Why has South Africa decided to merge a number of universities?
One of the driving forces was the need to achieve efficiency. We had polytechnics and universities with 5,000 students, and they could not operate at the appropriate scale. So we merged our universities from 36 down to 23. How will the merger benefit the University of Johannesburg? It allows us to build a new institution, one that brings together a polytechnic structure into a university structure. I’m confident we’ll become the benchmark in a decade’s time for institutional productivity and responsiveness in South Africa. The top five universities that have not gone through such mergers miss the dynamism and energy that is enabling us to rethink our institution. What models have you drawn on? We look to the new generation of universities in the United Kingdom formed in the 1980s—for example, Manchester, Warwick—institutions that were born out of polytechnics and have become giant universities. And, of course, going further back, we look to MIT and Caltech in the United States, two exc
