Making service count

By Charlotte Mbali, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UKZN

The subsidies that South African Higher Education institutions get from the government are primarily allocated according to two measures: counts of students, and counts of research articles. But this only covers two of the three often defined purposes of Higher Education : teaching, research AND service. This means that in any internal system of allocating departmental budgets or promotions on the basis of the measures that count for the subsidy inputs, the service work that is done by academics will be invisible. With less incentive to do it, and fewer resources for such work, it may gradually be abandoned, leading to a distortion in the function of Higher Education, and a mis-alignment between mission statements that are big on social relevance, and resource allocation that ignores the service activities. This paper will discuss the results of a survey about the types of service work that academics at UKZN consider needs to be taken into account, and how resources are currently found for them. It proposes a way of measuring such work via institution-based evaluation, that should ideally feed into a national system of evaluating such work in such a way that the national HE subsidies also provides incentives for the social service function of Higher Education in South Africa.