Carrol, Bidemi and Joel Samoff (2004) “The promise of partnership and continuities of dependence: external support to higher education in Africa” in African Studies Review v. 47, no. 1.
p. 1: “Universities were to educate the thinkers and inventors, the policy-[makers] and decision-makers, the teachers of the teachers, the leaders of the leaders. “The role of the university in a developing country,” said President Julius Nyerere in 1967, “is to contribute; to give ideas, manpower, and service to the furtherance of human equality, human dignity, and human development”.”
p. 5: “Although Africa boasts a tradition of indigenous and Islamic higher education institutions that predate Western colonization, the roots of nearly all of the modern higher education institutions in Africa can be traced to the colonial period. From the start, modern higher education institutions in Africa were developed with external support, initially from religious entities and philanthropic organizations and later from colonial governments. Over the years since independence, other countries, international organizations, foreign higher education institutions, private foundations, and others have all provided support to African higher education.
1876 – Fourah Bay College affiliates with University of Durham, thus moving beyond its beginnings with the Church Missionary Society.
Britain – 1945 - Asquith Commission – headed by James Currie – developed first colonial government policies about higher education – opened the so-called “Asquith Colleges” – Gordon College, Khartoum (1946 - Sudan); University College, Ibadan (1947 - Nigeria), University College of the Gold Coast (1949 – Ghana); University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1949), and Makerere College (1949). All were managed – curriculum set, policies established, degrees awarded – by the University of London.
France – Institute for Higher Studies in Tunis (1945); IHS in Dakar (1950); IHS in Tananarive (1955). Dakar becomes first university in 1957.
p. 7: “Rather than a situation of external support, it was one of external control of African higher education. Although in principle educational institutions in Africa were to adhere to European standards, they were always a partial or defective copy of the metropolitan original (see Altbach & Kelly 1978). Notwithstanding the rhetoric, African institutions were never intended to be the equals of their metropolitan counterparts. Their main purpose was to control and shape social change in the colonies (see Gifford and Weiskel 1971).”
1950 – a UNESCO survey shows that of 34 African colonies surveyed, only eleven had universities (for a total of 16 universities. By 1962, 28 countries had universities, for a total of 42 universities. Compare with Sawyerr’s figures.
Replacing foreign civil servants and economic expansion – principle reasons to establish and/or expand universities in early post-colonial Africa.
ASPAU and AFGRAD – early iterations of fellowships/scholarships for Africans to study in the USA.
1962 – Rockefeller sponsored a meeting of foundations – they would focus on social, natural and bio-medical sciences; Ford Foundation would focus on social sciences, public administration, and strengthening infrastructure; Carnegie would focus on teacher education and training.
p. 8: “The [1962 UNESCO conference in] Tananarive participants – African academics and government officials, observers from other United Nations member states, and representatives of the U.N. - concluded that in addition to providing a space for teaching and research and maintaining international standards of academic quality, institutions of higher education were to contribute to the social, cultural, and economic development of resources to meet new “manpower” demands (UNESCO and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 1963:19). This conference thus reflected a broader sense of mission for African universities, focusing on their role in national development and marking the rise of the notion of the “developmental university” in Africa.
p. 10: “The World Bank was also concerned about what it described as the “over-expansion in the poorest countries of education at the highest levels, as evidenced by an increasing number of unemployed graduates. In 1988, in response to its own studies of the rates of return on education (which concluded that the greatest private and social benefits were at the primary level) and to the conclusions of other studies that subsidies for higher education did not benefit the poor . . . the Bank recommended the shifting of funds towards basic education. Even though higher education was considered “of paramount importance for Africa’s future,” its contribution to development continued to be criticized because it produced “too many graduates in many fields” and outputs of low quality at very high cost. The document outlined a “program for structural adjustment of universities” that advocated improvement in quality and efficiency and reduction in public funding.”
p. 13: “Support to education in Africa is thus best understood within a foreign aid policy framework that has been bolstered by different rationales over the years. Consider the United States. Assistance from the US became prominent in the 1950s and later, reflecting legislation passed after President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address articulating the US role in world economic recovery. Coleman and Court found this new legislation remarkable because it explicitly declared that “the economic development of under-developed areas was a national policy of the United States. Based upon a mixture of humanitarianism, national security, and economic self-interest, it marked the first formal articulation of the principle of the moral imperative of development assistance, which rapidly became part of an emergent international ethic.”
Soviet Union had three technical institutes in Africa by 1963 – Ghana, Guinea, and Ethiopia. And Africans began to study abroad in the Soviet Union in greater numbers in the 1960s – by 1963, 3,000 students were enrolled in institutions in the Soviet Union.
p. 14; “A unique Soviet innovation was the establishment of the Lumumba Friendship University in the Soviet Union for students from Third World countries. In a 1960 Radio Moscow broadcast, Krushchev explained that this new university was established to “give aid to colonial and neo-colonial Third-World countries in the training of their national cadres of engineers, agricultural specialists, doctors, teachers, economists, and specialists.” . . . This university differed from other Soviet institutions in that it did not require a formal secondary degree for admissions. Nor did its students require authorization from their governments. Like other Soviet projects, the focus of Friendship University was on developing technical and scientific skills.”
p. 14: “Berman argues forcefully that foundations like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie collaborated with U.S. government agencies in the “execution of a foreign policy that protected the interests of the U.S. and of the world capitalist system upon which that policy rested” (1983:39; see also Arnove 1980). These foundations supported programs in higher education in Africa that reflected their beliefs that the implantation of U.S. notions of democracy and governance would improve the lives of poor Africans and that investing in human capital would stimulate economic growth.”
p. 15: “The foundations also focused their attention and funding on particular disciplines and areas of research. Ford and Rockefeller, for example, paid particular attention to the social sciences because of their belief in the power to “rationally manage social change” and in “an assumed link between social science and enlightened policy determination” (Berman 1983:79). Their support of research institutes and departments of economics, such as the East African Institute of Social Research and the Department of Economics at Makerere University in Uganda, gave them a direct connection to social policymaking in those countries. This effort to shape the institutions of knowledge production was stimulated by, and in turn reinforced, the broader trend of the era, which Coleman and Court characterize as the “global diffusion of the modern university,” and the “shifting perspectives regarding the relationship between higher education and development.”
Re: BRAIN DRAIN
p. 24: “International mobility is essential, not detrimental, to higher education in Africa. Surely a policy of intellectual isolation would be very short-sighted. It seems timely, then, to proceed beyond the dichotomous notions of either encouraging or discouraging the brain drain and to look toward genuine collaborations that recognize the internationalization of higher education and wish to use the situation to Africa’s advantage. This requires examining who benefits from particular sorts of arrangements and focusing on ways to increase the likelihood of genuine intellectual exchange. This also requires assurances that cooperating institutions are structuring their relationships in ways likely to support institutional development in Africa.”
The FINANCIAL-INTELLECTUAL COMPLEX – Samoff’s conception of the academic realm of commissioned research. The connection between foreign aid, education research, & senior academics. These academics become essentially paid staff of the funding organizations/agencies, beholden to prior views held by the funding agencies.
USAID 1990s programming focused on partnerships linkages between institutions in Africa and the US.
(1) University Development Linkages Project (UDLP) – 35% of this program’s budget (so, approximately $14 million over nine years) is focused on Africa, to support institution-to-institution program/project development, including new academic initiatives.
(2) Tertiary Education Linkages Project (TELP) – South Africa focused. Disappointing reviews focused on how the US-based institutions essentially hogged resources, sent people to South Africa, but did not reciprocate by supporting flow to the USA in any meaningful sense.
(3) International Development Linkages (IDP)
(4) Higher Education Partnership for Development (HEPD)
(5) Advanced Training for Leadership and Skills (ATLAS)
(6) Collaborative Research Support Program (CRSP)
University Perspectives/Orientations – pages 44-45
(1) University as center for higher level skills training – an economistic model
(2) University as center for development – two forms:
a. development as functionalism. National development; central planning to some degree. Higher education is but one piece of the strategies for development;
b. development as generative. Create new paths, new ideas, breaking old moulds. Reconsider-reconceptualizing
(3) University as liberal education – develop informed, educated young people, independent from development needs or strategies. Learning as broad-based, and leading, eventually to development.
(4) Higher education institutions as centers of intellectual development – more critical-analysis minded than #3. Inquiry, investigation, exploration, reflection. Here, institutions insist on greater autonomy from the State and other external control-minded bodies
(5) University as one cog in an alliance with private sector – attendant to business
(6) University as a key to national liberation – decolonization of the mind. Fanon, Biko, Ngugi, others. Liberate individual minds, but also liberate curricula, disciplinary structures – Africanize or localize the university – the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and 1970s stands out as an example here.
Working Group on Higher Education – within the Donors to African Education group that is World Bank-funded – page 47, a set of guidelines on external assistance to African higher education. A 14-point list that is not all that new or different from what many authors mention in their work.
