Page 82 - Transformation Indaba Report

and style from similar calls made at various periods over the past 20 years. These
demands usually include ‘Africanization ’ of universities; ‘decolonization’ of knowledge
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and curricula reform; equality of access and success; better facilities and better support
systems; demographic representation on all levels of the academy, and across university
structures; democratic and inclusive institutional cultures; and universities being more
responsive to the vast developmental needs and challenges of their environments.

7. In a meeting with the Transformation Oversight Committee on 26 May 2015, the
Minister also foregrounded the transformation challenges at Historically Disadvantaged
Universities (HDIs) in relation to functionality, efficiency, quality and good governance,
in addition to the challenges experienced at other ‘types’ of universities. Between 1994
and 2012 the Minister appointed 14 assessors to deal with public higher education
institutions in crisis; this includes governance breakdown, maladministration and near
collapse of institutions (see Lange and Luescher-Mamashela, forthcoming). These are
described as follows: ‘Factional councils that have failed to exercise their fiduciary
responsibility; a lack of leadership and absence of efficient administrative systems;
academic matters often involving weak, marginalized or dysfunctional senates;
maladministration, corruption and financial crises’ (ibid).

8. Problems in leadership and governance are equally not peculiar to HDIs, and have
periodically affected quite a vast range of our institutions in recent years and still continue
to affect some today. The fact that universities face such problems from time to time is
not the key problem, but rather how they deal with it. After all, corporate and public
institutions also face these challenges in their life histories. If, however, such problems
become endemic, ingrained and self-perpetuating and undermine the normal functioning
and integrity of an institution, they require more fundamental interventions. Similarly,
institutional ‘divides’ along departmental, school, ‘schools of thought’ and other lines are
perhaps inescapable characteristics of human organizations, and manifest realities at all
our institutions. After all, knowledge is always produced and reproduced within a given
set of social relations. However, when such ‘divisions’ crystallize across race, class,
gender, sexual orientation, and other discriminatory lines, it gives rise to inequitable
arrangements and ‘othering’. Moreover, when these arrangements obtain the status of
‘political power blocs’ conserving arcane and reactionary interests in blatant opposition to
progressive transformation goals, then it constitutes a problem.

9. Some writers have strongly pointed to the role that alumni, ‘ethnic’, academic, intellectual
and political ‘cabals’ play as ‘shadow governments’ on some campuses, by promoting
‘race’ and ‘ethnic’ (and one might add, gendered) networks and career advancement (see
Law, Phillips and Turney, 2004). Such networks are often based on various regimes of
patronage and the accumulation of power, influence and resources that do not have the
principle of equal opportunity as its inherent basis. Nevertheless, it is a given that all
universities have sub-cultures and networks to promote or facilitate a range of

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Need proper framing
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NelsoN MaNdela UNiversity • traNsforMatioN iNdaba • 2022 76