and the
qualitative rehabilitation of the universities.
The December
1990 AAU/DAE Working Group meeting in Accra noted that it is
impossible to make a clinical division between the two broad areas
of governance/management and quality enhancement, so it has chosen
to devote its next meeting to these two themes, concentrating on
research and postgraduate capacity under the `quality' heading. The
need for studies on research and postgraduate capacity received
special attention during this consultation and generated the second
main cluster of topics on the above list of research proposals.
Again, the essential link between the two themes is manifest, since
the organizational and managerial requirements of achieving a
selective development of disciplines within a national or
sub-regional system is high, as they are for installing a
successful structure of postgraduate work and effective research
management.
Although not
referred to in the body of the report, several other research needs
were suggested during the consultation which have a direct bearing
on both qualitative and organizational improvement: investigating
the appropriate organization of curricula and teaching methods to
take account of increased undergraduate enrolments; the development
of alternative models of delivery, including part-time night school
courses and `summer schools' with transferable course-credit
arrangements to encourage flexible enrolments, and assessing
alternative models of distance education at the university level
and the pre-requisites for success under present conditions;
mounting tracer studies of university graduates as a means of
monitoring both admissions decisions and curricular relevance; and
analyzing matriculation and admissions data as a guide to course
developers.
Finally, in a
class of its own is the proposal for a region-wide collaborative
study of the academic labor market in Africa in view of the
accelerated turnover of academic staff in many universities and the
possible effects of the opening of South Africa to a legitimate
trade in university staff.
Enhancing research capacity
It is clear
that there is no shortage of research needs and ideas for projects.
What is less clear is where research on higher education in Africa
can best be done, and how African capacity for undertaking such
research can be enhanced.
De facto,
much research on higher education is done by or commissioned by
international agencies, and there are at present several active
research programs at this level which involve Africa. The World
Bank has embarked on an elaborate world-wide study of higher
education, which will include case studies from all geographic
regions including Africa, and possibly the organization of regional
seminars to discuss them. This initiative might result in a Bank
policy paper on higher education. It might therefore be a vehicle
through which a considerable part of the reconsideration of donor
higher education policies would be transacted, in which case it
would be appropriate for the African university