Regulating Higher Education

Nov 12, 2012 Editorial

President Donald Ramotar, himself a graduate of the University of Guyana (UG) delivered a trenchant critique of the institution when he addressed its 46th convocation last Saturday night. He touched on a gamut of issues that have been well ventilated in the public sphere over the last few years.
These include funding challenges for the public institution; political posturing on salaries; opportunity for selling services and the need for private sector scholarships. But his strongest call was for an improvement in standards.
Handing out some verbal bouquets to lecturers who harked to high standards, the President warned: “The university cannot, however, approach and must not tolerate lecturers who fail to prepare properly for their classes, fail to show up for their lectures, fail to submit examination grades on time and fail to maintain required standards.” It is very possible that the President was even speaking from his own experience.
In reference to improving standards, the President noted that the Caribbean Development Bank has already embarked on a project to reformulate the regulatory and operational framework of UG so as to raise its standards to acceptable international levels.
The recommendations are supposed to be presented by month end. But this raises the issue as to whether there will be benchmarks established to ensure that there is accountability by the administration and staff. The following is one approach to introducing this end.
There has been a global move towards new accountability regimes in higher education in recent years, promoted by American or European actors as well as by International organizations like the World Bank or UNESCO. External Quality Assurance (QA) policies of universities, like accreditations and audits, reflect a paradigmatic shift of regulatory policies in the higher education sector.
This process is not undisputed, and those promoting QA partly face strong opposition, as traditional and collegial forms of ‘assuring quality’ in higher education are fundamentally called into question by QA as a new public management tool. However, not withstanding these contestations, new accountability regimes have become a widely accepted governance mechanism in higher education in very different contexts.
QA gained momentum because of its ‘adaptivity’: QA is a concept to which a variety of meanings can be attached, and thus very different, partly contradictory interests can be accommodated by implementing these reforms.
Thus, these new accountability regimes can be linked to very different ideas such as re-establishing public governance, strengthening market governance, contributing to national competitiveness, internationalization of higher education, positioning universities in the (global) education market and contributing to democratic transformation.
With reference to the case of Chile, we can identify very different ways of translation and appropriation. Chile was among the ‘first movers’ in terms of adopting QA for higher education and introduced these reforms in a process of transition to democracy since the early 1990s. This process, of course, was initiated after the excesses of the Pinochet regime – authoritarian like ours in Guyana in the eighties but firmly on the right.
The Chilean case of introducing QA in higher education can be seen as a struggle between the idea to re-regulate a higher education sector liberalized and privatized under dictatorial rule and the dominant ideology of market governance. In Guyana, tertiary education was partially liberalised with the introduction of fees on the insistence of the IMF.
Due to the broadly accepted belief in market-forces and a prevailing discourse about the benefits of market governance, QA as a policy of public re-regulation was heavily opposed. Hopefully we should not face too much resistance here, excepting from lecturers who do not want to perform to standards.
Of interest to Guyana is that some promoters of QA ‘jumped scales’ and shifted the forums of struggles by inviting the World Bank to support Chile with a program introducing new accountability regimes in higher education. On the other hand, QA was simultaneously discursively framed as facilitating market transparency in the liberalized sector and as strengthening Chile’s position in the globalised education sector via establishing globally recognized ‘quality standards’.
The bottom line is that we must have accountability.

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