Read the interview:
Philip Cotton reflects on his experience leading the formation of the University of Rwanda through a national merger of public institutions. He describes the complex, cross-ministerial coordination required to unify standards, reduce duplication, and elevate quality. Central to this transformation was a student-centered approach—actively listening to learners and building feedback loops into decision-making. Cotton highlights both the structural and cultural shifts necessary for such change, from rationalizing programs to rethinking cost models and regional access.
I mean, it was the greatest privilege of my life, I think, heading the institution. And we had merged a large number of public higher learning institutions. Some of them had accreditation as universities, others were nursing colleges or teacher training colleges. And we brought them all together to form one national, public university. And of course, it had many, many challenges, but there was a very clear vision because within the sector, there were issues around quality, and variation in quality, between institutions.
And yet, often, you had faculty emerging from the same, original, older National University of Rhonda working across a range of institutions sharing resources, teaching in in one another's institutions, and yet the quality in some institutions was different to the quality in other institutions. There was also quite a lot of duplication. So public money was going into institutions that were just running the same courses.
But there's very clear vision about what we wanted to achieve and what the nation wanted to achieve, and how the university sector could contribute to the development of the nation. But critical were issues of coordination, of consistency, of congruency, of collaboration. So everybody came together. This was a national effort.
So it required the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health for health related courses, the Ministry of Agriculture for Veterinary Medicine and agriculture courses. It required all of their agencies, some of their international collaborators. It required the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning as we worked out the funding mechanism for the university and the true cost of teaching. It required the Ministry of Public Service and Labor to be involved as we worked out the employment status of of academics, whether as civil servants or whether there should be a special statute. So you required the Ministry of Justice to be involved, and everybody was involved and it was it was coordinated by high office in the country and by the prime minister's office, but we were very much tasked with making it happen. So there was the government and the government agencies that moved to a position of letting it happen, once we had created the - we had the vision - once we had created the road map and we were then allowed to make it happen.
And there were certain people who were there to help it happen. So they were the technical advisers in the government and the people who came to join the university, and the people who emerged from the university as as senior leaders. So I think it was it was a rather beautiful lesson in a nation getting behind the development of something that it held very dear, which was education and higher education. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't easy. In fact, it was incredibly difficult at times, but I think we made heavy work of some things. You know, we had to get one unified set of policies and that would have been a very straightforward thing to do. You would think, but sometimes it took a little bit longer than others. I think we made light work of some things that we perhaps should have put more time and effort into.
I think one of the major successes of the university was the student centeredness of the university. So, making sure that the student voice came through in all of our decision making. All of the all of the committees that were in operation to run the university. Making sure that we constantly tested the temperature of the university. How are we doing? Not going to external agencies or asking our peers within government agencies, but asking our students, asking our learners, and then developing systems to take that feedback and to make changes.
You know as I say it wasn't always straightforward and, so you know, there was rationalization of programs, that was a major piece of work that we had to do. And once people realized that they were no longer institutions in competition, and you know the competition came from the fact that they needed to to stay solvent. So they needed to have a certain amount of scholarship fee income coming into the university, and so they needed to keep revamping the programs and introducing programs and if one institution introduced a new program that seemed to be quite popular then another institution would emulate it.
As soon as you took that away, people could manage rationalization of programs. But we had 16 campuses and there were some dominant voices coming from some of the secondary cities saying, "But if you rationalize the program, that particular program or set of programs, to one campus then people in these secondary cities, peripherally placed in the country, won't be able to access those programs because we only had programs that you had to physically attend." There weren't any virtual programs at that time. And so you're always weighing up access and presence of university, and young people, and staff in those secondary cities, and in those peripheral communities because obviously there's a lot of experience around universities driving socioeconomic development in the towns and cities, in which they have a presence. And so those were some of the issues that became problems for us.
I think also, you know, it's very easy to focus on problems of the present, but we needed to begin to look at problems of the future. So, you know, trying to think ahead of ourselves in terms of the impact of climate change, for example, on women as a group, on the labor workforce, on harvesting, you know, on water flow, on diseases and health, were things that we had to task ourselves with. So we were moving very fast in lots of lots of different domains operationally, administratively trying to work out the true cost of teaching, and the true cost of learning, and the true cost of running an institution as large as ours.
The things that we could share resources, over the things that we could actually reduce our spend on, but also keeping access to programs and driving the quality of those programs. And of course that that's yet another area, isn't it? What constitutes quality in a program? Well, it depends who you ask. And so we had to ask a whole range of stakeholders, not just the employers, who seem sometimes to be the obvious people to ask, but the students and the parents and the people within the university, as well as some of the people working in wider government.