The fragmentation, inequality, and inefficiency of higher education in the apartheid era left a legacy of deficits in academic and staff development. In her keynote presentation Naledi Pandor said, "Many people characterized the problem with our education system as purely a matter of financial resources, but increasingly it is becoming clear that the human element and its input into education may be the telling factor."

Training a pool of blacks and women to assume management responsibilities and academic leadership positions is a particular priority, but this is only one part of the task. As Vice Chancellor Bundy pointed out, a culture inhospitable to blacks exists on many campuses where the staff is predominantly white, and this culture must be transformed. Bundy reported that intensive mentoring has been found to be an important component in effective staff development programs at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Retention of faculty members and staff also is a serious problem. David Wiley pointed out that trained African faculty members at HDIs often are recruited by HAIs, the private sector, and government, reducing the staff who are available to teach and develop programs and also to develop partnerships. Increasing support to HDI institutions and their faculty for research and decreasing the heavy teaching loads could contribute to making these institutions more attractive for long-term career development.

Although several participants argued that developing academic leadership needs to occur rapidly, Richard Fehnel of the Ford Foundation said that it is essential to pursue a long-term approach to capacity building, given the scale and complexity of the academic and staff development that is required. He urged designing inter-generational approaches that incorporate the needs of senior staff, junior staff, and post-graduate students who will be future staff. Because this need cuts across higher education institutions, the Ford Foundation favors partnerships for staff development that are organized with consortia of South African institutions. Such programs need to be driven by the needs for equity and access and should target women as well as blacks. Another locus for formulating collaborative approaches to staff development (as well as other focus areas) is the U.S. AID-funded Tertiary Education Linkages Program (TELP) involving 15 HDIs.

Staff development is a multi-faceted need, including both administrative management and academic leadership. Faculty members and students need a well-managed institution to provide quality teaching and learning. Recognizing this inter-connection, the partnership between Technikon Northern-Gauteng (TNG) and several Dutch institutions coordinated by NUFFIC has focused on both academic staff development in selected faculties and middle management capacity building. Jonathan Jansen, Dean of Education at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), also pointed out that inadequate management capacity can hamper implementing decisions made democratically by a faculty to improve its program.

Naledi Pandor suggested that partnerships could be helpful to South African institutions for addressing some of the changes in strategic planning and governance that have been mandated by the Higher Education Act of 1997.

While some academic and staff development partnerships, such as the one at TNG, are designed to meet the needs identified by the South African institution, Ann Austin, Professor of Educational Administration at MSU, advocated mutually beneficial partnerships that may be most productive "when they are organized explicitly around questions of mutual interest, rather than simply around skill development."

"Many of the issues, questions, and problems in South African higher education parallel those in the United States - and I believe in Europe as well. When partners are working together to explore and address common concerns, power and responsibility are equally shared. Furthermore, framing partnerships within the context of questions of mutual interest illustrates that staff development directly pertains to the central issues relevant to the quality, role, and impact of higher education within society."

- Ann Austin, College of Education, Michigan State University

Austin presented detailed models of partnerships addressing various aspects of academic and staff development. One of these, a degree-awarding program in academic and administrative management, could involve South African and perhaps foreign scholars conducting intensive graduate seminars in South Africa. These seminars would be coupled with independent projects that students would work on during the months between intensive periods of course work. This model would reduce the time spent by South African academics away from their home institution and the cost of post-graduate training - problems that were identified also in the session on partnerships for research and graduate programs.

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