Aspects of corporate governance in South African public higher education institutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The right to education is entrenched in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. The Constitution, together with various policy documents, provides guiding principles for the transformation of higher education in South Africa. Several universities were placed under administration, before and after the attainment of democracy in South Africa. The independent assessors reports on these institutions have one thing in common, namely that they point out poor administration and ineffective corporate governance practices. Despite many commendable initiatives by Government since 1994 to improve an apparently flawed higher education system, some aspects could be enhanced further, especially concerning corporate governance and governance accountability. Council members and the executive management of higher education institutions are subject to common law fiduciary duties and duties of care and skill. However, their accountability for breaches of these duties is not always clear and is seldom enforced. There is a need to balance effective accountability and the exercise of discretionary powers that are integral to effective governance and management. This thesis considers how corporate governance and compliance in higher education can be improved further, taking into account various legislative changes to the Higher Education Act 101 of 1997, direction provided by the Companies Act 71 of 2008 and the Banks Act 94 of 1990 in respect of the regulation of directors’ duties. An in-depth investigation into the relevant provisions of these Acts was not intended nor undertaken. Rather, the thesis draws from these Acts so that the problems concerning corporate governance in the higher education sector may be dealt with. The regulation of higher education in the foreign jurisdiction of the State of Georgia in the United States of America and in the Canadian province of Ontario was also considered. Based on the research undertaken, specific amendments are proposed to the Higher Education Act of 1997 and the Regulations for Reporting by Public Higher Education Institutions 2014, which are aimed at improvin higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".