Future of universities rests in bold, visionary leadership

On September 25, 2014, the interim committee overseeing the establishment of the National Open University of Kenya project revealed that Kenya’s first ever institution of higher learning dedicated to online learning might become a reality by December this year.

The prospects of a digital university herald a blissful technological revolution in our universities, but it also reveals that all is not well with the higher education business model.

Certainly, Kenya’s higher education is now at the crossroads, with universities facing serious questions about their own future.

After nearly three decades of liberalisation of higher education, the university has become like the enchanted wild horse, free to run with the winds but difficult to rein in.

One scenario depicts liberalisation of higher education as a welcome earthquake that has irreversibly democratised access to a university certificate, diploma or degree.

The idea of a university as a citadel or preserve of a tiny elite is gone with the winds.

Higher education is now accessible to ordinary mortals with workers now able to train and re-train as they work.

In slightly over three decades, the higher education business has experienced a meteoric expansion from a single university — University of Nairobi — to 48, including 22 public universities and constituent colleges, 14 chartered private universities and 12 universities with Letter of Interim Authority.

The second scenario is that the entry of the market logic has cast doubts over the stable future of the prevailing higher education model.

Expectedly, a dramatic expansion of student enrolment and persistent public thirst for higher education has resulted in capacity over-stretch across universities and over-reliance on dwindling government funding and subsidies.

This has, in turn, lowered the overall quality of education and distorted the moral mission of the academy as a model of functionality.

Even established higher education institutions like the University of Nairobi — the oldest, largest and best-ranked, with over 70,000 students and 5,500 staff — is feeling the heat of rising institutional costs, costly investment in technology and galloping staff salaries and administrative costs.

EASING BACKLOG

Against the backdrop of these two scenarios, managers and thinkers of the higher education business view on-line education as a blissful earthquake, and a solution to the myriad dilemmas posed by the commercialisation of universities.

In Kenya, the government views the promise of digital education signified by the Open University as a way of easing a backlog of at least 40,000 would-be students.

This backlog, which has existed since 2010, has delayed the country’s dream of a stable, effective, affordable and accessible higher education system.

In July, the government disclosed that it was out to fast-track the online university by getting private investors to inject at least US$23.5 million into what will become the country’s eighth public university.

“We will use private investors since what we are able to raise from our coffers is too little,” said Education Cabinet Secretary Prof Jacob Kaimenyi.

Soaring this hope was Kenya’s growing investor confidence exemplified in June when the country sold US$2 billion though a sovereign bond that was oversubscribed four times.

Optimism is now in the air that online learning will significantly reduce the cost of education and increase access to anyone with a smartphone or laptop.

But a digital degree or diploma is hardly the silver bullet to the slew of challenges facing the university sector.

Indeed, the technological revolution comes with its own challenges to the higher education’s business model.

The legal quandary that planners of the government’s laptop project finds themselves in reveals the myriad challenges of closing Africa’s digital divide.

As such, digital learning is unlikely to overturn the higher education model of lecturing, cramming and examinations, which has hardly changed for centuries.

NEW MARKET LOGIC

In the next decade, the university will require a visionary, innovative, transformative and dynamic leadership with a long view of development to meet the challenges of the 21st century and seize the opportunities it offers in learning and research.

University managers and thinkers must address the impact of the new market logic in the university, which has distorted the vital balance between teaching and research, and stressed teaching as a principal source of quick dispensable incomes.

It should not be business as usual.

Kenya’s higher education demands a transformative leadership at the helm of universities who will decidedly use the advantages of the unfolding technological revolution and balance between the three core roles of a university: learning, research and service to humanity.

This calls for innovative resource mobilisation and fund-raising strategies to widen the resource base of universities to reduce over-reliance on state subsidies and quick incomes from teaching and support research.

Over-reliance on the Higher Education Loans Board as the only source of student funding is stoking a culture of protest in universities.

Last week, university students across the country stormed the streets over delays in disbursing their loans.

A common suggestion to pull universities out of the crisis of funding students is to bring commercial banks to provide students with loans.

However, individual universities should explore alternative sources of supporting students and research through grants.

Even as we surf the waves of technological innovations now poised to change the way we conduct university business, we also need to build broad-based partnerships of stakeholders — industry, governments, students, alumni organisations and foundations to put university funding on a stable keel and expand training and research opportunities for students.

Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute