Higher Education and Training Minister Buti Manamela says South African universities must rethink teaching and assessment to prepare graduates for a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI), while strengthening the country’s capacity to develop and govern its own technologies.
The Minister noted that generative AI can assist to improve research, translation, administration and teaching. However, he pointed out that can also pose risks, including reproducing bias, generating fabricated evidence, deepen dependence on proprietary systems and encourage students to mistake a fluent answer for an understood argument.
“If a machine can produce a plausible essay in seconds, our response cannot be limited to finding a better machine to detect it,” the Minister said.
Manamela was delivering a keynote address at a national webinar held on Tuesday under the title: "The Intellectual Directions of Higher Education in South Africa".
The webinar was convened by Nelson Mandela University, the University of the Free State, Rosebank International and Higher Education Media Services.
Manamela called for universities to rethink assessment methods to determine whether students can frame a worthwhile question, test evidence, make ethical judgements, work with others, and apply knowledge to an unfamiliar problem.
He said the country must build African capacity in AI through research infrastructure, open resources, African-language technologies, and trustworthy data, rather than becoming permanently dependent on technological systems developed elsewhere.
“Digital transformation should not mean that our universities become permanent consumers of knowledge infrastructures designed elsewhere,” the Minister said.
Defining purpose
The Minister said the future of higher education requires an honest discussion about funding, access, institutional sustainability, and the purpose of universities.
While the National Student Financial Aid Scheme has expanded access to higher education, Manamela said its administrative weaknesses and the growing gap between financial commitments and available funding affect the sustainability of the entire system.
Manamela said student support and institutional funding cannot be treated as unrelated, warning that protecting access, while undermining the institutions that must educate students, will not secure meaningful access.
"If we protect institutional balance sheets by excluding capable young people, we have betrayed the public mission.
“The challenge is to build a settlement that is equitable, financially credible and administratively deliverable. That settlement also requires institutions to ask difficult questions about cost, differentiation and cooperation.
“South Africa does not need 26 copies of the same university, each competing to look like a particular international model. We need a connected system of distinct institutions, with different strengths and responsibilities, all committed to quality,” the Minister said.
While the ranking of institutions can provide useful information, Manamela said that cannot be the intellectual compass of the entire higher education system.
Advancing intellectual transformation
Manamela underscored the need to deepen intellectual transformation, saying that decolonisation is “neither a slogan for strategic plans nor a rejection of every idea originating elsewhere”.
“It is a disciplined interrogation of power in the production of knowledge: what has been treated as universal, what has been dismissed as local, who is permitted to theorise and who is expected only to supply experience. When African languages are absent from serious scholarship, we lose more than an opportunity to translate existing material,” Manamela said.
Multilingual teaching resources, scholarly vocabularies and digital tools can expand both access and intellectual possibility, he said.
“The same responsibility applies to climate, health, land, food, water and energy. The planetary crisis is not somewhere outside South Africa. It is present in our municipalities, farms, mines, coastlines and households.
“Universities should connect scientific, technical, social and indigenous knowledge to understand these challenges, while protecting the space to criticise prevailing economic and political arrangements.”
The Minister also challenged universities to renew their public purpose by ensuring that their teaching and research moves beyond campus gates.
“A university located near communities experiencing water insecurity, unemployment, failing infrastructure or preventable disease should not be intellectually distant from those realities.”
The Minister further called for stronger partnerships between universities, technical and vocational education and training colleges, community colleges, employers, labour and civil society to strengthen pathways into work and support research and innovation. – SAnews.gov.za
