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HERANA 3 Meeting Date: 18 to 21 November 2014 Venue: CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch

Transcripts

Index

1. Emerging research-intensive flagship universities – Nico Cloete………………………………....................3

2. Moving towards a research intensive university: Eduardo Mondlane – Patricio Langa ……………..11

3. Internal differentiation: identifying and supporting knowledge production within an institution – Gerald Ouma………………………………………………………………………………………………………….27

4. Efforts to strengthen research at Makerere – Florence Nakayiwa and Vincent Ssembatya………..33

5. Incentives for research: > University of Cape Town – Christina Pather……………………………………..42

6. Institutional Presentations:

Botswana………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….50

Ghana……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….55

Nairobi………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………59

Mauritius…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..66

Makerere………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….69

UCT…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..74

Dar es Salaam…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..80

Eduardo……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………85

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Transcription: Presentation: Emerging research‐intensive flagship universities in Africa Presented by Nico Cloete (Director, CHET) HERANA 3 workshop 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch We are going to be looking at our two main aims for HERANA 3. The first is the issue of institutionalising the data process that we started. As I said last night, this is actually a unique data set in the world. No one else has such a comprehensive data set on eight African universities on comparable indicators with the same measurement – the same data – for the same indicators. What we were very impressed with was this: in the first round, it took us about a year and a half of the project to get the beginnings of a dataset together. Then it took another year to clean it up, with going back and forth and sorting it out. But in the second round, we simplified our data sheet a bit and the institutions all responded within two or three. So it's quite clear to us that the data collection capacity in the institutions has increased dramatically. But the basic question of HERANA 3, and the question that Carnegie asked is: How institutionalised is this data collection? And this does not only apply to data. In many of our institutions, we collect data, but data means nothing if it is not translated into an indicator or analytical information that you can use. So the real issue is the step from data to indicator, and then from indicator into the planning process or into use in the institution. That's basically what I asked you to prepare short presentations on for each institution for Friday morning. How institutionalised is that process in the institution? Is it working or are you mainly just collecting data? The other issue that I've seen in a number of the institutions is that they produce handbooks of data which then sometimes go to parliament. But I have serious doubts that they are any use to parliament, and I'm even more doubtful that they of any use in the institutions, because the data tables are not converted into indicators and are not compared to anything. If you don't compare your indicators between faculties or to a peer institution, what are you doing with these data tables? It only helps to get a bit of money from parliament or to tell the council that so many students have graduated this year, and so many students have enrolled. We really have to get beyond that phase if we want to use information for planning in the institution. Then the second area of focus of HERANA 3 is the process of strengthening knowledge production. When I look at the first half of the agenda for the Dakar African Higher Education Summit next year, I see that a lot of these projects in Africa are putting every issue on the table, with data getting collected for everything. From the start of HERANA, we decided that we were going to focus on this loose notion of knowledge production. If Africa is to become part of the knowledge economy, the institutions are going to have to step up knowledge production. The OECD measures knowledge production in higher education mainly through PhDs and research output, but we look at a number of other indicators that we think contribute to that too. You can see on the handout that we gave

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you on the empirical report that we developed a set of indicators which we think could be useful. Worldwide, there's a discussion about improving and strengthening knowledge production and developing research universities. Jamil Salmi is going around giving lectures on what a world-class university is, and making more money now than he made when he was working at the World Bank. What the Shanghai rankings have done everywhere is put pressure on institutions to perform; and not only to perform, but to perform competitively internationally. Every university, however small, is aware of the Shanghai rankings. They are a kind of assessment of reputation. Shanghai is a method to assess status in higher education across the world, and it's had a huge impact on money flows and who gets funded for what. But I find the Shanghai rankings absolutely useless for institutional improvement. I mean, how do you produce a Nobel Prize winner? What do you do in the institution? Johan [Mouton] is going to comment on the way it is weighted this afternoon. But our attempt is to develop a set of indicators that institutions can actually respond to and say, ‘This is something that we can actually improve in the institution.’ We hope we will have an outcome that is different: that we will stimulate a certain kind of behaviour or a certain set of outcomes. For that reason, we talk quite a bit in terms of inputs and outputs. Earlier today, Tebogo [Moja] and I were discussing the international consultancies developing worldwide. I actually had two requests yesterday to join global consultancies. These consultants go into universities: universities pay them a few million and they fly in and they tell them the story. This isn't only in developing countries. Frans van Vught was just involved with the University of Oslo where they probably spent a million to develop something they called a 'ladder to the sky'. One of the academics said, ‘But in Oslo you can hardly ever see the sky, so that's already a bad start.’ The response from some of the academics that I'm talking to inside the institution is that it's absolutely useless. At their faculty meeting, they said, ‘This doesn't help us, let's move on.’ With HERANA, we think that if we are going bring about some reform – or some strengthening – inside the institutions, it's going to have to be driven from inside the institutions, with some external assistance or advice. What we decided right from the beginning was that the key department is planning for research management. We still don't have enough research managers here, but we are talking with Johan [Mouton] about a training programme for research managers next year. UCT is also busy with this on a big scale. But that's another discussion. The idea here is that, as a group, we develop some indicators which you can take to your institutions to see if they are useful, as well as to see if there are other indicators which you think are more specific to your institution and that will be more helpful to you. Then, hopefully, Ian, Charles and others like them can assist you in developing the indicators. But then you will also have to develop some kind of a strategy on how you think you are going to get this into the institution. What we talk about in the deliverables is establishing at least some kind of forum – some group of people – who can discuss how you get this

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into the institution. In some institutions, people may decide that you rather focus on one or two faculties or departments rather than the whole institution. Peter Maasen is doing a big study looking at the issue of knowledge production in fifteen flagship universities around the world – these are fifteen, top Nordic, European and Australian universities – and specifically looking at the research and H.R. offices and what role they are playing. One of the things that they have already found is that, in all of these universities, they sit with at least 50% of the staff who are not producing anything except their minimum of teaching. Worldwide, there's a problem in moving them. Legally you can't fire them: they use academic freedom and autonomy to protect their jobs. So this leans towards the notion that if you try to bring about knowledge production reforms, you've got to focus on the people who are performing and the people who are close to producing. Trying to change the whole institution and get everything moving hasn't happened anywhere in the world. There are probably only a few of the top ten institutions where everybody is publishing and producing. (Johan [Mouton] will talk this afternoon about the 80:20 phenomenon.) So, when we think about attempts to improve or strengthen knowledge production in an institution, a key thing to keep in mind is this: Where do you start an institution-strengthening process? After my general talk this morning, Patricio [Langa] will discuss Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, the first institution out of the blocks, coming directly from the HERANA project. Patricio will tell you what they are doing and how they have gone about doing it. Our other HERANA product, Dr Ouma, is now in charge of institutional research at the University of Pretoria (UP). UP is probably the furthest down the line in South Africa on departmental performance. Every department is assessed and evaluated. It sends shivers down some people's backs and others think this is the way to go. But he will tell you what they do. A key focus is the issue of incentives. One of our HERANA Masters students, Agnes [Lutomiah], has done her Masters dissertation on the University of Nairobi. We also have one of Peter [Maasen]’s students in Oslo who has done a study on Makerere, and we will share the results of those with you. And then, as the top knowledge-production university in the HERANA group, UCT's going to tell us what it does and doesn’t do. In the afternoon, Johan [Mouton] is going to talk about bibliometrics and rankings and how you can understand them. Johan is by far the top guy in Africa – in fact, one of the top guys in the world – in that field. Below is a model that François [van Schalkwyk] and I developed as part of the proposal to Carnegie. It puts together the different components of the project: advocacy (François will talk about advocacy tomorrow), capacity development and empirically based reform.

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One key point is that the universities are the only institutions that have what Joe Muller and Peter Maasen call ‘regenerative capacity’ in each of the countries. They are the ones that reproduce PhDs; they produce research. Research institutes worldwide don't produce PhDs and they don't produce the human capital for the next round. That’s what the university’s function in society is; and there's no other institution that can compete with the university on that. Another point is that the traditional role of universities in Africa was mainly to train professionals, particularly the bureaucracy after independence. Then, of course, there is community service, pushed largely by development aid and based on the assumption that the university sits with a lot of fat cats with a lot of capacity who are not publishing much so they may just as well go and help the communities. But of course we know universities are very bad at that. Academics are not social workers or development agents so that's really a bad use of their very good human capital. One of the biggest issue in higher education in Africa is simply the issue of massification. We need to get a higher proportion of students into universities. We will talk at some stage about how using multiple, small, private institutions is really a bad route to getting them. That's something that we will have to re-discuss, I hope at least, at the Summit. I think the most bizarre example of it is the fact that Mauritius has sixty universities and a population of 1.2 million, which is just smaller than Cape Town. So their participation goes up, but the question is about the quality of these institutions, and how you manage quality across so many institutions? Tracey [Bailey] will talk about the councils and the difficulty they are having in accrediting and handling all these multiple institutions (in some countries, a couple of hundred of them).

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Another big issue is differentiation: acknowledging that a country needs one or two research universities that will get extra funding to do research that they can pull up the system overall; and recognising that not everybody in the system has to do the same thing. [Gerald] Ouma wrote a summary article which pulls together a lot of things that we've been talking about for a long time: that there is always focus on these top research universities – Harvard, Stanford and all these places - but actually developing countries also need research universities. They need top-end universities too. Manuel Castells argues that if you don't have at least one top university in your country, what happens is that the elite then send its children out of the country to other places, and then of course it pays even less tax towards building up the university. So you weaken the whole system if you don't actually have at least one strong institution which is supported by government. There is an argument globally that these research universities are ivory towers that are isolated from the communities. That is simply not true. Big universities like Harvard and Stanford are highly involved in industry and developing new things, because the money comes from outside and they respond to that. So a research university does not have to be an institution where people just sit. In any case, you can't actually do research by just sitting in the institution. You've got to be engaged with the wider community to do it. We are looking at developing a book called Africa Rising? with a question mark behind it, because there is enormous development taking place in Africa, stimulated by all kinds of different things. But there are also a whole lot of strange things going on in Africa. As some countries settle into democracy – like Ghana – then other countries starts unravelling, so the development is uneven. In the research area, there’s the stuff that the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University has done, and Paul Zaleza has done a summary. And there’s also the new observatory in Guinea: an African Observatory for Science and Innovation funded by the African Union. They've put out their first research report which is very useful to look at. It gives some indicator of research and science for every country. The main thing that the report shows is that research output has gone up; and, in some cases, quite dramatically. This is the same as you will see in our data on most of the institutions in the HERANA group. The thing about globalisation is that it’s a movement. So you can't stand still in this. If you stand still, then you actually go backwards because others move past you. So while Africa is rising, China is also rising, and South Korea is rising, and Brazil is rising. So there are a whole lot of other countries that are also on the move. As a continent we are definitely on the move: in some cases not as fast as we should be, but nevertheless. If you look at the African Union in terms of the number of people, and you then look at India, China and Brazil, we are actually just behind them; and, as a continent, we actually outperform Russia. Zaleza summarises the four issues that he thinks are facing Africa and that we should look at. His focus is on what I call ‘African dreams’. He proposes an ideal situation which doesn't even operate in most of the developed countries. For me, the main problem with it is that he implies there needs to be more for everybody: more money for higher

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education, more money for students and more money for research. The question is: Who actually gets this ‘more’? You cannot continue to give ‘more’ that gets spread out across everybody. The research universities are actually a small percentage of the universities in any system. After Pundy Pillay and I wrote a report for HERANA 1 (the report comparing South Africa to South Korea), the National Planning Commission (NPC) also started comparing South Africa to South Korea. We looked so bad on everything because South Korea has got the best school system in the world. South Korea has the same population as South Africa; and in 1948, our GDPs were almost exactly the same. Now they've got almost three times more than us, even though they started from the same place as us. Currently, the NPC is using Malaysia. It has only half the population of South Africa but it’s done an interesting thing: it’s selected five of its 65 universities as research universities. This has had a massive impact on the system already. Malaysia’s PhD enrolments have gone up from something like 10–12 000 to 40 000 in six years and its research publications has more than doubled. But it took a lot of politics and a lot of effort to get there. And their system has interesting things built into it, such as that the research universities have to get certain grants and have to cooperate with weaker universities or universities that are still developing. Remember, Malaysia is also an affirmative-action society like ours. So that is a model: you create a number of strong institutions which must then help pull up the other ones, and also produce academics that can go and teach in those institutions. I'm just quickly going to run over the indicators from HERANA: An Empirical Overview of Eight Flagship Universities in Africa. This shows the problem of our flagship universities: they are undergraduate, teaching universities. What's quite surprising is that the proportion of postgraduates to undergraduates has hardly moved over a period of ten years. One of the problems that I presume Patricio [Langa] will talk about is that, in looking for money, our flagship universities started competing with private universities for students, meaning that they were competing not for PhD or Masters students, but for undergraduate students in business science and so on. That's exactly what an undifferentiated system does. In my opinion, you should leave business studies to these private institutions. Let them do it. At UCT, they had a big debate some time ago about accountants. When accountants said they would not publish, one of the professors stood up and said, ‘In that case, you must leave and go to the city. Put your offices there. You don't belong in the university.’ Let’s look at academic staff with PhDs. There’s definitely a strong link between staff with PhDs, having PhD students and research output. For a start, you need staff with PhDs who can actually supervise PhDs. Take Makerere: it has done a miraculous thing, unprecedented in the world. In one year, they went from 45% of their staff having PhDs to having 90% with PhDs according to the Shanghai review of Makerere University. Vincent will explain to us how the profile of the institution is changing. Another factor is senior staff. We were surprised that some institutions had a very low proportion of senior staff. A problem with senior staff is that that the senior academics get pulled into senior staff positions which means they stop doing research and stop publishing. The college system in our universities, where there are seven or eight colleges, each with a principal with a BMW and a secretary and other staff, has created these

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islands of duplication of what happens at the central place, which also takes more and more academics away from being academics. So that's an issue which you will have to look at in your individual institutions. Where are the really qualified people who are publishing? Are they doing that or are they sitting in offices with fancy secretaries who bring them tea? Looking at doctoral enrolments, you can see that only Mauritius and Dar es Salaam had dips. In general, there is an upward trend across our institutions. You can see UCT shows a straight line, which is what a normal, established research university should show. We did a study on productive PhD departments with Johan [Mouton] – we chose 25 of them – and one of the things we saw is that the difference between them and less productive departments is that less productive departments graduate five PhDs one year and none the next year. They go up and down while productive departments have a constant enrolment and output of PhDs. On doctoral graduates, we see the same story. Apart from Eduardo Mondlane, all the others are on the up. And Makerere in particular has gone up fourfold. When Patricio [Langa] talks about Eduardo, he can explain. This is where we start trying to pull it together in relationships between inputs and outputs. You can see the ratio of research articles per permanent professor and associate professor (we were just looking at the top end), the ratio of doctoral graduates per permanent professor, and then the research outputs.

You can see here that Makerere is definitely shifting. When it comes to research output, you can see this even more strongly: high on doctoral graduates per permanent academic and high on ratio of research articles per permanent academic with a doctorate. One of the things we’ve discovered is that, although Stellenbosch is now out-producing UCT in PhDs and research, UCT has two big advantages in the South African system. It has a medical school that is highly productive. Most of the HERANA countries have medical schools but they are not necessarily highly productive. At the University of Pretoria, the

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Theology Faculty out-publishes the Medical School. How they manage that, I really don't know. But you need to put pressure on those medics of yours. I’ve spoken to people at Harvard and Berkeley; and, if you look at the analysis of their data, it’s these medical schools with huge, global research outputs that push their institutions forward. The other thing that UCT has is a very high percentage of lecturers with PhDs. So at the lower end – at the entry level – people starting already have PhDs, which gives them an advantage in publishing. My conclusions are all in ‘The Empirical Overview’. UCT and Makerere are definitely moving in the right direction and Eduardo has now taken a decision to move in that direction. But last night Naledi Pandor asked why African scientists are not part of finding a cure for Ebola. And the answer is that we need more of these flagship universities that are actually part of the global knowledge game. The catch is that, to be part of those global groups, you actually need to be at the table; and to be at the table, you need to produce knowledge. South Africa has gone through a whole process and we have finally have our National Development Plan. In South Africa, we were closer and closer to our continental brothers in many ways. We always thought we were always going to be different; and one of our differences was that we didn't have a 2030 or 2050 plan. The next thing was, there we came out with a 2030 development plan, like all our surrounding countries. The African Union also has a plan for 2060. But at least at the national presidency level, there is a set of strong recommendations around this issue of the PhD. The plan argues that improving the number of PhD students and getting more PhDs in the system will do two things: it will improve the quality of teaching (which is not necessarily proven in institutions) and it will also influence knowledge production. So the plan sets a target for the South African system to go from 34% to 75% with PhDs, which is a substantial increase. Johan [Mouton] and I are still trying to make projections around this. We don’t think it's achievable. Our growth rate at the moment will actually take us there, but we don’t have enough staff with PhDs to supervise so many PhD students, nor do we have enough money to give them bursaries and to support them. That's part of the discussion in South Africa. If you look at the South African system, we have the permanent academic staff, the academic staff with doctorates and the research output. By 2008, the government had put in place a new funding regime that actually rewarded institutions much more for publications (R120 000 per publication). Some institutions pass all the money on to the academics and some keep it. We will hear about it from UCT. But this shows that you can actually encourage a system in a certain direction with certain government subsidies and funding. If you want to take the issue of flagship universities seriously, you actually have to get government involved, which is what Patricio [Langa] will tell us about.

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Transcription: Moving towards a research-intensive university Presented by Patricio Langa (Deputy Director, HE Quality Committee, University of Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch Thank you so much, Nico Cloete; and good morning, everyone. I think Nico has just made my life a lot easier because his introduction gives a very good background and framework to what I am going to say, which is a tale of what are we trying to do at Eduardo Mondlane University. In fact, we started this before HERANA 3. So HERANA 3 finds us on the road already to try to change the shape and profile of Eduardo Mondlane into a university that is research-led. So what I am going to do is basically to give you a story, a little story of how we are doing it, and how and why we decided to take that step. So everything (in terms of higher education in Mozambique) started in 1962 when the Portuguese were under pressure from the international community to end colonialism, and wanted to give the impression that things were getting better. And then they introduced overseas universities in Mozambique and Angola. But these universities were not granting any credentials (any diplomas) there: you would still have to go to Portugal (to Coimbra or Lisbon) to finish your academic degree. Nevertheless we already had the first higher education institution, and it was called Estudos Universitarios, which means higher learning or something like that. In 1968, the number of students increased and the colonial government could not afford to send all of them to Lisbon. Then they had to upgrade the institution to full university status in 1968. And it became the University of Lourenço Marques. And then came zuru (independence) and things fell apart a little bit, in terms of the staff. There was a great migration of expatriates – they left the country – and we had to start anew. And starting anew, amongst other things, meant renaming the university. And the university was renamed after the liberation leader, Eduardo Mondlane, who passed away before independence in 1969. You can see from where we are heading now that we are changing the colour, changing the shape and changing the history of the institution. We think that the institution is ready to become a research-led university. And this is it: this is basically the synthesis, the story that I want to tell you here today. Now I am going to go through some of the processes that we went through to show the situation before and after independence. If you look at academic staff, in 1975 there were very, very few Mozambicans there:

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Things now are changing towards this direction shown in the green section above. This means that we have more capable people, more PhDs, more programmes. We have developed some capacity. And we can now start dreaming of a different kind of institution. Just to recall, we had about twenty or so years of a developmental teaching university. Eduardo Mondlane was the sole institution back then. I just want to remind everyone that changing an institution needs knowing and acknowledging the context in which this institution is operating. A university is not an outsider. It is part of the fabric of the society in a given era. So there was a time where perhaps that kind of university was needed for that society, but now things have changed. So each generation in each country of the world must ask and answer clearly in terms of its own problems and its concepts of social development. So at Eduardo Mondlane, we started to ask the question: ‘What is the function of the university within this new context?’ We were no longer a sole university. So UEM initially became a symbol of national identity. Nico Cloete mentioned that most African countries, when they gained independence had one strong (maybe not that strong) single university. And it was the national pride of that country and it also represented national unity, because people from all provinces would gather in that institution. So it was a symbol of national identity. Its core function or mission … was basically teaching, preparing the cadre, preparing the manpower (the people who took over the state apparatus). And in our case, in Mozambique (if you link it to the first quote) we went through about eleven years or so of experimenting with socialism. And then the university‘s main function became, as Castells1 would put it, to produce the ideology of that system, which basically was to train the so-called homo novo, the ‘new man’. Most of them would be the daughters and sons of the peasants and workers. The whole thinking and ideology was that.

1 Professor Manuel Castells

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Today, things have changed. We have eleven faculties, six schools, eight centres, about 130 courses, about 35 000 students:

And I will later show you the proportion of academic staff. Mondlane is basically an undergraduate teaching university but, in the last five or so years, the number of postgraduate programmes increased a little bit. Commentator: Just go back. This is also a typical thing of universities of developing countries, but also what we saw in the South African homelands. It’s an employment agency. Look at all those admin staff, I mean two admin staff for one academic. Exactly! Commentator: And the student to staff ratio is, what 17? It’s under 20. The student to staff ratio is not bad but the admin to academic staff is horrible. Commentator: They are growth poles for employment. And this causing a huge problem because most of the staff …. Commentator: … are politically connected. Exactly. They are not trained and they make a huge pressure for the universities. Most of these guys are the ones who are going to go to these evening programmes; and then move upwards in terms of managing and getting positions. And some of them are actually changing their career from admin staff into research or teaching. Commentator: But did you also look at them in terms of the proportion of clerical staff, as well as professional administrators? Yes, this includes everyone. Commentator: I don’t think it’s a fair sort of division.

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I agree with you. Of course, this is just an overview. But if you break down the numbers, the number of admin staff is way larger than academic staff. But I think it’s a good point. If you look at the proportion of undergraduate versus postgraduate programmes, this is what the picture looks like:

Commentator: What do you count as postgraduate? Speaker: Masters and doctorate (PhDs). Commentator: But these are courses, not students. Yes, these are courses, not students. The students are different. Commentator: And what is a course? Is it like a Masters in a particular field? Not the number of units. Not the number of units: it’s a programme. Yes, exactly, it’s a programme. And then we also introduced distance learning and this is how it has spread countrywide:

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We have about 1 000 students in distance learning, three Honours and three Masters programmes. In terms of proportion, in terms of candidates and places, this is how it evolved. Every year, the university offers a number of places and then students from all over the country apply. We have this thing called an admission exam every year, to enter the university, to access the university. On the graph below, the red is the demand; and the green is the number of places that the university offers for that demand.

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So you can see the pressure that is put on this university to absorb these students. And this is contributing to the phenomenon of overcrowding because if you have about 25 000 students for 4 000 places. That means that 21 000 students, no matter how bright they are, will fail. And then they will go to another …. Commentator: And the green ones? They are not the children of the peasants; they are the children of the elite, correct? That’s why it becomes quite an elitist system. Unless you come with some affirmative action policies to try to balance that, which Eduardo Mondlane has introduced, by the way. And then this is how it looks in terms of gender:

The number of female tends to increase; and about 48% of the student population is female.

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And then these are the tendencies by degree and by regime, whether it is part-time or full-time students:

So the blue one is the full-time students, meaning they study during the day; and then the red one is evening programmes. As you can see, the tendency is growing quite considerably: we have about 45% now of evening programmes. And then Masters (shown in green) and PhD (shown in purple) are still very low, as you can see. Commentator: Is this head counts? Yes, head counts. And then in terms of output:

Again, you see it’s increasing, particularly over the last three years for first degrees and Honours (blue line) but very little for Masters (green line). And then the PhD (purple line) is quite flattened. Nico Cloete: Just tell them briefly that your PhDs used to go to Uppsala.

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Yes, that’s part of it. PhD is this purple line. It’s very flat. Not all programmes offer PhDs so the PhD output is still very, very low. About 20% of the academic staff at UEM now have PhDs but most of these PhDs were trained overseas. They were trained in Sweden, South Africa and so on. Some of them are now coming back to UEM. In some departments, you have about 20% or even more staff with PhDs, for instance, in the Physics Department. The proportion of PhD staff in the Physics Department is almost 50% but this is very isolated. But, at the same time, this provides us with some capacity in certain areas to start thinking of training those PhDs in Mozambique at Eduardo Mondlane instead of sending them abroad. This is what I was talking about:

You see from 2008 to last year, the number of PhDs has increased, more than doubled actually (to 521 PhDs in 2013). So if you do a ratio, if you remember we have about 1 060 academic staff, 521 with a PhD: that is considerable. Of course, if you do a ratio with the students …. Commentator: There is something strange about this graph. What happened between 2010 and 2011? Because in 2010 you had 1 046 people (staff) without a Master or PhD, and then suddenly that 1 046 dropped to 353. How did that happen? It’s the same staff that are getting trained. Commentator: Yes, but if you look at your total for 2010 it’s about 1 600 people. Your total for 2011 is only about 900. What happened? Where are the other 700? You didn’t fire 700 staff members between 2010 and 2011 surely? I mean between 2010 and 2011, you lost about 700 staff according to that graph. That cannot be, surely? Ezekiel can explain this one. This is Ezekiel’s data. Yes, I will look at it, but the logic is that most of these guys will get trained; and then they change. But, again, I get your point. I will have to look at it; I will check the figures. Comment: They all seem to have returned in 2012, so I suspect there is something wrong with the 2011 graph.

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Yes, I will look at it. Good. So this is how the university looks currently. And then in 2011, the university got a new vice-chancellor. And this new vice-chancellor came with this idea of bringing academia back to university. It’s a long story which I will not go through about what happened in the past, but if you actually look at the trends in terms of all performance indicators, the university was really going down. And then things picked up again in 2010–2011 when he came in. Commentator: The vice-chancellor was part of HERANA 1, remember. Exactly! In 2007, we joined HERANA and this is what happens. I find two ‘legitimation crises’ and increasing competition in the system. One is internal: the training of civil servants and of state manpower was no longer a sufficient benchmark or sufficient criteria for the relevance of the institution. This was because of the second reason: the mushrooming of both public and private institutions competing for these students at the undergraduate level. So then there was all this debate about what Eduardo Mondlane should do. And most of the evening programmes that were established were competing with these mushrooming institutions to attract these students. And then of course the whole debate about whether the university, Eduardo Mondlane, should be doing the same (behaving the same) or whether it should change its role and start thinking of a different role in the whole system. It was no longer a privilege of UEM to train those people. And these institutions could also claim to be doing that with the same quality that UEM claimed to be doing. And UEM could no longer use the argument that they were the first and the oldest institution training all the government officials and so on. So that was the national (the local) context that actually started the whole debate. The idea that we were no longer that good came into place in the university’s mind. And then there was also an external context, and mainly UEM joining HERANA. Most of the data that was introduced by HERANA, was channelled to this new vice-chancellor. I interviewed him when I was doing my PhD with Nico in 2008. We furnished him with some of the results of our studies; and he is the one who later became the vice-chancellor. So he was very familiar with the low or poor performance of UEM when compared to your institutions. And that of course brought in what I call the end of the ‘illusion of perfection’ and ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. We were good; we were training the ministers and governors of all of this country. But then when we compared ourselves with regional and other institutions, we were underperforming. And then, of course, the impact and effect of world rankings: whether you like them or not, they play a key role in changing people’s perceptions. So those claims of excellence, etc.: they would not stick if you were not ranking considerably well in African rankings. So UEM was ranked 60-something in some of these university world rankings. I have already mentioned about the system: the increasing competition, the number of institutions increased; and this leading to a more diversified and differentiated system.

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This is some of the data that Nico has already presented which strengthened the idea that UEM was feeling a bit uncomfortable with its position in these kinds of studies. I’ll just go through this one:

This is how we envisioned our challenges – the university challenges – and we want to move from where we are:

But, of course, to do that there are a lot of challenges. So far we don’t have even have the answers to all of them, but we have already started to draft, to think about what to do. Last week, Ezekiel and I finished an almost-500-page report of the first assessment – a comprehensive evaluation of all dimensions and indicators of UEM as an institution – which we will present in two weeks to the university council. With that document, we will prepare the new strategy planning. And the new strategic planning will put this challenge of changing this university that currently is weak

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in terms of what it’s teaching to the university and to the community. Because it doesn’t produce new knowledge: it’s reproducing existing knowledge. I have already shown you the structure. It is structured around teaching, around classrooms; and there isn’t a balance between teaching and research labs and the environment (the whole environment). And it’s even worse with the evening programmes. So the university becomes a place where you go just to hear. It’s very teacher orientated and the classes are, of course, overcrowded. And that leads to a very weak kind of an environment for research: no incentives for research and, of course, a weak engagement. So the rationale is that if you want to be relevant – if you want recover that relevance in society – then your role no longer fits that kind of society that used to be relevant. And now you need to change. Of course, we still don’t have the right figures and proportions, but we have to set some targets. Let’s say moving from 95% of teaching to maybe 80%. But that has to be realistic as well. So far, the tendency shows the proportion is decreasing; we are now with about 92.5% of undergraduate students and 7.5% of postgraduate students. And then, these are some of the things that we have already started doing: walking the talk: not just thinking and discussing but also putting things into place. The first thing we did, as I already mentioned was to start a new governance cycle with this new vice-chancellor. Of course, I pushed for it. And I chaired a commission in 2012: it discussed and listened to all stakeholders (both internal and external stakeholders). So we had various seminars; and one of them was an international seminar where I brought in Nico Cloete, Teboho Moja and Saleem Badat to discuss the new university that we wanted Eduardo Mondlane to be. And then we drafted the new vision and mission; and that was approved by the university council in October 2013. This year, as I said, we have just finished a comprehensive evaluation of the strategic plan – the current strategic plan which ends in 2014 – and then next year we’ll start a new strategic plan. There is now consensus at all levels at university that this is where we want to go. But of course the negotiation is a continuous process to bring everyone on board. We are establishing a unit: we call it the Office for Institutional Research. And the idea is to promote and support internal differentiation and incentivisation of academic core products. What we are saying is that. I think Gerald [Ouma] is going to talk about this. You know, the different units, the different faculties will have to draft their own vision and mission. They shouldn’t all try to be top research-oriented departments or faculties, but they have to adjust whatever they are doing to this new strategy. We are establishing also what we call the UEM Excellence Initiative which is a way of coming with a system of incentivising knowledge production based on knowledge research groups and competitive funding. We are in discussions with the Swedish government for funding to support this programme. Just two weeks ago, we were in Stockholm and they are very supportive of this. The question is: where should the money go? We also asked that question. We need more money, yes. But who should we give the money to and what for? The money should go to those who prove that they need the money to take us from where we are now to where we want to be.

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This is my final slide:

And in order to do all this, we think that the university needs a pact, whether it is a written pact or it’s a tacit pact. The truth is that changing an institution needs the involvement of all stakeholders at different stages and different levels, with different capacities as well. We need, of course, a government. And the current management of the institution is already engaging the government, to show the government that there is an advantage to having an institution that is leading the system: that is a flagship institution of the system. And that producing knowledge and disseminating that knowledge and training – being ‘the university of the universities’ – would be the most appropriate role for UEM currently. Of course, the industry, civil society and you need money to do that. But we are also facing some challenges. One is the idea that UEM should play a different – an important – role which doesn’t mean just being an equal, but playing a different functional role. That means acknowledging the need for an institution that will push the system forward. And then of course, more institutional autonomy. Most of the setbacks – which I did not talk about here – that UEM faced during its 50 years of history had to do with political meddling. An example of that was the previous rector who was not elected by the university professors and staff. He was appointed by the President and, of course, he almost destroyed the institution. So we want to argue for more autonomy; but autonomy of course with responsibility and accountability. But, this is another challenge: to exploit the potential of autonomy and freedom, but without oppressive accountability from government. And then, finally, how to bring everybody on board in a win-win situation? Currently the university is doing a review of its evening programmes, as well as a review of all sorts of things that were not beneficial to the academic environment. And of course, that impacts on people’s pockets, that impacts on …. So you need to change. In order to make a change, you need to convince people that the future, that is not yet clear, will be, not just better, but beneficial; that they are not going to coming out losing from this changing

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process. Otherwise you start having resistance from within. And this is what UEM is trying to do now. And thank you for your attention. Commentator: Just one point: have you had official talks with government about this? On this, yes. Commentator: Okay. And what do they say? I mean, we have their support. One thing which I didn’t mention: we just had elections in October 2014, and then of course FRELIMO won the elections but we have a new president. One of the things he did was come to the university, and he discussed with us his plans, which are open for discussion. He wants to discuss what the university, in particular UEM, can do in his new government. So I would say it’s a negotiating process; because that’s why I talked about a … certain level of autonomy, to discuss, not just with government, but also with other stakeholders; and to come up with a sort of a pact. Otherwise this thing will not be; it will just be another of Salazar’s dreams. Commentator: Can I just ask a question? Other than these political conversations that you are having with FRELIMO and government, at a policy level is there anyone who initiates driving the system and putting money into …. Commentator: The Department of Education: what are they saying? Commentator: Because you straddle a number of provinces; you are facing access pressures; human capital development is still a huge thing. So how do you resist those pressures and say, ‘Look here, we don’t want to grow beyond this point because we need to focus a bit of our capacity on getting our research going here’? Yes, that takes bargaining capacity and flexing muscles and all that; and discussing; and mostly trying to make a very clear point to the different stakeholders that doing things the usual way is not going to help us. One of the issues that you are raising which is very important is actually with the student intake, and the pressure is very high. But, at the same time, there is also pressure from these very students that the quality in the evening programmes and also in some of the full-time programmes is not good. And then the system has grown. We have other institutions – public institutions – mainly in the north and central provinces. And then there is this debate and this idea that these other institutions can also absorb part of this. Public institutions can absorb part of these students. Commentator: How many have you got now? Public and private? About 18–20. Commentator: Public institutions?

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Public institutions, exactly. Then the other ones are private institutions. Overall, the system has 48 institutions. That’s one thing. The other thing is a government plan, which I didn’t show here, to train PhDs and Masters just for academic staff. And this plan is to train about 3 000 PhDs by 2015. Commentator: Are they on track with that plan? Yes, next year we are going to have – just at UEM – about 100 PhD students (graduates from Swedish universities). And these 100 PhDs are coming to different departments and of course it should impact on …. Commentator: And are they funded by the state or by …? They are funded by SIDA. Commentator: So it’s not government? But government provides the funding. Commentator: Are they all coming back? Actually there was a study by a Swedish scholar about mobility of the graduates. And then the main finding was that most of these graduates come back but, once they are back at the institution, they get disconnected from their previous institutions and don’t engage in research, mainly because they are drawn from teaching and research into management; or they go elsewhere. But they won’t go back: they cut links with the former university. And of course that has an impact in their productivity. But that is also changing now, and it’s changing because of that proportion which I showed you. The number of PhDs in each department is increasing. That means management positions like Dean and HOD. It’s still attractive because of the incentives and so on, but the waiting list is quite significant, you know. And, for instance, just at my faculty – it’s quite a new faculty – we have about ten PhDs. Most of those completed their degrees in the last two or three years. And the system is that deanship is a mandate. You have three years and you can renew it once. But that means waiting for at least six years for that dean to finish his term and then you can …. And the same applies for HoDs. And the idea now is to have these graduates becoming independent researchers. In order to do that, you need to provide a conducive environment with incentives and with research funds. And then the university recently established a university research fund, which we didn’t have before. And this research funding will be competitive funding. This is the manner that we will go to the Excellence Initiative to establish research groups within each faculty and each school …. So that means you can’t be a researcher… or a teacher if you are not part of a research group. As part of a research group, you can apply for funding and develop your research. So that’s how. Yes. Commentator: Just one quick comment again on the lack of capacity to supervise PhDs. You have people with PhDs in the administration, so to think about how they can be used

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also in supervising PhDs. They came from disciplines and they have PhDs, and that’s why I was talking about the professional administrators. So if they have the PhDs, there is no reason why they cannot be part of the research teams. Yes. But I don’t think it’s some of them would still be engaged quite productively, but you can’t really be fully highly productive if you also engaged in managing. I mean, I can use my own experience. I used to say, when I’m in Cape Town, I can write a paper in three months or so; in Maputo, I need a year to write one paper because of the demands of management. So the dynamics are quite different there. What’s happening now is that – and that’s my argument – is that those positions now (almost all of them) are taken with people with PhDs. You’ll hardly find a director – a top management director at UEM – who doesn’t have a PhD. That means if that place is taken, then you have to look for other green pastures. It’s not going to be that place. The problem now is that you don’t have incentives for those who want to go into research, and they can’t be a director of this or that. That leads to an unintended consequence, which is increasing conflicts within the faculties. Because people get frustrated if they can’t do research because there are no facilities. The current vice-chancellor of a pedagogic university was the first nuclear physicist to be trained at UEM. Then he moved up the scale. Actually he became deputy vice-chancellor. And then he stayed there for quite a while. He wanted to be vice-chancellor but the place was already filled. Then they start fighting. Then he had to move out of the institution because he got this opportunity of becoming a vice-chancellor elsewhere. But now the system is getting quite competitive and you need to develop. But, again, these people want to apply for research grants. But we need some capacity; we need some training for that. And the scientific directorate now is offering (but not on a systematic basis) training courses for winning research grants and writing proposals for these kind of activities. Commentator: Can I suggest that we take Gerald [Ouma]’s presentation too now, and then we have tea, and then we have a nice half an hour for discussion with all three of them? Yes. But there was a question here. Commentator: Thank you very much. I think it was a nice presentation. But I have a question with regard to the retention of academic staff or retention within the institution. I have seen that you say that you have about 18 public universities which have come up. And I think the tendency will be that these public universities will try to poach all your academic staff by giving them better and promising opportunities than they have there. So do you have a strategy to ensure that these members of staff in academic positions – especially those that you have spent a lot of money in training – are not poached by the institutions? Yes, in fact, that is not a new phenomenon. For UEM, being the first university, it has always been like that. If it wasn’t to establish new institutions, it would be to take positions in government and so on. So one of the strategies, for was that in its new capacity as the research-led university, instead of sending the staff from these other public universities, now that we have increased our capacity, we can establish those PhD programmes at UEM and then train them. So UEM has some sort of mandate from Sida to start training the staff of the other institutions at PhD and Masters levels. UEM negotiated

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to be the institution that trains. Another thing is that if you are in a public institution, there isn’t a differentiated salary: the salary is the same. If you are an associate professor, no matter if you are at UEM or the most recently established public institution, the salary is the same. And that’s what UEM wants to change with all these incentives. Commentator: What I see is that if you are at UEM, and UEM can only give you associate professor because of the credentials that you have, then these other universities will give you professor, therefore making this person who cannot be a professor at UEM go to another university. Yes. But that one cannot happen now because we have a new policy. The requirements for you to move up are uniform. They are binding for private institutions as well. So you can’t be an associate professor at UEM and full professor in some fly-by-night university. The rules apply for the whole system. Because of that, UEM is also a kind of a watchdog of the system. It played that role back in the 1980s when it was the single institution in the country because it was almost like a ministry. Everything that had to do with acknowledging, recognising and certification would go to UEM, or the ministry would ask UEM staff to check the validity of those credentials. Of course, that is changing now but, still, it won’t be an easy thing to do.

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Transcription: Driving research intensity through internal differentiation Presented by Gerald Ouma (Director, Planning, University of Pretoria) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch One of things that I have had to do in preparing this presentation is to read a lot of very interesting literature. And a lot of that came from non-traditional sources [like] political science organisation and theory, as well as a lot of literature in botany and zoology. One of the things I have been reading is something to do with ‘differentiation in organisms’. I came across the notion of ‘ontogeny’ in a 1942 publication, addressing how cells differentiate and the challenge of internal differentiation in plants. The reason I mention this is that the principle [for driving research intensity] is the same. It’s about organisational segmentation: getting the various parts to perform different roles so that in the final analysis you have the organism or the organisation performing all the roles that it is intended to do. Naturally, it’s an inherent feature of any organisation: if it’s a business organisation, you’ll have internal segmentation, such as a sales department, accounts and so on. So then, in a higher education context, what are some of the key drivers for internal differentiation? The first one is, of course, your institutional goals: what you want to achieve. Patricio’s [Langa] case speaks to this quite directly. The university has made a deliberate decision that it wants to move away from being a teaching-intensive university to becoming a research-led university, and that means that it has to make some changes. [Patricio] spoke about some of those changes. It’s also about organisational performance. Now the thing here is, in terms of institutional goals and internal differentiation, it starts with a system. The assumption is the system is differentiated; and then you decide, within this differentiated system, how you see yourself. After that you drive the internal system to be able to realise that which you want within the bigger picture. There is, of course, a division of labour: not everybody can do everything, so you give people what they can do best. The idea of institutional positioning within the higher education system is extremely important. It’s not, for instance, just about research; it’s also about what kind of research you want. The prestige economy is extremely important in driving these world ranking systems. At UP, we reference four systems: Leiden, Times, QS and Shanghai. Then, of course, there is the idea of resources and capacity utilisation. The institution, like any other organisation, does have enough resources to be able to everything that it would want to do. So it’s a question of optimisation. Where are you going to get maximum bang for your buck? So that is where you put your resources. There are also the demands of the external environment. We are being asked to do certain things so we are forced to make

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changes to be able to realise those things, whether it’s training professions or doing research. So these are the important drivers. Then what are some of the key features? Internal differentiation has to be purposeful. It has to be deliberately steered. It cannot just happen by chance because it has to be goal directed. And if it’s going to be goal directed, you have to steer it very deliberately. It valorises institutional goals, such as the question of what you want to achieve out of this. Attaining different kinds of internal differentiation varies in complexity. For example, if you want to do research and to differentiate along research lines, it’s a bit more complex than starting a new department. Moving from institutional theory, the time it takes to realise differentiation varies because it involves trying to get a new logic in place. Institutionalising a new practice – something that was not previously regarded as a natural part of the institution – takes time. It requires shifting and changing resources, changing people’s mentalities and organisational changes. A bit of context about the University of Pretoria’s internal differentiation drive: UP comes from a teaching-intensive context, where the focus has been more on quality professional preparation, including training doctors, engineers, architects, pastors and so on. That was the historical focus of the institution. Of course that meant it needed a particular type of staff to do that kind of job. There were enrolment pressures, especially after 1990. So the university grew. At some point, it was a legitimacy issue: ‘We need to grow. There’s a new dispensation and we are being asked to open up.’ Responding to that required different resources. Later on we had SACWA telling us the curriculum needed to change, and how it should change. The university over-implemented those requirements, resulting in a lot of modularisation. At UP, we are sitting with lots of modules, which meant staff had to do a lot of teaching. So at departmental level, there wasn’t order: you had a very small department teaching 20 modules and you had a big department with only five modules. It created a problem in terms of staff distribution and resource allocation. So that was the context for UP, with its focus on professional education. Then the university made a deliberate decision that it wanted to go the research route. So the demand for research productivity – both internally and externally driven – entered the picture. When there is scarcity of resources, the university does not have resources to do everything that it wants to do, so it has to make choices. What do you emphasise and what do you de-emphasise? How do you balance the demand for access in terms of size and shape of the institution at graduate and post-graduate levels? There is also the prestige economy which is linked to the ranking systems. I need to emphasise here that ranking is not an end in itself at UP. But the university uses rankings to drive certain behaviour. So we acknowledge that we’ll probably not be number 1 or number 10 on any of the ranking systems. But we know that these rankings have material

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implications; and so the university uses the ranking systems to try to drive particular orientations within the system, including what we want people to do research on. The other thing that the rankings do is tell us – for instance, in terms of research – where we are doing very well. For instance, in the life sciences, the university is doing very well and has potential to grow. So that helps us in terms of concentrating our capacity. What does internal differentiation intend to achieve at UP? It intends to provide a means of accelerating the achievement of UP’s strategic goals. One of the goals that the university is investing a lot of its energies in is the one about research. This goal aims to ensure that UP improves its research standing, including through providing opportunities to respond to new knowledge development more flexibly. So we have new knowledge development but how do we respond flexibly? By ensuring that relevant institutional support services are aligned. The idea is to get resources aligned with strategy. Previously it was the other way round: the allocations would be done and then later on you’d come up with the strategy, and there’d be no money to drive the strategy. So the idea now is to try to get that kind of alignment. Like I said it’s a goal-driven process. So what are UP’s goals? The important one as far is this presentation is concerned is the first one: ‘To be a leading research-intensive university’. This is linked to the second goal, because the university’s internationalisation strategy is based on its first goal: it has to be a research-driven internationalisation strategy. It’s not just about MOUs and feel-good networks. It has to be about research collaborations and that sort of thing. What are the important considerations so far as this is concerned?’ Let’s remember the historical context of the university, which was a lot more professionally focused. And so the question is, ‘What kind of balance are we going to have between the so-called professional programmes and the academic programmes?’ It’s also about the balance that is needed between undergraduate and postgraduate studies in order to strengthen the university’s research intensity. This has to do with the shape and size of the student body. If you want to be research intensive, you need particular kinds of students enrolling in particular kinds of programmes. You cannot purport to want to be a research-intensive university when 90% of your enrolments are in undergraduate areas. Then one also has to look at which university’s existing areas of strengths are and where it is getting international recognition. We are not going to beat about the bush: the point is that there are areas where we are good and there are areas where there is room for us to grow. So we need to invest in areas where there is potential for us to be able to realise our goal of becoming acknowledged as a research-intensive university. And it’s not just about the priorities of the university, but about national priorities as well because you cannot just internally differentiate because of your own internally driven purposes. What does the country want? So we have seen – since 1997 and until the publication of the White Paper the other day – the emphasis has been on equity, equity, equity. Then, wham! The National Development Plan, which speaks about driving the knowledge economy also wants research. The White Paper for Post-School Education and

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Training: they want research; they want PhDs and Masters. So again, it’s extremely important that we keep an eye on national priorities. Now another consideration in a resource-constrained environment such as South Africa is: Which areas are likely to attract the resources necessary for achieving excellence? Again we know the funding market doesn’t just put money anywhere. So we have to be strategic as well. In what areas do we want to excel? And what areas are likely to receive funding support, both locally and internationally? So these are some of the important considerations. What are the formalised structures that the university uses to try to drive internal differentiation? One type of structure is research themes which are built around areas of actual and potential strength. These are also driven by the notion of both inter- and trans-disciplinarity. This is because the new demands that we have are such that you cannot drive them in a single, focused manner. You need to have people from different disciplinary perspectives working together. I’ll show you later what the themes are. The issue of workload is also extremely important. This is related to staffing as well. We have a system in terms of teaching and doing research, with research output agreements. Each department is classified in a particular manner as a research-intensive department, a potentially research-intensive department or as a department that is not research-intensive. Linked to this is the issue of staff allocation. To undertake the classification of departments, what we did was an analysis of research productivity across all faculties and across all departments. We used these three categories: which departments are currently research intensive, which departments have potential to become research intensive, and which departments are really neither here nor there but which we can try to drive to get to us to the minimum norm. For example, Education Psychology was a research-intensive department; and Policy Studies was one with potential. We had one or two which were not captured on the radar. Where a department was supposed to grow and become research intensive, it became the responsibility of the deans. The next important thing concerns institutional research themes. UP does not have capacity to excel in everything but certain areas have already been identified where the university is doing well and where the university has potential to do very well. So the question becomes: How do you drive growth in those areas from a resource concentration point of view, both in terms of actual resources and the people doing the work (I mean the researchers themselves)? Various research themes drive the university’s research strategy. Again, these research themes are driven by national priorities. So you have energy, for instance: you all know the problem with Eskom. You can see chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics and chemistry, all working together on the energy research theme. Food, Nutrition and Wellbeing brings together five to seven departments and faculties working together. Genomics Research brings together different people. Then there is Zoonotic Diseases, including Ebola but with a current focus on things malaria, rabies and

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blue tongue (for horses). We also have Human Rights, and Ecosystem Services and Livelihoods. The first four are the active ones:

Energy

Food Nutrition and Wellbeing

Genomics Research, and

Zoonotic Diseases. The plan that we have developed for 2015 divides these into two broad categories. We call them research clusters. So you have Social Sciences and Humanities; and within that, where we have identified themes, we need to develop plans for those individual themes. We have Science, Engineering and Technology. The idea is the same throughout: to concentrate resources where the university thinks it can excel and where it thinks it can achieve greater recognition globally. For postgraduate enrolment and planning, we have a deal with the DHET (running until 2019) outlining what enrolment is going to look like. This is because the university deliberately decided to go to the research route. Undergraduate enrolment growth is going to be about 1.7% in that particular period (4–5 years). For postgraduate, it’s going to be 2.5 %. It’s not just an aggregate thing. It’s pegged down within the various departments, depending on the capacity that they have and depending on the research focus that the university wants to drive. And so each department has been allocated a percentage growth rate. If they do not have PhDs to supervise, then they cannot grow beyond a certain point. It’s linked to the capacity they have. The bulk of the students are in the natural and agricultural sciences. Theology is a small faculty: you’ll see it has a projected growth of almost 5.1%, which looks big; but put it in the bigger pool and it’s down to 0.02%. So it’s differentiated along those lines. There’s also our post-doctoral programme. Again, it’s the same principle. Where do we want to drive our research intensity? The majority of the post-docs will be allocated there. Post-doc and doctoral students are not allocated to aspiring researchers for supervision because if a post-doc is meant to become a future academic, UP’s argument is that they have to work with excellent mentors, like researchers who are already doing cutting-edge stuff. You don’t want to reproduce mediocrity. So that allocation again is driven by the same principle. For research productivity, the university has norms in terms of the kind of productivity they are looking for, and this is driven by a number of factors. The university understands that, in certain fields, if you get ‘x’ publications in a year, you are doing very well because the nature of those fields but in certain other fields, we know that you can get ‘x plus 3’. But this is where we want to drive growth again. Each dean has come up with this kind of thing for all their staff. So it means something to be a lecturer, and it also means something to be a full professor. So for a lecturer, there is going to be a minimum, as well as the opportunity to stretch beyond the minimum that is allocated to you. The same thing applies to senior lecturers and all the way to full professors. This varies; it’s not a homogeneous thing across the institution. For instance, the Faculty of Theology gets almost 5.5 research outputs per capita. You won’t see that in a number of other faculties. In Humanities, if you go to Afrikaans or Modern Languages, the research outputs across

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the various groups varies again, compared with, for instance, Performing Arts. So you have to recognise the disciplinary differences, the history of research in those particular departments and discipline, and what you want to achieve in the final analysis. Thank you.

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Transcription: Efforts to strengthen research at Makerere Presented by Florence Nakayiwa-Mayega (Director, Planning, Makerere University) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch My presentation picks up where Patricio [Langa’s] left off. I'm looking at becoming research led. We have a ten-year strategic plan for 2008–2018; and in that plan we have defined ourselves as research led. But what format is this taking? We have defined it but how is it manifesting? How are we seeing ‘research led’? The bulk of this is taking place through partnerships. That's why I'm calling this ‘strategic partnership’, this being the impetus for becoming research led in Makerere University. I will briefly go through the strategic plan. It talks about a research-led university where research and teaching are mutually reinforcing. Our understanding is that we will be research driven when knowledge generation, transformation and utilisation influence public policy. You can see that we are positioning ourselves within three areas of the university:

Learner-centred teaching;

Knowledge-transfer partnerships; and

The research-driven aspect binding the above two elements. What is our definition of research-led university? We understand this as a university:

Where research and teaching are mutually reinforcing;

Which vigorously undertakes research to generate knowledge to power the national economy;

Which provides leadership in university research in Uganda; and

Which focuses on knowledge production. We have indicators that demonstrate what we are going to do. Whether we are getting there or not, that's a different question. But we have defined what we understand by being research led.

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The national and global contexts call for knowledge-based economies where ICT is used and where we need to devise mechanisms that ensure sustained relevance of education. We are also looking at what our role is within the community. This is where the university is defining itself and how it sees itself within a global and national arena. At the same time, although we have a national framework, there's no document that clearly articulates what the expectation of the nation is of higher education. It’s more a case of us shaping the definition rather than government giving us the definition of what they expect from us. The national framework provides fragmented support: there is no concerted, concentrated effort that focuses this support; there's no comprehensive national financing mechanism for research. We also have a fragmented dissemination mechanism and a limited national policy framework for research. Right now, tertiary education falls under the Ministry of Education and Sports. We don't have a Ministry of Science and Technology nor do we have a Ministry of Higher Education. We have a Ministry of Education and Sports so everything gets sucked up into that. Given World Bank policies, the focus is on primary education. It’s only been about two or three years ago that the discourse of higher education started to manifest in the national discussion. Our national budget allocates less than 0.3% to education, compared to the stated regional 1%. But we have Vision 2040, which talks about us transitioning to a middle-income country even though it does not provide clear pathways on how higher education fits within Vision 2040. To illustrate my point: we do have a National Development Plan but none of the National Development Plan’s strategic focus areas for promoting science and technology talks about higher education. The country is looking at national development through different agencies: the Ministry, trade and tourism institutes and the National Council for Science and Technology. But, still, none of those has been really aggressively pursued. As an example, the Ministry of Tourism, Trade and Industry sets out to, ‘Establish and foster the national innovation system’. But the country hasn't really demonstrated that it wants this done. There is recognition that Makerere is a public premier university for the provision

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for higher education, and promotion of research, advancement and learning: this gets flagged all the time. But, as I said, we don't have any clearly defined strategies at national level. The national expectations are based on our status as the premier tertiary institution in the country rather than clearly defined indicators. The best document that outlines the role of tertiary institutions is the Act to Establish the University of Dar es Salaam (1970). The Act talks about providing instruction to all those admitted at the university, and makes provision for the advancement, transmission and preservation of knowledge and the stimulation of intellectual life in Uganda. This is the only document that outlines the ethos of the university as it should be. Since 1970, no other document had really articulated what university education ought to be. At the institutional level, we have decided to come up with our own definitions; and we have pathways for becoming research led. But our big question is, ‘Can the institution excel given the inadequate national framework?’ My presentation is about that, as well as the coping mechanisms that have been adopted by Makerere University given that framework. These are some of the factors we have:

Some of them are facilitating our being research led, while others are inhibiting. I will go through them. In our strategic plan, we have come out with a strategic focus on being research led. We have a research agenda, research capacity for staff and students, management and coordination, and the mainstreaming of those activities. We also talk about a dissemination strategy, commercialisation and networks with teaching and research institutions. With respect to a management system, we have a Directorate of Research and Graduate Training. This is supposed to drive the research systems within the university. We have a policy framework –with different boards for research and management – and a research

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monitoring framework. It isn’t very vibrant but it exists. We started with a research audit but it didn't generate information as comprehensive as we would have liked. So these are some of the things that we have. The system of incentives for research is really performance based. We have the traditional incentives: you move from being an associate professor to a professor given the output that you have produced. We also have monetary incentives for research which are really project-based, internal processes. This is our research agenda which has been defined through a participatory process:

We have highlighted certain areas but, as you notice, it is very broad. It captures several partnerships that facilitate the research process in the university. The bulk of the research focuses on two themes: health systems and health, and agriculture and transformation. The management style that we use is facilitate partnerships is a loosely coupled system that is open-door. This system incorporates several networks, including opportunities from the international research environment. At the same time, it generates a tension between the centralised and decentralised system. When the colleges are left to do what they want to do, then there is some friction because people feel the research is ‘my thing’, not ‘our thing’. The bulk of the research that we have in Makerere University is not from internal resources of the University but from partnership agreements that we have signed. We are harnessing what the global world out there is putting out. For example, we have research funded by IDRC. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has been quite instrumental in what we do. The Accordia that we are part of has generated a lot of research on HIV/Aids and infectious diseases, but that is because this is what has been defined in the national and global framework. Because as a university we are committed to working with medical institutions, how do we then benefit from that commitment to enhance our research focus?

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Let’s look at USAID. They were looking at working with seven world-class universities. They put out a call and Makerere took it up. They picked Makerere University as one of their seven world-class universities because in accordance with USAID criteria, it has done a lot of research and is harnessing what exists out there to become research led. Then, as common to everybody, we've had a lot of support from Carnegie. Carnegie clearly says that it wants to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. So we need to look at how Makerere builds on Carnegie’s expectations to expand research output from the staff at the University. Most universities are also addressing the concept of internationalisation. This means is that Makerere is partnering with several universities across the globe to build the research focus and the agenda. In the process, we get a lot of research productivity, as well as part of the ranking that comes from partnering with researchers in universities elsewhere, both within the region and at the international level. We have collaboration with Lund in Sweden and with MIT because they are also looking at their collaborations. We have Uppsala and Kent. Several of the PhDs that we have come from the collaboration that we have with these universities. We also have a lot of partnerships with Norwegian universities. These generate a lot of research productivity for Makerere University. I’ll now look at external support for research. These are those tables that Nico [Cloete] was talking about that we take to parliament to get additional resources.

This one shows the resources that we get from the various funding sources, college by college:

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The College of Health Sciences has the biggest amount of resourcing probably because, at the international level, health systems demand so much. When you are talking about ebola: right now in the Public Health School of Makerere University, they are talking about how we stop ebola. They took a whole team to West Africa to see how we can stop that process. We get external support for research, but the issue of research networks is quite a fundamental aspect of how we get research out there, as well as in the formation of centres of excellence for research. Here are the main research networks we participate in:

• RUFORUM- regional research network • CARPREX- cross country research capacity development • Resilient Africa Network • Grand Challenges.

I wanted to highlight is the issue of leveraging research performance from networks that begin at the university. Two key networks are the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (a consortium of 29 universities in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa) and the Accordia Global Health Foundation. I don't know whether you are familiar with or part of the Regional Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture but it brings out a lot of Makerere's research. Through partnerships with these centres, we have emerging centres of excellence for the Plant Breeding and Biotechnology Centre. Then we have the Infectious Disease Institute which arises from the Accordia Global Health Foundation and clearly defines that it is celebrating partnerships based on infectious diseases. This is a centre of excellence in infectious disease management and it’s produced a lot of research and publications based on that. So partnerships are really a big thing in research. The Resilient Africa Network is USAID funded but based at Makerere University and spread across the region. We also have a new centre of excellence on ecology and this is going to be supported by the African Development Bank.

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So there are these pockets of centres of excellence emerging, but partly they arise from the flagship status as has been defined. For example, if you get the BBC World Service coming to have its first Science International Fair at Makerere University, that reinforces the concept of a flagship within Makerere University. But then the issue comes up of what we should pay attention to: for instance, the issue of the Webometrics Ranking of World's Universities, the Shanghai Index, and even the CHET tables. Yes, we may not like them and we sometimes say they are very bad, but we pay attention to them. We use them when we go to the vice chancellor or the senate. We say, ‘This is where we are; this is how we compare with UCT or Nairobi or Eduardo Mondlane.’ An example of flagship status was the BBC World Service celebrating the role of African global science with the first-ever science festival in Uganda, based at Makerere University. I like this quote: 'Universities decry the commercialisation of rankings, attack their methodology and distribute those in which they rank high to their alumni.’2 We do that. We may not like it but then when they say, Makerere is, for instance, number four, then we go on flagging it all over the place even if we don't believe that it is. What are the implications? We have had improved research performance, increased mobility of people and incremental access to resources for research. We have had several PhD trainings, postdocs, community development, research capacity and research systems development.

On the issue of measures: we put them down in the strategic plan as part of the indicators that we are looking at, for instance how many publications we plan to produce and the amount of research income that we are getting. It's a little bit hard tracking these indicators but we know that they exist and we try. We attempt to capture them in our

2 From: The Lombardi Program on Measuring University Performance (2000).

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annual report. But it’s not yet at a level where you are categorically saying this is what it is because generating the information is quite challenging. As I said, we also have challenges. We have a disjointed institutional definition of performance and inadequate systems for tracking. Our research is resource dependent because as a university we don't have a port (at a national level there is no port). When we see CIDA encourages discourse in research, we go there; when we see Norway doing this, we go there. Resource dependency is a big challenge to the concept of being research led because it introduces an external influence into the research agenda. And we also have an intermittent brain drain because of the self-development policy that we have. This means we have personalisation within the research process. We have an imbalance in research output per college. We find that the College of Medicine produces a lot much more than the College of Humanities. There is also no clear indication on how we are utilising the research findings. The institutional benefit is quite an issue. We may be doing a lot of research but it hasn't manifested into intellectual property for the university. We have these league tables and collective institutional benefit from the research output because when you mention Makerere out there, even if it is individuals who are doing the research, we have collective benefit. We need to ask, ‘Whose research is it?’ These maps show research at the global level. These slides are old, and I don’t know whether they are still 100% correct.

You can see the world map but, on it, Africa has disappeared because there is no research funding. And then the North is where the research is taking place. When we ask whose research it is: this is an extract from our annual report where we publish what is disclosed. Not all of the research undertaken by the various colleges is disclosed. This is an extract

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from the 2013 Annual Report on the College of Veterinary Medicine. The marks you see in yellow are external collaborators for publications. And then you might have one individual who is across the whole spectrum, so the question therefore that comes out is of productivity of staff. Is it that one individual who is getting all the publications in a specific college, or otherwise? This is something that needs to be tracked to establish what exactly it is. Ultimately, if you have one individual from Makerere University and you have so many others from Scandinavia or wherever else, those are issues that we need to look at in terms of research. Whose research is it, given what we have and looking at the publications? For example, if you look at the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science, with 19 professors and 18 associate professors, then it has 94 PhD students and 29 publications according to the Annual Report. I know that the Annual Report has flaws because it doesn’t report everything, but it still gives you an indicator because this is the report that we take to government to say this is what we have done. Ultimately the question that comes out is, ‘Whose knowledge is it?’ Who defines it? Is it the government? Because government hasn't given us an agenda to follow. Is it the Institution? Is it the college? Is it the staff research professors? Or is it the development partner or the collaborating institution? Because it has been said that probably African universities are more internationalised than international. That is something that still needs to be looked at. What are the new directions for research management at the university? We want to look at sync between the university and development assistance for research. We want to go towards patents as a performance measure. That’s why we want to establish an intellectual property office and we are looking at performance management systems. That’s why I liked what Gerald [Ouma] did on those on his very last table. I think it's something we can adopt. Naturally, there is also the issue of marketing. There's continuous and positive reporting about research activities. It features in the rankings. But that's one of the things we need to look at: research output, and then recruitment and training of established research networks. Some of the tentative conclusions are that, yes, research development or being research led can exist despite the characteristics of an institution. The research process in Makerere is also very definitely intertwined with internationalisation. And, yes, we do have some pockets of excellence or centres of excellence. At the same time, we have individual unit implementation together with collective benefit for the institution.

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Transcription: Incentives for research Presented by Christina Pather (Deputy Director, Research Office, University of Cape Town) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch Good afternoon, everybody. I am Christina Pather from the University of Cape Town Research Office. I was given the task of talking about incentives for research. And last week Nico Cloete called to ask whether I could just give a bit of background on how the South African government allocates state funding to each university. I am going to use a few of the slides to quickly run through this. In South Africa the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) awards subsidies to all universities using a funding formula. This system was started about 30 years ago, under the former Department of Education. About ten years ago, a new funding framework was implemented by (what is now) the DHET. I will go into some detail on that framework that is still in use at the moment. Research publications are reported to the DHET annually for publications produced the year before, and subsidy is awarded by the end of the year. Subsidy is calculated according to a unit and based on the fractional proportion of the author’s contribution to a paper. This means if you have two authors on a paper, one from UCT and one from Stellenbosch, we would claim half a unit each. We can only claim for papers produced by academics linked to the public higher education sector in this country. So if we are to author with Makerere, only half of a unit is claimed under the South African system. Comment: It is one of those incentives: the government paper says you must collaborate; the funding system discourages you from doing so. You’ll see the point later as well. The intention of the current policy is to encourage research productivity by rewarding quality. However, many institutions in the country are using the policy to reward quantity in order to increase their subsidy from government. Johan Mouton at CREST is doing some research into that. What is currently funded within the system at present? Basically it’s journals; books and chapters-in-books; and refereed conference proceedings.

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Basically it’s journals, books and chapters-in-books, and refereed conference proceedings. The journals are restricted to a set of three indexes that the DHET has accredited ten years ago. So it’s:

ISI journals;

IBSS, which is an international bibliography of the social sciences of about 300–500 journals; and

A list of approximately 200–300 South African journals.

I have put in at the bottom of the journals block that it excludes other lists. For example, the Scopus list of journals or PubMed Index journals are presently excluded. At the moment, we do not receive funding if a journal is only on one of those lists and not on the other lists. Under the books – and this includes chapters in books – we would submit all books that are peer-reviewed research books. So there are quite a lot of exclusions in this process. For example, handbooks or student textbooks cannot be submitted. Books are presently subsidised up to five units. The challenge that we have with the books and chapters-in-books is, even if you publish with the best publisher in the world, the Department of Higher Education still requires evidence of the peer-review process (ahead of publication) that was followed in order for the book to be published. The bullet I have under evidence under books and conference proceedings: that essentially is a lot of paperwork. It’s quite a tedious and time-consuming process to get all of this from the academic to our office and then to the Department. The same applies to conference proceedings: you need the evidence of the peer review. It is subsidised only to half a unit per conference proceeding. The Department initiated a list of accredited or recognised proceedings about two or three years ago, that includes about 20 conference proceedings. This means that if someone has attended a conference and published in the proceedings, it would automatically get accepted, and the resulting paperwork is reduced.

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If anyone is interested in the nitty-gritty around this process and collecting data, there is further detail on our website at http://www.researchoffice.uct.ac.za/publication_count/overview/. These are the problems we have with the current system that we have picked up at UCT:

Under the old funding framework, patents were recognised and funded; however, that no longer counts.

Creative works and creative writings are excluded. For example, if someone does research into creating a beautiful bridge or anything from the architectural design perspective, there is no recognition from government for that.

So what has been penalised, like Nico [Cloete] said, would be collaborations and group authorship. At UCT over recent years, we have seen a higher number of papers with international collaborators, which means that our publication units for this system are relatively low. It hasn’t really been going down as such [due to the higher number of papers being published], but it could go up if some papers did not have so many authors. But we want to be a university with strong international links and we do not want to play the system for the purpose of gaining subsidy. There are also some researchers at UCT who are part of large international groups or consortia, for example, the CERN and the ATLAS groups that are based in Europe. Their publications usually have up to 500 or a 1 000 authors on a paper. In cases such as these, there is likely to be impact and visibility as a result of these international group collaborations, but no subsidy from DHET.

The issue about the book’s publishers and the book value: this has been raised through feedback by many universities over the years with DHET, in terms of providing an easier way of submitting our books, and also to increase the value because we believe five units for a book is not justified.

Question: How much money per unit? It’s currently at approximately R115 000 per unit. It is likely that the current policy and number of units for books and chapters in books will soon change. This is likely to increase the number of units paid for books, as well as extending the list of journals to include Scopus for example. In this slide below, I borrowed some data from our Central Finance Department which will give a sense of what’s happening at a national level. This looks at the units produced by the entire higher education sector starting in 1984.

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The latest data we have is for 2012 [year of publication]. There has been growth in the system. Around 2007 and 2008 is when we had a big growth to about 8 000 units and you’ll see that it has been steadily increasing. So this is 12 000 for the 23 universities that we have. This is the unit value per publication (in rands) that each university has received over time:

It started quite low at R7 000 per unit in 1984, increasing to R24 000 just before the policy change in 2004. It then went it up threefold to R72 000, and to R127 000 in around 2010. However, it has been decreasing since then. The reason for that is because the allocation to DHET has been steady over the years, so government does not have enough money to subsidise the system and the growing number of publications.

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Comment: So the academics out-published the budget. So now it goes down again. So now it is going to be interesting to see what’s going to happen. Speaker: Exactly. And we are waiting for 2013 information to come out. This slide shows the budget that the Department has spent on research publications: starting with ZAR24 million back in 1984, and currently at ZAR1.4 billion:

Now, just talking about UCT. What I thought I would have a look at is just two universities and what they do with the subsidy received from government. I just did some homework with University 1 to ask them ‘How do you incentivise research?’ This is direct incentives for research. In other words, if you publish an article, the central research office would automatically give you this amount of money every year. This university has three research areas: the social sciences, natural and health sciences. And depending on their budgets every year, they would award those sums of money to each journal article produced or each book produced or each conference proceeding. In the last two years, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor has set aside strategic funding that they have made available to ‘high flyers’ – so that would be dependent on how good the budget is – and the faculty also provides an incentive. So someone who is a high flyer at this university could potentially get money from three different sources for the same publication. Then University 2 works with the concept of ‘productivity units’. What is interesting about this is that they are looking at more than just the publications submitted to government and they allocate their own units to each of these publications. They also look at the ratings obtained from the National Research Foundation, patent outputs, student supervision, membership of editorial boards etc. Each year, depending on their budget, they assign their own value to the unit. Currently it’s ZAR 400 a unit, which is down from ZAR 600 not so long ago. Essentially with this system, if someone produces a book in the same year, if you get an NRF rating, and if you graduate a doctoral student, you could

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easily get about ZAR 120 000 back into your research fund from the central research office. So these are examples of direct incentives at the two universities. Just a general statement: Except for UCT and possibly Rhodes University, all the other universities offer direct incentives. I would be interested to know if Pretoria has a similar model? Comment: They give some money for NRF ratings but they are reviewing that strategy because academics should aspire to get these ratings, so they want to take it away. At UCT, firstly, we do not have a central or direct incentive policy for research publications, or student supervision, or obtaining an NRF rating. However we are often asked why do we still have a good number of publications and how is it that we appear on some of the international rankings of universities? We are not certain, but here are some possible ideas. The philosophy that we have at the university is that DHET uses the funding formula as a method of allocating state funding to the university. They do not say that it needs to be restricted to research. On the other hand, there is other funding that comes from the state for example, the DHET research development grant, which is something that UCT recently has been able to access, where there are fixed deliverables and you have to use it for research. UCT’s Central Finance is responsible for allocating the subsidy money at UCT. I am going to talk more about this. The first allocation is money to each of our seven faculties; the second is money to our central university research committee; and third is to fund structures that we have in place to support research. The first one: Central Finance makes an allocation to each of our faculties, and the faculties will use this money to support research according to their own faculty strategy. Each faculty dean can decide how and what they want to do in their faculties as long as they have a faculty research strategy. But first let’s look at some examples of what the faculty would use the money for. The Science faculty, for example, would hire contract staff to alleviate high teaching loads to free up an academic’s time to focus on research. They would be able to provide extra funding or other means of support to early career researchers in order to grow the next generation of academics. Then there is money that is used to support new research groups or units. So again, the Science Faculty as an example: traditionally they have been working in isolation or in silos. There has been very little interdisciplinary research going on. Earlier this year, the Science Faculty set aside some funding to create interdisciplinary networks across the departments; the subsidy revenue is used for top-up funds or start-up grants if someone is new and joins UCT.

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Earlier I mentioned that money is given to the University Research Council (URC). This is spread across the following areas:

Proposal-based competitive grants

Application- & nomination-based grants

Institutional contributions & matching finance

University Equipment Committee

Formula-based research output block grant to faculties, used at discretion of deans

Growth block grant.

The last two points on the list above would be indirect incentives to those who publish. So the first one is a research output block grant, which is calculated by looking at the proportion of your faculty’s publications which are submitted to DHET. So the Health Sciences faculty, for example, would get 40% of this block grant and the Science faculty about 30%. Those are our two largest producers of research output at the moment. What I should mention is that the block grants are then given to faculties; and there again, the deans can decide how they want to distribute it. So they can decide that they would want to upgrade a laboratory or to fund post-docs, to support research at UCT. Then academics can apply directly to the URC for proposal-based grants (for example, conference travel), for application and nomination-based grants. The URC also makes institutional contributions, for example, if we have a new Centre of Excellence, matching finance is required by the NRF or DST. So all of these are seen as indirect ways of supporting and enabling research. We also have a university equipment committee that has its own budget to support equipment purchase and maintenance. The last item here is something that we initiated in 2011, called a ‘growth block grant’. And with this, we looked at 2009 as a baseline to see what UCT produced in terms of publications. The idea is that faculties that then produce anything more than that in subsequent years would be given an extra grant in addition to their research output block grant. But due to budgetary constraints within the university, the growth block grant is currently on hold. I want to talk a bit about the support departments. The reason that I am flagging this here is because we have good structures and I believe this helps in enabling and supporting research at UCT. And part of the money that comes from government to Central Finance obviously goes into funding these departments. This includes the Research Office, the Postgraduate Office which is part of the recently created Directorate for Postgraduate Studies, the Research Contracts and IP Office; these three departments make up the Department of Research and Innovation. In addition, there is UCT Libraries, Information and Communication Technology, and Comms and Marketing. So it’s interesting listening to Florence Nakayiwa-Mayega where she also spoke about marketing of research activities. That’s been one of the challenges that we think we need to address more strongly. UCT is doing a lot of research but the story is not being told to a large enough audience.

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What I forgot to mention along the way was Judy [Favish], my colleague from institutional planning, and her role in this process. Judy is at the Institutional Planning Department (IPD): the link between teaching and research happens here; the engaged-scholarship happens here. We have what they call the Four Vice-Chancellors’ Strategic Initiative at UCT that looks at addressing climate change, safety and violence, the education and schools, and poverty and inequality. And a lot of this work actually happens in Judy’s office and then it filters down into our area once it becomes more research focused. Judy, do you want to add anything? Judy Favish: In terms of incentives, what the Deputy Vice-Chancellor did was establish a strategic fund. And the intention of the strategic fund was to use that to support key leaders that will strengthen research intensive objectives of the university, particularly those have an impact on the challenges facing the country and the continent. And that’s why he set up these four initiatives. The intention is also to use those initiatives to build collaboration both in research as well as in teaching. They all have a very strong emphasis on external partnerships; with government and with a range of other stakeholders. The other thing that the funding has been used for is to lever new kinds of partnerships. Lastly, just to say that there is a very strong regional consortium in the Western Cape. And for a long time there has been a strong partnership between the Western Cape Government and the four universities. And the regional government – what we call the provincial government – has allocated an amount of funding to the regional office to support collaborative initiatives between government and the four universities. And a lot of that money is channelled to support a plan of action, but part of it is also used as seed funds which the academics from the four institutions can submit proposals for. And, again, the idea is to use that fund to provide opportunities for new academics to build partnerships with government and other stakeholders; and to start their career trajectory by focusing on an area of joint interest to government, as well as the university with reciprocal benefits.

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Institutional Presentations

Botswana Transcription: Institutional presentation: University of Botswana Presented by Mogodisheng B.M. Sekhwela (Acting Director, Research and Development) and Silas Onalenna (Assistant Director, Institutional Research) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch We are going to take you through our journey at the University of Botswana in data collection and analysis. It's going to be a very quick one because when you were speaking over this week, I could identify some of the areas where we are as the University of Botswana. It's a journey that you have to plan, which is also dependent on what you have in the national frameworks. For instance, in Botswana, we (as a university) had to embed ourselves in what's happening in terms of the national frameworks. When the country is saying, 'We need information for development. HIV/Aids is really a problem in Botswana’, then the university becomes the centre for all eyes for information. At the same, the University of Botswana realised that it had to be part of international processes. We looked at the question, ‘What is there in the country that would support such a development?’ So we looked at what the country was doing in terms of policies; and took it from there as a university. In Botswana, the Tertiary Education Policy (2008) underpins all information generation efforts. The policy drives all institutions of tertiary education to be part of knowledge generation and systems of innovation in the country. It has also led to two other regulatory authorities: the Human Research Development Council and the Botswana Qualifications Authority. They have been put in place and started operating this year (2014). With this policy, our aspiration to be known worldwide has support nationally. Now we can look nationally and say, ‘We are embedding ourselves within the national framework for information generation.’ At the same time that we looked at ensuring that our research would be of international standard, we also looked at how to monitor our process towards our aspirations. Planning became key in our development as a university. We started talking about strategic planning. We referred back to what was happening in the country and asked what structures we needed. Recently, we started looking at policies because the University of Botswana’s intentions should be made clear to the University research constituency. It's a commitment of the University to provide resources and structures to support our intentions as a university. Most importantly, other policies now have to talk to what the University intends to do. Within that journey, we have been able to prioritise certain areas. We are guided by our Strategy for Excellence in which our goals are clearly identified. One of these goals is

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expanding access and participation. We have heard over this week that most of our universities are actually teaching universities, with research being treated as just a by-product. But through planning and prioritising areas, we have a goal of intensifying research performance in our Strategy for Excellence, so we now know where to focus. Policy frameworks since University of Botswana’s inauguration in 1982 and until 2002 made absolutely no statement about research at the University. Researchers at the University were just doing research on their own. But with the formulation and approval of the Research Policy in 2002, the University stated what it would do about quality, funding and postgraduates. We also said that if we were talking about culture of research, we should also state what we intended to do about issues that concern research development. So ethical conduct and safety became issues. We also felt the need to cultivate areas of competitive advantage. This resulted in three policies: one on ethical conduct in research, one on centres of excellence and a third one addressing the protection of intellectual property at the University. Prof. Mazonde3 and Dr. Sekhwela4 then came up with a research strategy because we felt that we then needed to talk to staff. If you have staff that have been doing research since 1982 and then you are coming forward in 2000, a culture of individual researchers has already been developed. It's a culture that you don't break overnight. It's a culture that you need to convince to change. Researchers have developed their strategies of working but if you want to really be part of them, you have to start talking to them. We were saying we needed to manage information in order to know what was happening. So we needed an understanding of what made our research tick and to make shifts in line with future goals. We started looking at projects and programmes, and noted that in most cases our research was carried out by projects. Our definition of a project (rather than research programme) is each individual having funding for their specific focus over a set timeframe. Without research programmes, maintaining postgraduate training is very difficult. This is because programmes are more advanced than projects: they go a little bit longer and can embrace the timeframe of PhDs. Another intention was to gain international visibility. I will show you what I mean by that. When thinking about research management and data collection, you have to think about systems. Systems allow us to collect the data on our research processes, analyse it and derive some information for decision making. Data without analysis is useless. You need to analyse it for it to give you information for making decisions. We have a system running called Converis, a product of Avidas, a company in Germany. We are in the process of upgrading it to another version as we identified additional functionality available at the level of quality we require. For example, all our proposals need to be peer-reviewed at department level. Currently this is done within faculties

3 Professor Isaac Mazonde, Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Botswana 4 Mogodisheng Sekhwela, Acting Director, Research and Development, University of Botswana

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across the university. But now we are moving towards peer review and mentoring at departmental level in order to assist people faster than at faculty level. We want to approach it from a position of growth rather than fragmentation. We also have an archive which is Internet-based. I want to show you something about it and what we mean by visibility. This is the archive for the University of Botswana [connected to live from the presentation]. It is still modest, but it can give you the kinds of collections published in peer-reviewed papers in each of the faculties. The communities are based on the faculties that we have in the university. You can see that uploads vary across the campus. It's all about getting the buy-in of researchers, showing them the advantages of being part of it and showing them the benefits. For instance, in the university we need to give recognition. If you look at this paper here, it has been visited 30 000 times! It’s a paper from the Faculty of Business called Business Planning: Small and Medium Enterprises in Botswana. Already it has been viewed 30 000 times and this is still increasing. So we can see the kind of visibility we are getting already with this modest archive. Isn't it impressive? We are also saying to colleagues that we need to recognise them, possibly by incentives. We already have incentives at the University, as well as a policy on incentives that is included in its structures because we want to recognise the effort made to gain that much visibility. It's similar with citations. Once the data in the database is in the systems, we are able to analyse it and see what is happening. This is an example:

On the graph above, the red column is showing the data from the HERANA 2013 Phase 2 collection and the blue one is from University of Botswana records. Comment: The red ones are Web of Science? Speaker: Web of Science, yes. And then the green one is our total research output collection. Colleagues, what do you do to encourage researchers? We recognise the whole life cycle of research including the time when the proposal is developed to the time it's reviewed for funding, all the processes. We then understand what the researcher is going through. In the past, we ignored processes and said we only wanted outputs. It can thus be very frustrating for researchers because proposals take time to prepare. We need to recognise such efforts as a university.

0

1000

2000

2007 2008 2009 2010

Co

un

ts

Year

Refereed Publications

Refereed Journals

HERANA 2

Total Outputs

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Question: Are proposals included in these figures? Speaker: No, these are outputs only: just publications, including output, research seminars, keynote addresses, conference papers and other reports. Other reports here include commissioned research, working papers, consultancy reports and technical reports. Question: Are they part of the green? Speaker: They are part of the green. Green is all about the whole research cycle that has various stages and associated outputs. This one I just included because at one point I made an effort, using all kind of reports in the database, to see the University’s research since 1982. I was able to construct a diagram showing the transition from what I call ‘other publications’ to this sharp increase in journal articles.

This has to do with the incentives in place. This kind of analysis is very useful for decision-making. We are not yet there, but I wanted to show you what you can do with the data that is now in your collection. On expanding access, our key priority is to extend the range of offerings and expand student enrolments at postgraduate and masters level. Our specific objective is to increase postgraduate and masters enrolments to 1 953 by 2015/16. I will just focus on our figures for postgraduate students over recent years. Enrolment and graduation were as follows:

Masters MPhil and PhD

Enrolment Graduation Enrolment Graduation

2009 1 125 166 52 3

2010 1 249 191 61 10

2011 1 253 217 55 6

0

500

1000 Book

Book Chapter

Non Refereed …

Non Refereed … Refereed Journal

Refereed Paper …

Other Publications

UB: 2004-07

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2012 1 308 179 62 4

2013 1 403 165 69 13

2014 1 558 187 89 13

With a Masters, we enrol many at the moment but have a low graduation rate. Similarly with the MPhil and PhD: we are enrolling over 50 each year but, again, very few graduates. With our data systems, we are able to have all this information at our fingertips. We are able to track our movement towards excellence. Strategically, how do these systems link? Our systems are linked. We have:

A vision;

A strategy;

Research data;

Archives; and

A Performance Management System (PMS) which counts outputs.

I think that we need to have an institutional research office to do all this. Question: When did you start the Institutional Research Office? Speaker: I think it was 2000. Question: And when did you start getting these fancy graphs together? Speaker: That was part of some of the research reports. If you visited our research reports through the years, you will find some of them. Comment: But they are clearly getting more sophisticated. Speaker: Yes, all the time. And actually, even in the data collection processes, and indirectly HERANA has influenced this because the quality of data that is required has made us move in that direction. Comment: Great. We are still going to ask you to write us something about your incentives. We are going to have to look at this system of different kinds of outputs and see if we can develop a standard system across the HERANA universities. This tip of the iceberg of Web of Science is a bit too narrow, too small.

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Ghana Transcription: Institutional presentation: University of Ghana Presented by Mercy Haizal-Aisha (Registrar) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch This paper was put together by Alfred Quartey and myself. As an introduction let me explain that at the time that University of Ghana (UG) joined the HERANA project, the goals of HERANA were definitely the goals of the University, except that we probably didn't know how to get there. So we sort of latched onto the HERANA project. At that time (I remember at the 2012 meeting), my main complaint was that when I was working I was generating data and I generated data that I needed. But all of a sudden, here was HERANA, asking for historical data in another format. We therefore had to change the way that we collected the data so that we would be able to meet the HERANA format and, in the process, be able to showcase exactly what we do, because there was definitely a lot happening at UG that we were not collecting data about. What have we done since then?

We have introduced an integrated, enterprise-level software system called the ITS.5 So we now have an HR-finance-student system all linked together. We used to have them standing alone. The HR sub-system was working by itself and not able to produce all the data that we needed. But when we started using the ITS system, our HR data became worth talking about. So that's what we did. Now, before an academic can enter his/her grades in the academic system, he has to be on the HR system. Before a student can see his grades, he has to be linked to an academic programme, and so on. So it is really integrated now. I am happy with our level of data collection. I hope that, when we show data for 2013/14, you will see some improvement.

We also established an Institutional Research and Planning Office (IRPO) which aims to provide the corporate services that will help us in our strategic planning and do monitoring. We did realise that depending on which unit you went to and at which time, sometimes, the data was different. So, as an institution, we took a decision that any data going out should come from IRPO and it will have a date. For example, when it comes to graduation figures, if you submit your thesis in December, the date of your certificate is July of the following year. However, sometimes the marking process takes longer than July, but when the result finally does come, it's still tracked as a July certificate. So, depending on what time you ask for the information, some data may or may not be captured. So that is still a

5 This is an integrated tertiary software (also called ITS). It’s a product from a South African company.

The University has activated the Personnel, Finance and Students sub-systems in the ITS and this has allowed us to track data across the system.

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problem that we haven't sorted that completely. We are putting in place incentives for those who examine to make sure that they do it on time. However, we decided that IRPO will be that point that the HR, finance and student data feed into.

Another thing we have done, which we hadn't even thought about seriously in 2012, was the appointment of Research Development Officers in our Office for Research, Innovation and Development. These are young, bright, enthusiastic research administrators whose work is to do the administration part of research so that the researcher is then free to get on with research. They prompt you when it’s time to do your reporting. They prompt you to put your reports into the database. What we did was appoint them to the Office of Research, Innovation and Development where their goals are set, before they are assigned to the research groups. At the end of the performance period, we are able to report what research went on, how much money come in, how many grants we were able to win and so on. That has helped us to put together a lot of data.

In the process, we have developed quite a number of policies.

Research Policy: Like Botswana, we have a Research Policy which sets out the University of Ghana requirements. This is the document our employees use when they are looking for grants..

Research Ethics Policy: This is aimed at ensuring that research activities within the University is in compliance with all national and international regulations.

Intellectual Property Policy: The Intellectual Property (IP) policy is intended to sensitise employees and students of the University on Intellectual Property matters and to provide the needed security and incentives to inspire the discovery of new knowledge.

The Plagiarism Policy clearly defines what plagiarism is, spells out the University’s efforts at preventing plagiarism by employees and students, gives permissible extent and formats for citing the works of others, and details the sanctions for plagiarism.

About the strategic plan: In our previous strategic plan, our mission was to develop world-class human resources and capabilities, to meet national development needs and global challenges through quality teaching, learning, research and knowledge dissemination. The current vision of the University of Ghana is to become a world-class research-intensive university over the next decade. The mission of the University of Ghana, as defined in its Corporate Strategic Plan, is to create an enabling environment that makes University of Ghana increasingly relevant to national and global development through cutting edge research, as well as high quality teaching and learning. The pillars of our Corporate Strategic Plan are the following:

The first one is to balance the number of regular on-campus undergraduate students against distance education students to achieve a 50/50 ratio. We want to

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maintain the total number of all students at no more than 35,000, but we want to situate distance education so that more people can access our programmes away from the main centre and to develop distance education centres to allow more people to access our undergraduate programmes without coming to the main campus.

We want to grow our faculty numbers so that we can have a decent teacher/student ratio. We have national norms that we want to live up to.

We have decided to create an academic structure with four colleges under the University of Ghana and to decentralise majority of operations of the University through the collegiate system headed by a provost. Each college will then have to take charge of its research agenda and find its own incentive structure to make sure that research grows.

Our strategic plan has nine strategic priorities. The first one is research: To create a vibrant intellectual climate that stimulates relevant cutting-edge research and community engagement. With the establishment of the Office of Research, Innovation and Development, we have been able to attract a lot of funding for research. I was telling Judy [Favish] that the Carnegie system has supported many of our research efforts. We have been awarded two World Bank grants to establish centres of excellence in four thematic areas; and we are working at getting two more. So we have put in a lot of effort into getting our research going. We have said we want to be a research-intensive university. What will we do differently?

The first thing is to increase the postgraduate admissions to a one-to-one ratio with the regular undergraduate on-campus intake.

We have restructured our PhD programmes, because there definitely were some concerns about the quality and theoretical depth of some of our PhD programmes. We now have a four-year programme with a comprehensive exams component that students have to pass before going into research. We also introduced internships, and these are supposed to be in collaboration with other institutions. So hopefully our research output will reflect a lot of collaborations with other institutions, and not just University of Ghana work.

When we established colleges, we gave them the mandate to grow their own research. So colleges will do their own interdisciplinary research and the performance of the provost will be assessed based on how much research each college produces.

As an institution, we are looking for big funding for four thematic research areas: - Malaria research and control; - Enhancing food production and food processing; - Trans-disciplinary research into climate change adaptation; and - Development policy and poverty monitoring and evaluation.

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These are the four thematic areas that we chose because we believed we had enough researchers who had established themselves in these areas. We knew that if we set them up as thematic areas, we would definitely be able to attract some funding. We already have World Bank support for two centres of excellence, one in Agriculture and the other in Cell and Molecular Biology/ Medical Research. These are big grants that are expected to run for five years. UG has won some grants in the other areas as well.

Is there debate about becoming more research-intensive? Before we took the decision to become a research-intensive university, we had a discussion at a forum where we invited the stakeholders (government being the biggest one), because they would have to fund this initiative to a large extent. We think that it was our drive that brought the discussion into the national arena. The National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE) held a seminar a few months ago and has accepted the fact that Ghana should have different categories of tertiary institutions:

Those that award diplomas

Those that do the technical degree awarding, like the polytechnics and the university colleges

Specialised institutions that award professional certificates, like accounting and so on;

Current universities; and

Research universities.

The NCTE (our Council for Tertiary Education) has started discussing what the description of our research universities should be. But the University of Ghana is making the case very strongly that it is the best choice out of the possible three public universities to be Ghana’s research university. The last I heard, our competitors were also saying they want to be research universities. So far we haven't seen anything that suggests that they are ahead of us. So, basically, that discussion is out there. What we planned and what we are selling is this: we agree that there are so many institutions but one has to be the one to do the training up to PhD level so that our products can go out there and service the polytechnics and all the others. It's just that it costs money. We still have to negotiate very hard to see what the government will provide. Comment: You are clearly going to be part of the discussion for what the criteria are for research universities. You are a step ahead of South Africa. Thank you very much. So there's been a great improvement in your information system, as well as in your research management and in the debate, in your discussion as to where you are going.

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Nairobi Transcription: Institutional presentation: University of Nairobi Presented by Ibrahim Otieno (Director, ICT) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch I am going to be taking you through the presentation for the University of Nairobi. Together with me is my colleague, Mr Ben Waweru. This is my first time here and I am looking forward to working together with you in the future. So, in my presentation, I am going to cover the following topics:

A brief introduction about the University of Nairobi;

Some of the statistics we have about our student numbers, our graduation statistics, staff numbers, etc.;

The institutionalisation of data collection at the University of Nairobi;

Some of the research debates that are going on; and

A brief conclusion about what we need to do in order to improve the University of Nairobi.

The University of Nairobi is the oldest university in Kenya. It was established in 1956 with a student population of 215 but we have increased this number to a student population of slightly over 80 000 currently. Our vision is to be a world-class university committed to scholarly excellence. Of course, a world-class university is orientated towards research. In the previous Webometrics ranking, we were number one in the East Africa region, and number nine in Africa. That is in the results that were just released in July this year. One of the things that I want to mention is that we are operating in a very competitive environment, especially with the introduction of a new Universities Act and the establishment of the Commission for Higher Education, which now requires all the public and private universities to be chartered before they can operate. Also, last year, before the previous regime exited from power, we established an additional 15 public universities. So, from a population of seven [universities], we now have 22 public universities. This means we now have more universities are competing for the same resources. The capitation that we are being given by the government is reducing–the government funding is reducing– and therefore the University has to look for other alternative means of surviving if it is to survive. The University of Nairobi is guided by the following national and institutional policies and legislative frameworks:

Vision 2030 guides the country. There are several pillars in Vision 2030 which include social, economic and political pillars. In Vision 2030, one of the key issues

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that we need to address at the University is the issue of research [in] science, technology and innovation. It has been put very clearly that that is the only way that we will be able to drive our economy;

The Medium-Term Plan2013–2017;

Sector Performance Standards of 2009–2030;

A new Kenya Universities Act which was enacted in 2012; and

The Constitution of Kenya. Apart from this, the University has put in place:

A research policy;

An anti-plagiarism policy; and

An open-access policy, which guides how students and staff will have publications and other relevant materials disseminated through the University’s institutional repository.

The University of Nairobi has a very strong brand. Most students’ first choice would be go to the University of Nairobi. It's only when they cannot get a place at the University of Nairobi that they think about other universities. The student enrolment statistics over the past six years are the following:

Year 2008/2009

2009/2010

2010/2011

2011/2012

2012/2013

2013/2014

Student enrolments

44 183 47 908 52 871 55 395 62 040 80 209

There is a big leap between 2012/2013 and 2013/2014. This has been attributed to the issue of double intake. We had two groups of students who had just finished their O-levels who were taking too long to join the University. So the government gave a directive that we had to admit all these students so that they didn’t have to wait for so long. That was the reason that we had a double intake in 2013/2014. Question: Is this a combination of publicly-funded and shared-costs students? Speaker: Yes, all of them, the self-sponsored and the government-funded. Perhaps one third are the government sponsored students. Question: Are they all contact students or do they include distance education students? Speaker: Including distance education. Question: What percentage is distance education? Speaker: For distance education you are talking about a figure of about 10 000. Question: And self-sponsored?

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Speaker: Self-sponsored, there are about 40 000. We have gradually been increasing our graduates:

Year 2010 2011 2012 2013

All graduates 9 077 11 520 13 110 14 312

PhD graduates

43 55 79 96

You can see that the number of PhD students is also gradually increasing. In terms of academic staff statistics:

Full-time, we have about 2 200;

Part-time, we have 185;

The total number is 2 384; and

Approximately 3 500 administration staff. How are we institutionalising the collection of data? One of the ways is through the implementation of management information systems. We have a student information management system that helps us to collect information about enrolment, graduation, etc. Then we have the human resources system and the financial management system. All of these are integrated. Although they look separate, they are integrated and they all operate from the same database and therefore are able to talk to each other. Question: Since when is this working? We have implemented the student management system since 2002 and human resources management since 2000. They are in-house developed and therefore we keep enhancing them as time goes by to respond to the changing environment. In fact, over 95% of our information systems are developed in-house by the University of Nairobi. It's only the financial management system and maybe one or two more systems that we procured from an external vendor. But all the other systems are developed in-house. We also have a research grants management information system which is currently being developed. We are looking to rolling it out in January next year so that it can help us capture some of the research information that we require. It's not fully implemented but it is almost done. We have a corporate strategic plan. The University is organised in terms of colleges so the corporate plan is cascaded down to the colleges, the colleges cascade it down to the faculties, and the faculties to the departments. Then we have annual performance contracting. All the units at the University of Nairobi are under performance contract. If you look at some of the indicators in the performance contract, they are related to research and things to do with enrolment and graduation. The University of Nairobi is ISO9001 certified and is running an effective quality management system. One of the requirements of the ISO9001 standard is data collection and analysis. You must collect data and analyse it; and therefore we are also using this standard to ensure that we constantly collect data and do the analysis that is required.

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Then, all the employees must develop individual work plans. Their evaluation is done through staff performance, analysis and evaluation at the end of every year. All the colleges and faculties make annual reports which also help us to collect data. We have a vibrant digital repository which has been implemented. It has quite a huge collection. If you look at the Webometrics ranking, one of the indicators is openness; and the University of Nairobi was actually number one in Africa in terms of that particular indicator of openness. That was courtesy of our institutional digital repository. Question: What sort of things do you put in there? Speaker: We put student papers and publications, even dissertations: we put all of them in the repository. What are some of the issues that we have to say about research at the University of Nairobi in order for us to make it a research intensive flagship? One of the issues is the establishment of the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (DVC) who is in charge of research production and extension. Previously we didn't have a DVC in charge of research production and extension. This function was actually being taking care of by the DVC of Academics, but we thought that it will be important for us to have a DVC in charge of research production and extension. Then, we are also having discussions and proposals in terms of creating a Director who is in charge of research, which we hope will be approved soon. We are also having talks with the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology and the National Council for Science, Technology and Innovation to increase such funding for our universities. If you look at the current Universities Act, there is a component that says that the government will set aside 2% of the national gross domestic product specifically for research. The funds have not been disbursed but we are in negotiation with the government to disburse these funds so that they can be used for research purposes. And then we are encouraging the faculties to create research groups and to have thematic areas where they can conduct research that is specific to their areas of specialisation. For some programmes, we are also increasing our community outreach and extension. We are also looking forward to strengthening support for postgraduate research through increased funding from our internal sources. Lastly, I want to talk about the strategic plan for the university. We currently have a strategic plan which is running over 2013–2018. There are six main strategic issues that are addressed in this strategic plan:

Governance, leadership and culture;

Resource, facilities and infrastructure;

Teaching and learning;

Research, innovation and technology;

Competitiveness and image of the university; and

Collaboration and partnerships.

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Two of these are relevant to our discussions here. Therefore I'll highlight some of the performance indicators that relate to those two particular strategic issues. One is teaching and learning as an issue. The strategic objective that we have for this is to produce quality and holistic graduates in diverse fields. There are several performance indicators that I have selected. These are not all of them but I just picked out the ones that are relevant for this discussion and that we are talking about increasing:

The percentage of courses scoring above 70% in student evaluation;

The number of students enrolled in science, engineering, medicine and agriculture as some of the areas that we want to emphasise;

The number of flagship programmes that are aligned to Vision 2030;

The number of programmes: we want to increase the number of programmes that are in open distance and e-learning; and

The student enrolment in those open programmes The other performance indicators are increasing the number of:

Masters and PhD programmes;

Students who enrol in this programmes;

Masters and PhD graduates that we are graduating each year;

Postdoctoral students and;

Students who are on industrial attachment. On strategic issue number four: where we talk about research innovation and technology. The strategic objective is to contribute to the development of society through creation, storage, application and dissemination of knowledge. These are some of the performance indicators that we have put in our strategic plan to assist us to grow as a research university. Question: But are you collecting data on it? Speaker: Yes, we are collecting data on this. One of the tools that we are using to help us collect this data is coming from performance contracting. At the end of every year, we expect the departments and the units give us some reports about what they have achieved in their strategic plan apart from having them in the performance contract. So we are talking about:

The number of journal publications produced;

The number of staff participating in conferences;

The number of papers presented;

The number of successful grant applications;

Total research grants portfolio;

Number of IPs registered; and

Number of university journals. Currently we have very few open-access journals or online journals, and we intend to increase this number.

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In conclusion, I say that the University of Nairobi will achieve its vision and mandate of moving towards world class excellence. We need to:

Reduce the teaching load of our researchers, because we find that our teaching staff have a very high teaching load which needs to be reduced in order for them to concentrate on research;

Rationalise the student-to-lecturer ratio;

Attract more research funding and reduce over-reliance on funding from the government and revenue from academic sources i.e. fees; and

Increase collaboration with our industry partners and the community. Thank you very much. Question: One of your indicators is the number of new Masters Programmes. Here you want to reduce teaching workload, yet your Masters programmes are by teaching. How are you going to do that? Speaker: We can do that by increasing the number of lecturers; also our staff with PhDs and postdoctoral [fellows] are able to do it. Question: There is some kind of exponential growth and it is endless. What is the rationale? Speaker: It is something that is subject to debate right now, even within the University. The government capitation is reducing and the University must fund sources of funding itself; and that is why you will see the student numbers increasing. But in our strategic plan, we have also talked about increasing the number of students in Open, Distance and E-learning (ODEL). The plan is to increase this while reducing the number of students that are on campus. Comment: The teaching-student ratio is close to 40:1 if you have 80 000 students. Speaker: I agree that it is a concern. Question: Are your PhD graduates already members of staff or do you have intention of recruiting some of them? Speaker: Most of the PhD students are actually members of staff. There are significant numbers of them. There are only a few that come from outside. Comment: But now what happened here between 2011 and now? Because with the 2011 data, you were the last. It took more than a year to get the data out of the University of Nairobi. I even went on a special visit and you gave us some hand-copied stuff. Speaker: Now you'll get it quite fast. Comment: The system's clearly improved. This looks like a huge improvement. Question: I saw that you are advertising the Director of Research. What about institutional planning?

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Speaker: Yes, we do have it. It is in place. But now the Director of Research will be working under the DVC for Research Production and Extension. But you also have a Planning Office which is different. Comment: Actually maybe this is why I am raising it, because I'm worried about the flow of information between the Research Office and this Institutional Planning Office. Speaker: We have to be careful. Okay, I’ll take note of that. Question: My concern is the numbers of indicators you have. They don't give us any priority as to what you want to focus on. Do you want everything? Speaker: No. For every indicator, there are time frames. We are not striving to achieve all of them within one year. The strategic plan is running for five years and we are saying that for this, we want to achieve it within this time frame: one year, two years and so on. We are not achieving everything in one go.

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Mauritius Transcription: Institutional presentations: University of Mauritius Presented by Henri Li Kam Wah (Associate Professor, Faculty of Science) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch The question asked was about institutional data collection and analysis. The University of Mauritius has had its management information system since 1999. The following information systems are managed:

The student information system;

The admission and nominal roll system; and

The university integrated information system. The student information system manages student grades, computes the cumulative point average (CPA) and processes examination results. It also provides reports and statistics for decision-making and managing the student progress. The admission and nominal roll system manages student admission and enrolment. The University of Mauritius also has a computerised system for the selection of students as there are more applications than seats available. This system allows selection of prospective students based on the University of Mauritius’s programme requirements and policy. The most recent system developed is the university integrated information system. It manages staff personal and employment details for the University of Mauritius. It has sections for both human resources and financial data, based on Oracle software. On collection of the data: as per government requirements, the University of Mauritius – being a publicly funded institution – has to submit budgetary proposals in accordance with a three-year programme-based budget. For monitoring purposes, six-monthly progress reports have to be submitted. In addition, the University of Mauritius – being under the purview of the Tertiary Education Commission – also has to submit baseline data and projections, as well as progress reports, on a quarterly and annual basis. Here are the key areas for which data are provided for the government and the Tertiary Education Commission:

Total number of students;

Number of new students enrolled;

Number of students enrolled in science and technology programmes;

Number of programmes offered;

Number of new programmes offered;

Ratio of academic to non-academic staff;

Proportion of the university budget allocated for research;

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Number of MPhil and PhD students enrolled and also the number of awards

Number of academic staff with PhDs; and

Number of research publications. How do we obtain these data? What are the sources of data? Most of the data asked are common for the two reports that have to be submitted to the Government and the Tertiary Education Commission and for the HERANA one. The majority of the data needed for the two reports can be extracted from the Management Information Systems and the student, human resources and financial records. On the other hand, the research data are compiled by the office of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor: Academia. As research data has been collected, we have found that approximately 20% of academic staff have been reluctant to submit information concerning research publications. Because of this, our search function on research publications on the database is not up to date. The ways the University of Mauritius has used and disseminated these data and the HERANA data are:

They were used for the preparation of the University of Mauritius’s 2012 self-assessment for the institutional quality audit carried out by the Tertiary Education Commission. This was the second time the University of Mauritius had been audited. The self-assessment document included a section on benchmarking the University of Mauritius against other African universities with reference to the HERANA project. Our strong, medium and weak points and ways to improve them – as mentioned in our HERANA report – were discussed in our self-assessment.

A summary of the HERANA data was also circulated to all academic staff by e-mail.

Annual reports of the University of Mauritius have also mentioned participation of the University in the HERANA project.

The University of Mauritius is currently finalising its new strategic plan for 2015–2020. Some of the HERANA report data will be used to provide information for this plan, including for the external analysis of University of Mauritius.

We have also set up two committees to work on the institutional data:

1. The Strategic Plan Monitoring Committee under the chairmanship of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor: Academia; and

2. The University of Mauritius Ranking Committee to see how to improve the University of Mauritius on the ranking list.

For programme-based budgeting, targets have to be proposed. Here are the knowledge production targets for 2014:

Target for postgraduate enrolment is 14%, up from 11.3% in 2013.

Percentage of full-time academic staff holding PhDs was 47% in 2013; the 2014 target is 49%.

The number of research publications in international reviewed journals by academic staff is presently 0.4. An increase to 0.5 is proposed (This is for all publications, not only Web of Science journals).

The number of PhD awards was 14 in 2013. We are aiming for 15 in 2014. These are the targets for knowledge production for 2014.

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Question: You've got there an increase from 11.3. What would the number be? What is the figure? Speaker: We have about 12 000 enrolments. It comes to 14%. On research-intensive flagship universities: A research strategic plan has been developed. This still has to be considered and approved by Senate and Council. Also, previously all the MPhil/PhD students were managed through different faculties. Now we have set up a doctoral school for the whole University that will be managed through the Pro-Vice-Chancellor: Academia. Our research strategy shows that we are looking at setting up more research centres and also provide the much-needed space, infrastructure and administration to support research. We are thinking of how to implement a research performance management system in the near future in order for the University of Mauritius to become a research-intensive flagship university. Thank you. Comment: I have to tell you that we have prizes. If you send a request to Henri in the afternoon, the next morning the data is there. There’s nowhere else on the continent where you get data so quickly. So I can see, Henri, that your system is well institutionalised. The other thing – what I really like – is that you set remarkably modest targets. That’s a very important thing to keep in mind when one looks at setting targets. I think it’s very undermining if the institutions have got these grand plans and grand targets and then they don’t meet them. Rather be more modest and then actually have a chance of meeting them. Is that a simple explanation of why Mauritius is the single best-performing economy in Africa? Comment: New reporting requirements from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) mean that we are going to be audited by the Auditor-General. And if you put targets too high and don’t meet them, your funding will be decreased. Speaker: Exactly! Comment: To me it looks like over-monitoring but you have to report to both the TEC and the Ministry of Finance. If you have that amount of reporting, the quality of data and demand from the national system …. In some of our countries people are trying to develop without having the demand from the system.

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Makerere Transcription: Institutional presentation: University of Makerere Presented by Vincent Ssembatya (Director, Quality Assurance) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch Makerere University has been part of HERANA from the beginning. There is a lot of support from Carnegie for our library, alongside various development partners like the Swedish and Norwegian governments. Makerere University’s background is that the institution was started in 1922 as a humble technical college. It underwent a sequence of transformations, mirroring the changing needs of the colonial government and leading to affiliation to the University of London. After independence in 1962, the University became part of the University of East Africa in 1963 along with the current University of Dar es Salam and the University of Nairobi. In 1970, it became an independent university. Makerere University has a vision for the country as the leading institution supported by the Government of Uganda. It was the only government university till 1988 when the government started Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST). When HERANA started, the Government of Uganda was following Vision 2025. The country has now developed a new vision: Vision 2040. Makerere University is a key player not only in the area of human resource development, which is heavily emphasised in the country’s vision, but also in knowledge generation, which is a critical factor in economic development. The country’s vision has specific attributes which it seeks to see expressed in its people, such as independence, sovereignty, democracy (I just picked a few). People should also be knowledgeable and skilled, and able to exploit and use resources gainfully and sustainably. We have interfaced with the country unit that is responsible for planning and participated in a discussion about the human resource issues specifically because they were missing from the vision. The vision did not articulate how it would do things. Our current development plan expires next year; and the one that takes over from there is going to select issues from this vision. We hope that the university will be at centre stage in developing the new human resource development strategy of the country. Makerere University’s role in the higher education sub-sector in Uganda is pre-eminent. The flagship notion is clearly illuminated by the proportion of the students (40%) within the public university system that are at the university. Key other important factors include

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the comprehensiveness of the curriculum across science and technology, humanities, arts and business. Research intensity is another contributing factor. Such intensity has now started yielding tangible innovations like energy-efficient electric vehicles that have drawn interest from major investors. Makerere’s flagship role has also been depicted in its leadership roles brokered by development partners like the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida). Sida supports the collaboration of public universities in Uganda for development of research capacity in the nation through graduate training (especially at PhD level). Such research funding is channelled through Makerere University. About 15 years ago, in 1989, there were only two universities in Uganda. Now we have 41, with seven of them public. This figure has changed after the discussion I had with Pius. When I first looked at this presentation, I think it was 39. It has now moved to 41: Pius [Achanga], my colleague who works with the Council, tells me they have just licensed another two. So there are many universities coming on board. There are 181 other tertiary institutions, ten of them are affiliated to Makerere University, as well as one affiliation from Somaliland. There are about 200 000 students within the tertiary education sector in Uganda. This is not as many as we would like. The gross enrolment ratio is about 9% according to the World Bank. I do not know where the World Bank figure was calculated but it is on their website. However, the National Council for Science and Education gave us a lower figure than that. Makerere has about 42,000 students, including 7,000 in the Business School. Forty-four per cent of all students are female. I think this is a very key number because it has been improving over time. About 20% of all students fall under science and technology. The Makerere University Science and Technology Department’s enrolment is about 32% of the student population. Question: Can I just ask a question? The 34 private institutions. What would entitle a private institution to be classified as university as opposed to a tertiary? Speaker: Most of the tertiary institutions do not award degrees but there are two degree-awarding tertiary institutions. The major classifier is the degree. But from those tertiary institutions to universities, I think the classifier is research. There are certain key characteristics in the higher education sector that we wanted to press Makerere University, for instance, admissions being 44 % female. Florence [Nakayiwa-Mayega] talked about the vision of the university. The vision is to be a leading institution in academic excellence and innovations in Africa. There was a lot of discussion about whether we should be modest by putting ‘Africa’ instead of ‘the world’. We decided, like Mauritius, to be modest and say, ‘Let’s take on Africa first’. Under teaching and learning, we have included knowledge transfer partnerships because the previous vision was patronising with a message of, ‘You have all the knowledge and we need you!’ We realised that the public has knowledge bases that we need to tap into,

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so we changed this to a bi-directional conduit. The public comes to the university with knowledge; and we have mechanisms for tapping into this knowledge through internships and knowledge experts. Our strategic pillars are being research led, learner-centred and using knowledge transfer partnerships. We also have crosscutting themes, like internationalisation, ICT, gender mainstreaming and quota assurance. Everything done at the University must pay attention to these themes. The culture must be internationalised; the ICT must be embedded and utilised; and on quality assurance, evidence-based improvement is critical. Another strategic goal is to understand Makerere’s potential flagship role. In the higher education sector that number is close to 200 000 students. 18% of those students are at Makerere. This number has been decreasing since Makerere was the only university. We hope it can keep going down so that Makerere can take on niche areas and reposition itself to support research a lot more than teaching. So this number probably will keep going down and stabilise at some point. For academic staff, Makerere has exactly the same percentage (18%) of the academic staff available in higher institutions. For staff with PhDs, many are manufactured at Makerere and distributed to other places. So you can see, we hold onto some but not all of them as they move at a very fast rate. 566 is the Makerere total and the system total is 900. As other universities try to create systems that are comparable, PhDs move. We hope that we can recreate them at the same rate, or even faster than the rate at which they move because we want the proportion of PhD staff to grow. Comment: What about the 2011 figures? Speaker: Because the National Council Higher Education data comes out periodically, the only figure I could get hold of was the 2011 figure from their 2011 document. The figures change every day which is why data must be dated. This, even as we speak, is changing. Among the public universities, Makerere had about half of the students. This again speaks to the flagship issue. There are two new public universities. Muni University in North Western Uganda has just started admitting students in the last months. Soroti University is creating systems even though it has not admitted students yet. People have been talking about the staff-to-student ratio. The national average is 1:32 but at Makerere University the ratio is 1:21. Here we use the HERANA data: we take the picture and project it onto our sub-units. We have ten colleges and we try to map this data against them as opposed to having a university aggregate. We inserted the good ratio recommended by the standard from the National Council of Higher Education. Then we insert the actuals and can show the colleges where they are not doing well relative to this standard. We insert data such as staff-to-student ratios and the number of PhDs – 566 in this case – and distribute them across 30 schools. We evaluate each school for how many PhD staff they have. We show how each school is doing relative to the other schools.

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Comment: What is very strange is that we look at your numbers for publications, they are all there in medicine and in health sciences. Why are these other guys sitting with the PhDs but not publishing? Speaker: Actually, we have a comprehensive report where we compare these ratios to each other. We show how many PhDs each institution has and how it is doing on producing publications. There is a checklist for quality and institution capacity. The National Council for Higher Education gazetted specific indicators for university land, governance, structures and infrastructure. Some are included here. We found as a university that a lot of attention is paid to inputs, and limited focus is given to processes and outputs within the national framework. The national framework is silent on differentiation so if you want to be research-led, it does not advise what performance trajectory you have to have follow. Instruments based on factors without efficiency and innovation are not considered. The University utilises regional and international benchmarks for research-led efficiency issues. That’s why HERANA come in handy because it defines regional standards for benchmarking for research which we don’t otherwise have at country level. We also have other standards, for instance, the inter-university accounts for East Africa that has a quality assurance framework. Thomson Reuters has a global institutional framework that we subscribe to and submit data to every year. We also submit data to QS and Shanghai. We utilise these international frameworks. When HERANA 2 data was published, we requested the re-publication of 500 copies of each publication. We got support from CHET and reproduced these publications, printing them in Uganda and distributing them as widely as possible. They went to university management, National Council and the Ministry of Education. Everyone who really matters got a copy. We had to do more than that: we had to break it down for them. One of the strategies that we used during the 90-year celebration of Makerere University was inviting CHET to talk to the stakeholders. We also invited National Council to participate. The tool listing the indicators was comprehensive and the data was utilised to highlight the constraints facing Makerere in playing its role meaningfully. It was not a glossy picture, as you can imagine, especially when you are benchmarking against the likes of UCT. You have to explain gaps even where they seem obvious. So, we thought we should have another indicator: one for increased efficiency with little money i.e. how much do you produce per unit dollar? I think this indicator doesn’t exist in other rankings. Other rankings don’t know how much money you use to produce what you produce. It is a value-for-money indicator which works well for us. Every time they pit us against Stellenbosch or Cape Town, we quickly remember that the Vice-Chancellor at Stellenbosch is paid three times as much as the Vice-Chancellor at our university. When you look at the unit costs – what students pay in and all other factors put together – then we can show that if people want us to look as good as these universities, then they must bring in the money. So we have used this: we have put this case to the Education Committee of Parliament. Actually, one of the outcomes of this debate was that now members of staff knew clearly that they should ask for a 100% increment in their salary;

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and they insisted on it. Actually they even brought the university to closure last August on this insistence. We brought out a self-assessment report where we include a lot of these figures. We are also trying to bring it out for the staff. We mention in our report that we used CHET and HERANA indicators to produce the report. There are also other interfaces with Student Experience in a Research University (SERU). You heard Thierry [Luescher-Mamashela] yesterday talking about student experiences in research universities which we did: you will have seen the results. As I mentioned, incentives data was utilised. Data collection has improved and the resulting data fact sheets are based on this type of aggregation. There is something major coming out: a curriculum review exercise is underway utilising the taxonomy of disciplines from HERANA. We realised that if you want to be research led, you must restructure the curriculum at undergraduate level so that you feed into research. We realised we were teaching without knowing that there were 40 other universities round the block. We are now saying, ‘No undergraduate diplomas; no certificates.’ We are saying that we are not going to teach or offer a degree in Development Studies but rather integrating these studies across the curriculum. We are rather offering to prepare these undergraduates to take on research later. In order to do so, we are reclassifying the curriculum. Also, the Head of State, the President, has stepped in. He has been interrogating the principal of one of the colleges and asking ‘Why are people being taught human rights?’ They don’t want a Bachelor of Arts in Ethics and Integrity or a Bachelor of Arts in Development Studies. We are thus restructuring the curriculum: even though we know these are very important components of training, we are making them cross-cutting and scattered across programmes. The programme changes are linked to the research taxonomy you have already seen: the one CHET has come up with and is testing with us. With support from Sida, the public university quality assurance forum has been put in place. We are now going to collect data from public universities in Uganda and submit it via an online portal for transparency, because these public universities have not being doing research and they have been getting away with it. Comment: I’m very impressed with the way you are using the different HERANA indicators in your own different ways and your own publications. I think that’s way beyond our own regional expectations.

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UCT Transcription: Institutional presentation: University of Cape Town Presented by Judy Favish (Director, Institutional Planning Department) and Christina Pather (Deputy Director, Research and Development) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch Judy Favish: I'm sure you've picked up over the years that Nico is always poking fun at UCT, and he's always telling us what we don't do and how naughty we are. So we've stuck to the rules and we've only got three slides, which means this is obviously going to be at a very high level. Christina and I worked on this together. She'll talk to the last slide and I'm going to talk to the first two. So starting with institutionalisation: we have different kinds of reporting that we do. We have a monthly dashboard which we distribute to the senior leadership group, and that shows mainly operational indicators around key deliverables each year. The intention of that dashboard is really to flag issues that may require particular attention, for example, number of applications. Where applications drop over a particular period relative to previous years, we would flag that for attention of the senior leadership group on a monthly basis. Our new vice-chancellor was appointed at the end of 2008 and started working at UCT in 2009. That year was used to develop the first five-year strategic plan under the current vice-chancellor. That strategic plan's time span was 2010 to 2014. So we are about to come to the end of that strategic plan and we are currently in the process of working on the next strategic plan which I will talk to a little bit more in a minute. Within the current strategic plan, we had 57 indicators, with a spread between qualitative and quantitative indicators. We also included for each of the strategic goals what we call an impact measure. The focus of the impact measure was really to try to say, 'At the end of the five-year period, looking back, given all the interventions that might have been made, what was the impact of that particular goal on steering the institution in the direction outlined in the strategic plan?’ There are 57 strategic indicators and six impact measures. For the duration of the five-year plan, we had annual reviews organised around the 57 indicators. They were presented to the University Strategy Forum. The intention of the annual review was to inform planning for the following year, to demonstrate accountability to the institution for adherence to the strategic plan, and to report to council to indicate how the university was progressing with regard to the strategic plan. In addition to these annual reviews and monthly reports, the institution has standard reports which are presented to senate and council each year. These reports include

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interventions that were made relative to the goals set for that particular year, as well as a set of quantitative indicators which are presented to senate and council. The three standard reports that we have are for:

Social responsiveness or engaged scholarship;

Teaching and learning; and

Research.

In addition to that, we have a set of departmental indicators. Again, there is quite a strong correlation between the departmental indicators and what we ultimately aggregate up for reporting on the strategic plan. But the departmental data enables us to make comparisons between the different departments, and is used in the reviews of academic departments. We also provide comparative data so that the departments can assess their performance relative to the performance of other academic departments, particularly cognate departments. Where possible, we assist by providing comparative data benchmarked against other institutions (mainly in South Africa but not only). The data for the departmental reviews are used partly for accountability purposes, as well as for developmental purposes. At the Institutional Planning Department, we have a very close relationship with the Finance Department. We provide a lot of data that's used on an annual basis for finalising the University's budget. The Institutional Planning Department also conducts routine surveys. Those are mainly student satisfaction surveys. Each year, for example, we do a survey looking at the experience of undergraduate students – in applying to the university; in the registration process; and then the first semester – to get some feedback on the quality of the services that we are providing for the students. On a cyclical basis, we also conduct particular kinds of surveys. For example, we conduct surveys on what we call 'no-shows': students who've been made offers of places and who don’t come. We are particularly interested in Stellenbosch because there is lot of competition now with Stellenbosch for student numbers. So we try to find out, if students have been made offers, what are the reasons they have not accepted offers? Those surveys are done online and we have always been surprised at the response rate. We used to do it by phone but now we do it online. We also do surveys on, for example, students who drop out of the university but who are of good academic standing. We try to trace them to understand the reasons that they dropped out. We also do an annual graduate exit survey trying on an annual basis to track what happens to our graduates. Benchmarking is done in different ways. In the departmental reviews, every department is encouraged to have quite a strong focus on benchmarking their performance against other institutions. They need to choose those institutions themselves. As I said earlier, we try to assist with the provision of quantitative date in relation to the South Africa system. Benchmarking is also done through exchanges and study visits where we carefully identify institutions that we feel are better than us in areas we want to improve and from which we can learn. Then, particularly with the professional bodies, there's a lot of pressure

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from certain quarters on departments to get international accreditation, which is also regarded as a form of benchmarking. In South Africa, we use the higher education data and analyse the peer review data. That's extremely useful. All of that data has been audited, so we assume that there is a measure of reliability in the data that we use. Moving on to the second one: as I said, we are in the process of working on the next strategic plan. The characteristics that I am going to highlight here are still very much in the process of being discussed but this will give you a sense perhaps of some of the things that we are trying to capture in the next five-year plan. In essence, one of the things that I would like to stress is that, in thinking about the characteristics, what UCT is trying to do in this current strategic plan is to try to use indicators that reflect a desire to measure the performance of UCT in the global arena, but also really try to ensure that the resources of UCT are used to address national development goals; and, in a sense, to lever strengths that enable the institution simultaneously to address local and national needs, and compete internationally within the global arena; and then to embed transformation into our thinking about the distinguishing characteristics as well. So I've tried to highlight the key ideas that are being discussed. The first is the conscious use of research strengths – our geographic advantage in the local context – with the view to elevating our research in the national and international area. The second is the growth of new areas of study that lend themselves to cross-, multi- and trans-disciplinary engagement but are geared to having an impact on the external environment. The next is to really try to capture the notion of having a stronger focus on innovation and what will incentivise innovation within the institution. So it's about taking risks: encouraging the institution to take risks, and using the incentives stem to encourage the institution to take risks to generate new perspectives that address the complex issues of transformation in higher education and society more broadly. The next talks about UCT’s role in relation to the system; and hence the reference also to playing a role in building research leadership and capacity. There's a lot of debate on the need to focus on the people. At the end of the day, it's the people who are producing the research outputs. So we really need to ensure that there is quite a strong focus on what makes the lives of researchers easier and what makes researchers happier. So this is about the provision of an enabling environment which rewards, supports and motivates staff and students to engage in innovation and research uptake. And then classical things: the number of post-doctoral candidates; in our case, quite a strong focus on the spread and focus of collaborations and partnerships; the range and nature of scientific and societal impact on research and innovation; percentage of staff with PhDs; and looking at the proportion of students who are postgraduate students. I want to talk a little bit about the last one. This is one that's getting increasing attention within the university: trying to focus on the pipeline of undergraduate students into postgraduate studies. We have quite a big project on growing opportunities for

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undergraduate students to do research as part of their undergraduate degree. There are a number of strategies that are being put in place to do that. But we see that potentially as also being a distinguishing characteristic of the University by virtue of having a strong focus on research and undergraduate teaching. Christina will talk on the last slide. Christina Pather: I am going to talk quickly about the university’s new research strategy that is obviously very closely aligned to the strategic plan that Judy has discussed. We currently have a strategy that we started drafting around the beginning of the year [2014] that’s going through the various structures of the university. It goes to senate this afternoon for the second time so we hope that it would get accepted. It will be implemented from 2015 for a ten-year period, whereas the current strategy has been running for five years. So essentially this is what we are emphasising in the new plan, some of which I’ve spoken about in my presentation earlier this week. But I’m just going to take two minutes to run through these at very high level. The first one is resourcing research effectively. That was the bullet that I had expanded on earlier this week. Our big drive is to develop a research fundraising plan together with our Fundraising and Alumni Department in order to get more money for research. Over the last decade, funding from government including the National Research Foundation has dwindled. The DST – that's the Department of Science and Technology – for example has ring-fenced money for certain areas; the National Research Foundation (NRF) has got its own priorities and the Medical Research council has very little funding for competitive research grants. Question: How much are you bringing in currently for research? Speaker: The research contracts were just under ZAR 1 billion last year. The NRF is about ZAR 230 million or so. The next point is supporting research through research development, and focusing on the next generation of academics. About 12 years ago, the Research Office submitted a proposal to the Atlantic Philanthropies to start off our Emerging Researcher Programme and that has been one of the success stories from our office, in terms of working with younger researchers up until senior lecturer level. Over the course of about ten or 11 years, the programme has worked with some 600 academics, and there are ongoing seminars and workshops, so we will continue with that. But we also want to now take the focus to working with our mid-career researchers because once you're done as a junior researcher, you want continued support and not just to be left in the lurch. So that is one of the continued focuses of the University. Then with the Intellectual Property (IP) management and commercialisation: that will also be a new emphasis in the next decade; together with IT support. One of the big initiatives at the moment is the creation of an e-research centre that will be able to support initiatives such as “big data”.

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Over the last few years, there has been an increased focus on the internationalisation of research, not just collaborating with partners in the North and in Africa, but also growing our postgraduate sector by finding supervisors in the North who can do joint PhD supervision with UCT students. The next bullet is increased research visibility. I've heard that being mentioned in quite a lot of the presentations [here]. As I said earlier, a lot of exciting research is happening at UCT but the story is not being told externally. So, for example, we have a research portal that's presently being developed, and a focus on creating a communication and marketing strategy for research. Enhanced inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research: this is a new focus at UCT. Obviously those departments that need to do traditional basic research need to continue with that but, where possible, we are trying to attract funding specifically for interdisciplinary research and to establish institutes that will focus on that. And the last two work very closely with Judy's office, which is supporting engaged scholarship; and then also to bring research into teaching so that what our undergraduate classes and students are taught is now informed through research, and it's not just the same curriculum that's kept every year. Comment: I always criticise UCT with great pleasure, but this morning the Times Higher has done a ranking of the BRICS and a few other developing countries. The interesting thing is that UCT is number three behind two Chinese universities. What's also interesting is that number five and six are Turkish universities. Wits came about 15th and Stellenbosch about 20th, with UKZN 45th. So there are four South African universities in the top 15. Comment: Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) also produces a ranking now and South African universities don’t do nearly as well. Question: This social responsiveness, what is it about? Speaker: It's what we refer to as engaged scholarship. That's basically using teaching and learning and engaging with an external non-academic constituency for public benefit. It's what some people refer to as community outreach. But we've consciously taken the decision to use the term ‘engaged scholarship’ because it looks at how teaching and learning are used within the university together with external constituencies around a public issue or development challenge. Each year, there's a senate Committee that chooses a particular theme that tries to capture information about what's going on in this field. When we started out, the reports were really about trying to capture practices on the ground: How are people doing it? What kinds of relationships are they setting up? What are they actually doing? Are they getting involved in policy? Are they getting involved in working with government around development plans? Are they working with stakeholders around addressing particular problems? What are they actually doing and how do they do it? And we use those – what we called 'portraits of practice' – to develop a policy, and then each year we report on different things. But this year, I think the interesting thing for this discussion is that, every four years, the staff have to report on social responsiveness as part of their performance reviews. We've

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taken all of that information and included that in the Social Responsibility Report. So we have a very wide range of activities that academics are involved in, all captured in a single report. Question: Are you codifying it in a way that people can read a few things or do you have to read the whole report? Speaker: The report is organised thematically, so you can choose what area you want to focus on. But with regards to capturing the range of activities, it's done by individual academics at this point with an analysis of what the common themes and issues are.

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Dar es Salaam Transcription: Institutional presentation: University of Dar es Salaam Presented by Richard Kangalawe (Director, Research) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch This is a presentation from University of Dar es Salaam. My name is Richard and the presentation has been made in collaboration with my colleague, Judika [Kingori]. Both of us are attending this event for the first time and so we are pleased to engage with you. By way of background, the University of Dar es Salaam was established in 1961 to provide competitive academic outputs from training, academic research and public service. As with Makerere, the University of Dar es Salaam also started as a college of the University College of London. It later became part of the University of East Africa until 1970, when it became a fully-fledged university. Until the mid-1980s, the University of Dar es Salaam was the only university in Tanzania. Then, in the mid-1980s, one of the faculties of the University grew into the fully-fledged university now known as the Sokoine University of Agriculture. Since then, other universities have been established. However, the University of Dar es Salaam remained the largest university in the country; and so needed to reconsider its position at national and international level. As a result, during the mid-1990s, the University formulated a comprehensive programme called the Institutional Transformation Programme. This programme focused on building a new identity in an effort to achieve and maintain a regional and international reputation for the relevance and quality of its outputs. It succeeded in transforming the University in a number of areas, including:

Teaching and learning;

Research;

Public service;

Quality assurance issues;

Human resource and infrastructure capacity building; and

Crosscutting issues, such as HIV/Aids and gender mainstreaming.

When the University was celebrating its 5fiftieth anniversary, it took stock of where it had come, where it was, and of its future outlook. This is reflected in its Vision 2061. We thought that since we were celebrating the 50th anniversary, we should start thinking about the coming 50 years. What do we want to be 50 years on after experiencing the past 50 years? Among the issues in Vision 2061 is the question of elevating research to higher status at the university. I will look more at this later. I will address three questions. Regarding data:

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How is data collection institutionalised?

How is data analysed?

How is data disseminated? I am glad to report to you that the institutional frameworks are in place to ensure that data collection is done in an organised manner. Every academic unit of the university produces a quarterly report to the Vice-Chancellor, sharing these in quarterly council meetings and in the annual reports of the university. We also have an academic record information system that manages and reports on academic records, student record and examinations. Over the last few years, the government has required all the public institutions to use the Open Performance Review and Appraisal System (OPRAS) in which every member of staff signs a contract with the employer. In this contract, individual targets are set, and at the end of the day, each academic must report on what they have achieved and what they haven’t. This is reviewed every six months. In a year, we have to report at mid-year, then review the plan and at the end of the year, report on what you have achieved. This has enabled the university to collect information from all staff members systematically. In addition, the university uses a research report: academic staff report on what they are researching and their outputs of publications and other reports. To ensure that there is institutionalised data collection, the university has established research colonisation units in all the academic units. This means that it is not only the overall research office that ensures that data is collected, but also each academic unit that makes sure that it has a facility to collect and report on the available data. Regarding dissemination, the university supports various dissemination activities including publication of internal journal publications and participation in various dissemination forums. At the moment, the university publishes 20 journals but I am not so sure whether these appear in the Web of Science. We will have to find out. I think two or three will perhaps be there. On question number two, regarding the strategic plan and knowledge production, the University of Dar es Salaam has a Corporate Strategic Plan 2014–2023 and the five-year Rolling Strategic Plan 2014–2019. Both of these strategic plans, in line with our Vision 2061, emphasise the following:

The need to enhance the teaching and learning, both at undergraduate and post graduate level;

Research;

Innovation and knowledge exchange; and

Quality assurance. The strategic plan has 13 strategic objectives. I won’t go through all of them, except to say that research is quite highly ranked. This is one of the ways of making University of Dar es Salaam a research-intensive university. Regarding postgraduate enrolment, postgraduate issues are coordinated by the Directorate of Postgraduate Studies, not by the Directorate of Research. A strategic issue is the high demand for some academic disciplines. In response, the University has

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established online and distance learning courses, as well as establishing and expanding evening classes. Another strategic issue within postgraduate training is the need to diversify and become a comprehensive university. Let me say here why we think of diversifying. Over its lifecycle, the University of Dar es Salaam has produced three new universities. In doing so, it lost three of its major disciplines. In 1984, the Faculty of Agriculture became a fully-fledged university and so agriculture was no longer offered by the University. However, we would like to re-establish it. Between 2006 and 2007, two other universities emerged out of the University of Dar es Salaam: Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences (which later became the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences) and the Ardhi University that used to provide for studies in architectural sciences. We would like to re-establish these disciplines in order to be as comprehensive as we were in the past. Other issues are the limited sponsorship for our postgraduate candidates, limited space and facilities, and the need to expand our number of PhD programmes that are completed through course work. Here the strategy has been to conduct studies to reveal the opportunities for establishing such kind of programmes. Where necessary, there will be support for online deliveries. Furthermore, a number of PhD programmes by course work have been established over the last two years; and they are enrolling quite a number of students. We are also addressing improvement to our library and bookshop to ensure that students get access to reading materials that they need. At postgraduate level, we are looking at enhancing or expanding electronic journal subscription. On research, there are few strategic areas we are wanting to reorient the university research agenda in line with national development needs. As we implement Vision 2061, we need to refocus and be more comprehensive in approach, including through reviewing our research agenda. Another research issue is the need to create frameworks for strategic engagement with stakeholders. We are also creating structures that foster multi-disciplinary research and enable interdisciplinary collaboration. The university has passed guidelines for establishing, research centres and research centres of excellence that will involve both national and international stakeholders. There is also a need to establish a stable research fund to support research. The university plans to build the capacity of the faculty to develop fundable research proposals. This is being undertaken through the training and retraining of members of academic staff, particularly the junior ones, on writing fundable proposals. In addition, the university looking at how those who cannot access competitive research grants can be supported through funds to undertake smaller research projects. Another strategic issue is the need to enhance the visibility of the university, as every other university in the world is trying to do. We are looking at achieving this through improving our research facilities, supporting initiatives for enhanced visibility for the university, enhancing coordination of research and research databases and supporting the dissemination of research findings. To make Vision 2061 possible in the research context, we are guided by various policies as a university. These are the National Development Vision 2025 and the National Research and Development Policy;, and then the university-based Research Policy and Operational

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Procedures, Research Ethics Policy, Intellectual Property Policy and Guidelines for Research Centres of Excellence. Very recently, we established a university research week. This provides a forum where university researchers engage with the public to exhibit various research outputs. The plan is to make this research week competitive so that those researchers and research outputs are rewarded. We think this will incentivise our researchers to engage more in research. A major challenge regarding research is the limited funding. Despite the fact that the National Research Policy states that at least 1% of the GDP will be allocated to research that has rarely happened. In our discussions on becoming a research-intensive university, Vision 2061 guides us towards that end. Our vision is to be a leading centre of intellectuals, spearheading the quest for sustainable development. In our mission statement, excellence in teaching, research and knowledge exchange are given prime importance. In order to become a flagship university, the University of Dar es Salaam has undergone restructuring. This includes the establishment of a third deputy vice-chancellor position, responsible for research and knowledge exchange. This position was created in 2012 to give research the necessary rigour and to push the university towards a flagship position. The university is also proactively creating collaborative links with industry and other research institutions, including through research, outreach, dissemination of research findings and strategic resource allocation to show its commitment. Another aspect being discussed is the need to enhance research by making it more relevant to the national strategic priorities and by addressing the socio-economic needs of the country. As part of the process, we need to continue with and intensify the search for new knowledge as other universities are doing in order that we can produce new knowledge in line with the applied research. However, we also need to engage in basic science research. A further aspect is building the capacity of young scholars though mentorship provided by senior professors. Because of the ageing profile of the university academics, there is a big gap between the younger academics and the very senior ones. We thus retain retired professors so that we can access their capacity to develop fundable proposals and so that they can help mentor the younger academics to develop similar capacity. An issue that we think will be important in making the University of Dar es Salaam a flagship university is ensuring that we are part of the international process. Through the establishment of this Deputy Vice-Chancellor position in Research and Knowledge Exchange, we believe we will spearhead research towards internationalisation. Another step that the university has taken towards an international position is the establishment of a Directorate of Knowledge Exchange to enhance the dissemination of research findings. This Directorate works with the Directorate of Research under the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Knowledge Exchange. Finally, the university has established a Directorate of International Relations to enhance the university’s international orientation. We believe that these new structures will enable the university to attract

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more research funding and hence dissemination, thus forging a stronger and more meaningful collaboration with various stakeholders. Thank you very much.

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Eduardo Transcription: Institutional presentation: University of Eduardo Mondlane Presented by Ezequiel Abrahamo (Director of Planning Office) HERANA 3 seminar 18–21 November 2014 CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch This short presentation will give you information about four points. The background to our university has already been presented so I will not repeat this. I will inform you about:

How we collect the statistical data and our sources data;

Performance indicators that we use;

The users of the data; and

Institutional documents we produce and that we use for defining policy. The main source of our statistical data are faculties, schools and centres, as well as the Directorate of the Academic Register, the Pedagogical Directorate, the Scientific Directorate, the Human Resources Directorate and the Finance Directorate. The faculties prepare statistical information and we, as the Planning Office and on behalf of the university, systemise and compile the data, and also send it back to all these units. We collect information about some of the indicators that we use. We have made some changes to these indictors in order to collect adequate data for HERANA since we joined the HERANA project.

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The data collection is as shown in the flow chart below:

We collect the following information:

Number of students;

Total student enrolment by gender and course

Numbers of full-time and part-time academic staff;

Numbers of full-time and part-time Masters and Doctoral students;

Total number of graduates by faculty; and

Number of research projects. We have a statistical publication that has since two years ago also been published in English. I gave one to Nico [Cloete] when he was in Maputo for a workshop at the Eduardo Mondlane University. One of the institutional documents that we produce is an annual report. This report gives information about how each activity is achieved within the faculty, school, centre, and also the whole university if it was university-wide. We also report on financial performance, namely how finance was used for research activities. We also have an annual academic report produced under the coordination of the vice-chancellor for Academic Affairs. A team that includes senior academic staff delivers this report using the statistical information that we have provided. As mentioned, we have a statistical publication, as well as an annual publication in which information is provided by faculty and school about courses administered by our university. These are all institutional documents, not scientific publications.

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We have a separate focus on the university’s scientific publications. For instance, we collaborate to produce an academic report for which our senior academic staff provide articles that are published nationally or internationally. This report is produced with coordination by the office of the Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Who are the main users of this data that we collect? Naturally, the academic staff, first of all. Then, researchers, faculties, schools, centres, the administrative unit, the government, HERANA itself and other national and international institutions use this information. Thank you for your attention.

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HERANA 3 Meeting Date: 18 to 21 November 2014 Venue: CoE in Scientometrics Seminar Room, Stellenbosch

Tuesday 18 November (Asara)

Arrivals at Dorpshuis, Stellenbosch

18h00 Drinks, welcome and general introductions – Teboho Moja

18h30 HERANA 3 Deliverables – Nico Cloete and Claudia Frittelli

19h30 Dinner at Asara

Wednesday 19 November (CoE Scientometrics, Wilcocks Building)

08h30 Emerging research‐intensive flagship universities in Africa – Nico Cloete

09h30 Moving towards a research intensive university: Eduardo Mondlane – Patricio Langa

10h45 Tea

11h00 Internal differentiation: identifying and supporting knowledge production within an institution – Gerald Ouma

11h15 Efforts to strengthen research at Makerere: – Florence Nakayiwa-Mayega and Vincent Ssembatya

12h00 Incentives for research: ˃ University of Nairobi – Agnus Lutomiah ˃ University of Cape Town – Christina Pather

13h00 Lunch

13h45 Research performance and bibliometrics – Robert Tijssen and Johann Mouton

17h30 Break

19h30 Supper at De Cameron restaurant

Thursday 20 November

09h00 The academic core – Ian Bunting

10h15 An indicator of research funding – Mark Bunting

10h45 Tea

11h15 Data collection – Ian Bunting

13h00 Lunch

14h00 Data management – François van Schalkwyk

14h30 HERANA 2 Reports: ˃ University Engagement – François van Schalkwyk ˃ Student Engagement and Democratic Citizenship – Thierry Luescher ˃ Roles and Functions of Higher Education Councils – Tracy Bailey

16h30 Break to finalise presentations for Friday

19h30 Dinner – Dorpshuis

Friday 21 November

09h00 Institutional presentations: Botswana; Ghana, Nairobi, Mauritius

10h30 Tea

11h00 Institutional presentations continued: Makerere, UCT, Dar es Salaam, Eduardo

12h30 Tasks and Wrap up

13h00 Depart to Cape Town