Looking backwards: how to be a South African university
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2015
TITLE AUTHOR(S): C.Soudien
KEYWORDS: HIGHER EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE ERA, RACE RELATIONS, UNIVERSITIES
DEPARTMENT: Office of the CEO (ERM), Office of the CEO (OCEO), Office of the CEO (IL), Office of the CEO (BS), Office of the CEO (IA)
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 9009
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/1619
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/1619
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
In this paper, the author argues that the contemporary South African university cannot be understood and engaged with outside of an appreciation of its constitutive beginnings. Race is central to these beginnings but how it takes form, is worked with and deployed in the university is, to be historically accurate, not a deliberate teleological project. The approach the authors takes in this work is to see it rather as a site of perverse ambivalence. He argues that this ambivalence is unable to impede the momentum of whiteness as a sense making paradigm in which the university is to operate. It is not, however, a totalising apparatus. Contestation surrounds it, even in its most powerful moments. He suggests, in terms of this, that even as white dominance deepens there continue to be agents who both reflect on and act critically on the circumstances in which they find themselves. The first part of the paper provides a brief description of the inauguration of the higher education system. A second looks at the social conditions in which this inauguration played out. A third part then looks at how the universities in their engagement with this social context responded in determining who should come to it and what should be taught. Flowing from this, the paper closes with preliminary thoughts on how the South African university might begin to address its constitutive challenges.-
Related Research Outputs:
- Unpacking (white) privilege in a South African university classroom: A neglected element in multicultural educational contexts
- From racial liberalism to corporate authoritarianism: the Shell affair and the assault on academic freedom in South Africa
- Chasing credentials and mobility: private higher education in South Africa
- The focus of an undergraduate social science curriculum for Southern Africa: historical consciousness, human rights and social and development issues
- Book review: Musisi, N.B. & Muwanga, N.K. 2003. Makerere University in transition 1993-2000. Oxford: James Currey Publishers, p. 103
- Whose teaching whom?: interrogating subjectives in the teaching of literature in post-apartheid South Africa
- Going global: working with South Africa's universities
- Review: "the African university in the 21st century"
- 'Shutting up the crazies': reflections on feminists, whiteness, intellectuals and black aliens inside and outside the academy
- Changing gender profile of medical schools in South Africa
- Impact of networks, globalisation and their interaction with EU strategies (INGENEUS project): synthesis paper on "HRD policies and MNC subsidiaries"
- Student retention & graduate destination: higher education & labour market access & success
- Poverty, race and student achievement in seven higher education institutions
- The Fort Hare writing centre: an integrated collaborative model for writing and language advancement
- Race, education and emancipation: a five-year longitudinal, qualitative study of agency and impasses to success amongst higher education students in a sample of South African universities
- Lecturers' perceptions on the academic performance of conventional and distance education students at UNISWA: a comparative study
- Linking knowledge producers and marginalised communities
- Brutal inheritances: exploring diverse students' responses to racial, ethnic, language and religious privilege in four African universities
- Of false-starts, blind spots, cul-de-sacs and legitimacy struggles: the curriculum debate in South African higher education
- 'Luring the academic soul': promoting academic engagement in South African universities