 2003 the ‘new CHET’ (re)emerged in the ‘sleepy hollow’ (and other unprintable opinions of Cape Town) linked through Jim Leatt’s acumen to the considerable administrative infrastructure of the Cape Higher Education Consortium. This enabled chet to return to its initial model of a small, flexible management structure with a strong reliance on outsourcing administrative support on a ‘pay for use’ basis.

The ‘new CHET’ refocused on a more traditional notion of capacity building, namely strengthening higher education studies through teaching and research, in partnership with the University of the Western Cape (South Africa), Oslo University (Norway) and Makerere University (Uganda). Linked to this are two major research projects; higher education and development (economic and democratic) and performance indicators. Both of these projects involve a range of other African countries, which is the beginning of implementing of what was simply a ‘symbolic’ ideal in 1996, namely, to become an intellectual resource for the African continent.