Swings and roundabouts: Centralisation and devolution in a multi-campus university in South Africa

Over the course of its ninety-year history a great deal of time and energy has been devoted at the University of Natal to trying to understand the bes t way to administer and manage a unitary University whose two main campuses are fifty miles apart. In the early 1990s, after decades of gradual separa tion of the campuses, the massive changes taking place in South Africa, as experienced in Higher Education, prompted a major review of the management, administrative and committee structures within the University. This review , whose recommendations were accepted and implemented, advocated a formal p rocess of administrative and budgetary devolution to the two campuses in Du rban and Pietermaritzburg. Five years later, in the face of further externa l pressures, a new review recommended that the devolution be reversed and a strongly centralised structure be put in place. This recommendation, in tu rn, was approved and implemented. This article outlines the reasoning behin d both sets of recommendations and explores the pros and cons for a multi-c ampus university of both centralisation and devolution in the light of the experience of a university which has gained first-hand knowledge of both al ternatives in less than a decade.