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Staff Reporter
South African universities need to recover the intellectual purpose of postgraduate education, resist xenophobia in the academy and improve the quality of supervision, Professor Jonathan Jansen said at a national higher education colloquium this month.
Jansen, a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University, made the remarks while delivering the keynote address at the third Enabling Quality Postgraduate Education colloquium, held in Gauteng on March 16 and 17.
The colloquium brought together academics, postgraduate supervisors, and higher education specialists to examine how to strengthen research culture and postgraduate training across the country.
Jansen opened with a warning about the impact of anti-foreign rhetoric on universities, saying academic life depended on the free movement of scholars and ideas.
“I never thought the day would come when I would see my government issuing blatantly xenophobic statements about foreign nationals who teach and do research on our campuses,” he said.
“Xenophobia has no place, whether on the streets or in the halls of the academy,” he added.
He said universities could not treat knowledge production as a closed national project. “None of us has developed knowledge in isolation from people in other countries,” he said, adding that South African institutions had to remain open to intellectual exchange across borders.
Jansen’s remarks came after Parliament in February questioned universities and TVET colleges over their employment of foreign academics, warning institutions not to use “internationalisation” as a pretext to sidestep immigration and labour laws.
The higher education and home affairs committees said foreign appointments had to match genuine scarce-skills needs and “must not disadvantage South Africans”, while committee chair Tebogo Letsie said institutions had to show why foreign academics were needed and comply fully with the law.
In March, the Department of Higher Education and Training was ordered to submit a detailed list of foreign academics employed at universities and colleges, amid fallout from an SIU probe into corruption in visa and permit processing.
Higher Education Minister Buti Manamela adopted a more qualified stance than some MPs, saying South Africans “must be prioritised in employment opportunities” and that internationalisation was “not a loophole to bypass local employment”.
But he also said foreign nationals made up about 12% of permanent academic staff at public universities and that there was “no evidence of systematic displacement of South Africans in permanent academic posts”.
At the colloquium, Jansen then turned to what he said was a more basic question: what postgraduate education is actually for.
He said universities too often fall back on narrow, instrumental answers linked to labour market needs, research methods, and professional preparation, while neglecting deeper intellectual goals.
Distortion of priorities
He warned that financial pressure was distorting academic priorities. “In real terms, government spending on higher education has steadily declined,” he said. “Departments, therefore, feel pressure to produce more master’s and doctoral students simply to sustain themselves.”
That pressure, he said, could erode standards. “At its worst,” Jansen said, “the entire process of postgraduate education has been corrupted in a relentless quest to maximise income and research outputs.”
He was highly critical of practices he said undermined academic integrity. “Do not claim authorship on your students’ work,” he said. “You are paid to supervise that student. It is the student’s work.”
He also condemned “salami slicing”, where one study is broken into several smaller papers, saying: “You take a small piece of research, and you churn it into several mediocre articles. That is not scholarship. That is gaming the system.”
Jansen said the purpose of postgraduate study should be broader than getting students over the line. “The purpose of postgraduate education is to cultivate the intellectual mind,” he said. “It should produce students who can think deeply within and beyond the confines of their field.”
He also challenged the traditional one-on-one supervision model. “No one supervisor, unless you are extremely arrogant, has the depth and the range of knowledge to educate the postgraduate student fully,” he said, calling instead for cohort-based models that expose students to wider intellectual communities.
The colloquium, held under the theme “Enhancing the Knowledge Project”, was the last in a three-part EQPE series led by Professor Sioux McKenna of Rhodes University with funding from the Department of Higher Education and Training.
It was implemented with the Community of Practice for Postgraduate Education and Scholarship, led by Professor Stephanie Burton of the University of Pretoria.
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