African
university managers have an increasingly sharp awareness of the
need for pro-active measures in cost reduction and revenue
enhancement, often prompted by new official policies on university
planning and financing. Behind the official policies frequently lie
the severe disciplines of macroeconomic structural adjustment, and
their application in sectoral policy. As high cost institutions,
which also appear to have excessively high unit costs by comparison
with primary schools, or national per capita incomes, or other
countries' unit costs (comparisons frequently made by the World
Bank's researchers), the African universities have been easy prey
in recent years to radical critiques of their cost structures.
Ironically,
the high cost charge has been laid at the very time that African
universities have experienced every kind of dilapidation and
professional humiliation as a result of budgetary stringency, high
inflation and currency depreciation. It is this very situation
which has compelled many universities to accept, even under
protest, the core of the World Bank's logic on university costs.
Few university executives would refuse new funding policies which
removed from their budgets, or reduced the subsidies of, municipal
and food and lodging services, provided they received more funds
for staff salaries, rehabilitation and maintenance, teaching
equipment and materials, and books and journals. The
rationalization of course offerings, the compulsory retirement of
(mainly non-academic) staff in order to meet new planning norms,
and the reconstruction of student finance, including increased fee
charges and the introduction or revival of student loans systems,
are highly controversial but are nonetheless being proceeded with
on many campuses.
The demands
made upon the management and planning systems of universities by
such changes have already been referred to. It is very important
that the whole transition should be properly documented and
analyzed, at least in a sample of universities. A snapshot picture
on some campuses will be given by the AAU/NUF-FIC/World Bank study,
but a collaborative research project involving several universities
is called for. Since the changes have already got under way in many
universities, the sooner a start can be made the better.
Reference has
already been made to the value of university managers being able to
share experience. Such meetings are not luxuries but necessities,
given the heavy demands being made on vice-chancellors and senior
administrators by the changes being implemented, and the untried
nature of many of them. The British Council's Committee for
International Cooperation in Higher Education (CICHE), following
the success of the September 1990 Lusaka workshop, will finance
others out of a special fund dedicated