A primary function of any governance structure is to observe the system it regulates and introduce distinctions that reduce complexity, thereby ensuring stable and predictable operations. When a regulatory subsystem, however, fails to adequately observe the intrinsic complexity of the system it purports to describe, its attempts at codification do not produce order. Instead, they become a source of systemic irritation, a signal registered as noise. The codification itself then becomes the primary syntax for revolt, a focal point against which the regulated system defensively asserts its own operational logic. The recent controversy surrounding the Ethiopian Ministry of Education’s revised promotion guidelines for academic staff reported by University World News serves as a clinical case study in this precise dynamic of systemic failure.
The Ministry, operating as a second-order observer of the national academic system, initiated an intervention with the stated aim of standardizing promotions and rectifying perceived inconsistencies. It attempted to stabilize its environment by imposing a simplified, uniform code—a singular set of distinctions for evaluating academic advancement. Yet, this intervention has paradoxically become the primary source of destabilizing noise for the very system it sought to regulate. The problem is not one of mere policy disagreement; it is a fundamental mismatch between the complexity of the regulator’s observational schema and the requisite variety of the system being observed. The Ministry’s uniform code, in its attempt to create order, threatens the autopoietic self-regulation of its institutional subsystems, triggering a systemic rejection of an input it cannot meaningfully process.
The first point of systemic friction emerges from a failure to adhere to what W. Ross Ashby termed the Law of Requisite Variety. The law states that for a system to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system it controls. In simpler terms, only variety can absorb variety. The Ethiopian higher education landscape is a system of immense internal variety. It comprises institutions with divergent missions—research, applied sciences, comprehensive—and, more granularly, a vast heterogeneity of academic disciplines, from the fine arts and humanities to the natural and health sciences. Each of these subsystems operates according to its own internal logic, its own criteria for what constitutes meaningful contribution, and its own modes of knowledge production.
The Ministry’s new guidelines function as a low-variety control mechanism imposed upon this high-variety environment. Consider the compulsory requirement of securing a research grant for promotion to full professorship. This elevates a single distinction—the ability to acquire external funding—to a universal criterion of academic value. While this metric may possess operational validity within certain subsystems (such as engineering or health sciences), it is largely nonsensical as a communication to others (such as philosophy or literature), where research is not structured around the grant model. From the perspective of these subsystems, the requirement is not a standard but an arbitrary perturbation. The system observes an instruction that does not compute within its own operational logic. The communication fails, and the signal is decoded as noise. The Ministry’s attempt to simplify the observational field by using a single, easily quantifiable metric has blinded it to the complex, multi-valent reality of the system itself. This is not governance; it is the imposition of a caricature.
This leads to the second critical observation, which concerns the principle of autopoiesis. A university, like any complex social system, is autopoietic. It is a self-producing and operationally closed network that maintains its identity and boundaries by continuously regenerating its own components and processes. While it is structurally coupled to its environment—it responds to funding, student intake, and regulatory signals—it cannot be directly instructed or controlled from the outside. Its operations are determined by its own internal structure. A regulatory body like the Ministry is part of the university system’s environment. Its communications are perturbations that the system observes and to which it may or may not structurally adapt, depending on whether the perturbation can be processed meaningfully within its own autopoietic organization.
When the Ministry’s guidelines are perceived as arbitrary and externally imposed, they are not integrated. Instead, they trigger a defensive response to protect the system’s operational closure. The widespread dissatisfaction and complaints from faculty are not merely expressions of personal grievance; they are a systemic immune response. The system is re-asserting its boundary and its autonomy against an environmental input that threatens its self-referential logic of operation. This is exacerbated by the Ministry’s decision to mandate its representative as a non-voting observer at promotion evaluations. This constitutes a direct intrusion by a second-order observer into the first-order operations of the system. It is an attempt to breach the operational boundary, which is invariably observed by the system as a threat to its autopoietic integrity. The response is not compliance but a doubling down on institutional autonomy and a rejection of the regulator’s schema.
Furthermore, the entire episode reveals a pathology of second-order observation. The Ministry is observing a system (academia) that observes itself (through peer review and promotion). The Ministry’s error was to mistake its own simplified, second-order observational model for the objective reality of the system. It reified its own contingent distinctions—”grant-winner,” “digitally literate,” “published in an A-rank local journal”—and sought to impose this construction as the sole legitimate code. However, any observation is just that: one possible distinction drawn among many. When the system being observed does not recognize the validity of the observer’s distinctions, communication collapses.
The retroactive application of the new guidelines to pending applications is particularly instructive. This action disrupted the system’s temporal expectations and negated its past operations, effectively communicating that the regulator’s new observational present invalidates the system’s operational past. This does more than create unfairness; it severs the trust that is essential for structural coupling. The system learns that the regulatory environment is unpredictable and its communications unreliable. The result is a retreat from engagement and a deepening of systemic distrust, transforming a regulatory body from a potential steering mechanism into a source of erratic, irritating noise.
To move forward, what is required is not merely a revision of the guidelines but a fundamental shift in the Ministry’s mode of observation. A first-order solution—adjusting the grant money threshold or re-ranking local journals—will not resolve a second-order problem. The problem lies in the regulator’s theory of the system it seeks to regulate. A cybernetic approach to governance would abandon the illusion of direct, prescriptive control in favor of indirect steering. This requires the regulator to increase its own internal variety to begin to match the variety of the system.
This means replacing a single, rigid code with a framework that enables and respects the distributed intelligence of the system itself. It means observing how different disciplinary subsystems generate and validate knowledge and allowing for a plurality of legitimate pathways to promotion. It means engaging in genuine communication—a recursive loop of feedback and adaptation—rather than issuing unilateral decrees. The regulator must move from observing the system as a simple object to be managed to observing it as a complex, self-organizing entity whose autonomy is the very source of its vitality. It must, in essence, learn to observe itself observing the system, and in doing so, recognize that its map is not the territory. Until this cognitive shift occurs, the Ministry will remain trapped in a paradoxical loop, where every attempt to impose order only amplifies the very chaos it seeks to contain.
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