Page 91 - Transformation Indaba Report

ambitions. It is also tied to the implicit or explicit privileging of ‘research’, and
particularly ‘blue sky’ research amongst the three institutional mandates of
universities, and with this, promoting by some university leadership, the myth of
the so-called ‘research’ universities as the apex-type university in the South
African higher education system. The unstated claim underpinning this logic is
that such universities constitute the ‘idea of the archetypal university’ in South
Africa.

e. This patently ideological construction of the post-apartheid university system
needs to be contested and debunked if we are to develop a conception of the
university system as open, discursive, multipolar, and not arranged along some
kind of imperial, hierarchical and self-interested lines which put competition and
mimicking a European or North American ideal of the university over
collaboration, collegialism and a commitment to tackling the deep-seated issues
of African development, whilst holding onto an internationalism that is
normatively based on the values of democracy, social justice, equality and human
solidarity.

f. It is in this context that transformation imperative have to grapple with the idea
of ‘what kind of universities’ we strive to establish: an extension of the European
or North American ideal (itself fully reflective of those realities) or the evolution
of universities fully embracing and drawing on their African existence and
identities as currency in a wider cosmopolitan and democratic internationalism.

21. Institutional Culture - Six Economies and the Social Structure of the Academy

a. Notwithstanding Higgins’ (2007) productive analysis of the complexities of the
notion of institutional culture in South African Higher Education, we view
institutional culture in much less amorphous terms; it is not as slippery a concept
as it is made out to be. Institutional (academic and administrative) cultures within
universities refer to ‘the deeply embedded patterns of organisational behaviour
and the shared values, assumptions, beliefs, or ideologies that members have
about their organisation or its work’ (Peterson and Spencer, 1991:142). If this
formulation is linked to the social structure of the academy, we may speak of
institutional culture as the collective outcomes of the six economies that produce the social
structure of the academy, its administration and governance, and its habits and
dispositions.

b. The social structure of the academy has not featured in any serious research on
higher education transformation post 1994. It remains the most unstudied aspect
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of transformation within universities combining scientific fact with social fiction
into a powerful reproductive matrix. We refer to the social structure of the

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The discourse on excellence is a good example of the circulation of social myths.
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