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History
In 1993, on the eve of our democratic revolution, the Councils of the five institutions formed a legal body called the Western Cape Tertiary Institutions Trust. The member universities and technikons were to be the ‘beneficiaries’ of the Trust which was established to “facilitate and expand co-operation between the beneficiaries with regard to the sharing of infrastructure, such as libraries, information technology, training of personnel, as well as any other form of co-operation which may be beneficial to any of the parties . . .” This was their response to the twin challenges of meeting increasing demands with decreasing resources and levelling the playing fields between them.
By 1997 we were pursuing a more systemic approach to regional collaboration that moved us beyond infrastructural projects such as library automation. A strategic vision statement was adopted that read:
“Through the establishment of a co-ordinated, cost-effective regional system, to promote quality higher education in the Western Cape which is responsive to historical realities and challenges, with an extended influence beyond the region.”
Our early sorties into strategic academic programme collaboration ended in failure. Failure is not a bad place to learn that voluntary, regional, inter-institutional organisations, such as the Trust, are inherently fragile and precarious. They depend for their success, therefore, on crafting rules and conventions for co-operation that bind autonomous, competing and very competitive institutions. In short, we have had to learn by trial and error to balance competing interests, resolve conflict and find diplomatic solutions to difficult problems. In fact, the literature of international affairs, conflict resolution and diplomacy has assisted us more than management literature has!
The Vice Chancellors of the, then five, institutions signed a revised vision document in the form of a public Compact at the end of 2002 in which they committed their institutions to implement this vision and to certain principles that ought to govern their behaviour towards each other.
On 1 January 2005, Cape Technikon and Peninsula Technikon merged to form the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, thus reducing the five institutions making up CHEC to four.
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Page updated 22 February 2005
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