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Between Race and Reason: Violence, Intellectual Responsibility and the University to Come
(Susan Searls Giroux 2010); The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom 2008);
Achieving our Country (Rorty 1999); Our Underachieving Colleges (Bok 2006); and
Universities in the Marketplace (Bok 2009). Others include Citizenship and Higher
Education - The Role of Universities in Communities and Society (Arthur and Bohlin,
2005); Higher Education and the Public Good (Nixon, 2011) and Intellectuals and the
Public Good (Misztal, 2007).

c. Economic, cultural and political globalisation is, amongst others, organised
around global knowledge economies and thus ‘higher education institutions are
more important than ever as mediums for a wide range of cross-border
relationships and continuous global flows of people, information, knowledge,
technologies, products and financial capital’ (xx). But, globalisation also raised a
critical question as formulated by Torres (xx): ‘Will globalization make human
rights and democratic participation more universal, or will globalization redefine
human enterprise as market exchanges invulnerable to traditional civic forms of
governance? Whether education as a publicly shared invention, contributing to
civic life and human rights, can thrive depends on the specific dominant
trajectories shaping globalization – either a future that may offer
internationalization of the ideals of a democratic education or reducing education
and civic participation to narrow instruments of remote and seemingly
ungovernable market forces’. Both trends are discernable and often co-present in
higher education systems across the developed and developing worlds.

d. Amidst analyses of this kind, ranking frenzies and the overproduction of such
orderings are now dominating the higher education landscape; its over-proximity
within universities gave rise to forms of anti-educational and narcissistic forms of
academic citizenships across the sector. A perfunctory analysis of the Daily
Higher Education News (DHEN) will underscore this assertion.

17. Institutional inequities

a. An important dimension of transformation relates to institutional inequities,
particularly the impact of accumulated under-capitalization of many historically-
black institutions (HBIs) and/or campuses inherited from HBIs as a result of
merger/incorporation processes in 2005. Many HBI universities or campuses still
face formidable challenges stemming from long legacies of chronic under-
funding in infrastructure, staff and student services that, despite periodic, but
generally wholly inadequate, policy interventions by Government since 1994, has
not yet tilted the balance of economies within these institutions towards lasting
sustainability. However, policy interventions alone would not be sufficient to
meet the challenges of structural inequality for most of these institutions.
Fundamentally, many face significant problems in their underlying business
models and economies – located in small, rural or peri-urban towns, primarily

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NelsoN MaNdela UNiversity • traNsforMatioN iNdaba • 2022 81