Transformation and Legitimation in Post-apartheid Universities

Abstract

These are no poverty; no hunger; good health; quality education; gender equality; clean water and sanitation; renewable energy; good jobs and economic growth; innovation and infrastructure; reduced inequalities; sustainable cities and communities; responsible consumption; climate actions; life below water; life on land; peace and justice; and partnerships for the goals. See the full document at http://www.un.org/ ga/search/view_doc.asp? symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E. [Accessed 17 June 2016].

Transforming transformation in research and teaching in South African universities

“…Homing in on whiteness as an institutional form, this concept is used by a number of scholars in a bid to capture the workings of everyday racism in the institutional cultures of universities (Van der Merwe & Van Reenen, 2016;Higgins, 2007;. Whiteness is a structural position intertwined with heteropatriarchal and middle-class privilege which maintains itself invisibly and is normalised as the standard of achievement.…”

Quality Enhancement in Student Affairs and Social Justice: A Reflective Case Study from South Africa

“…Having been designated during apartheid as exclusively white, Afrikaans-tuition university, the institution was amongst the public universities in South Africa to undergo a set of far-reaching changes, including an ongoing process of language policy review (e.g. Van der Merwe & Van Reenen, 2016). In the early 1990s, after the removal of restrictions on access for black students, the institution adopted a dual English/Afrikaans tuition model and thereafter admitted increasingly larger numbers of black students.…”

“…Given that the dean of student affairs, who had been put in place in the wake of a widely publicised racist incident at the university in 2009 (i.e. the 'Reitz incident' analysed in detail in Van der Merwe and Van Reenen, 2016), was leaving the institution by the end of 2014, an assessment of progress made by the DSA in terms of its transformation was timely. The DSA strategic plan sought to position its core student life function as part of "the heartbeat of the transformation process within various student cohorts" (DSA, 2013, p. 6).…”

What Are We Witnessing? Student Protests and the Politics of the Unknowable

“…Wherever one's sympathies may lie within the diverse racial, political and class histories of South African public universities, 1 it is a truism that since 2015, South African higher education (and broader society) has seen some rallying against inherited structures of power, establishment and privilege in the form of widespread student protests (Luescher & Klemenčič, 2016;Van der Merwe & Van Reenen, 2016;Jansen, 2017). 2 In the academy, there have been persistent calls for 'new' ways in which to speak about, make sense of, and resolve problems in South African public higher education, which have arguably reached crisis stages as full-blown university shutdowns became spatial representations of communicative breakdowns in recent years (Manjra, 2016).…”

“…The policy changed again in 2016 with white students, many of whom did not select Afrikaans-medium instruction, now forming about 20% of the student body (UFS Commission for Gender Equality presentation, 2017). The university continues to struggle with transformation against this history(Van der Merwe & Van Reenen, 2016). 5 Some refer to this generation as the 'born free generation'(Cooper, 2017, p. viii), i.e.…”