Page 92 - Transformation Indaba Report

academy as a ‘system of rules and practices that influence the actions and
outcomes of large numbers of social actors within university settings: it consists
of rules, institutions, and practices; is embodied in the actions, thoughts, beliefs,
and durable dispositions of individual human beings; assigns roles and powers to
groups and individual actors; and has distributive consequences for individuals
and groups’ (xx).

c. The structure, though embedded, is disclosed in equity patterns; promotions,
privileges, access and success rates; governance; teaching and learning;
community engagement; and research. It is at the heart of the reproductive
machineries of the university, and should be one of the central priorities on the
transformation agenda. The way is which scientific authority is distributed and
transferred; the constitution of university committees such as disciplinary, ethics
and research committees; the patterns of decisions emerging from these
committees; the pedagogical arrangements and support matrixes within
institutions; the access and success rates of students; etc. are all constitutive of
and functions of the social structure of the academy.

d. The social structure of the academy, to our minds, is organized around six
economies: management-administrative, material, socio-cultural, affective, intellectual, and
political. These economies are central to the reproductive machinery of the
university. Its dominion is affirmed in the mass of quantitative data available to
us that reveals a higher education system that continues to reproduce many of
the fundamental discriminatory fault lines in society.

e. Management economies distribute the variety of codes by which institutions
operate. On one level, the emergence of a managerialist discourse focusing on
system efficiencies steered by an audit and input-output logic represents a clear
example of how regulatory frames can shift institutional cultures; in negative and
positive ways. On another level, administrative economies serve material
economies on all levels of the system; where administrative economy refers to the
circulation and distribution of administrative and regulatory power and control;
access to systems and the codes and rules by which these systems operate. The
shared values and assumptions that steer administrative cultures and practices
dovetails with broader institutional cultures which normalise entrenched patterns
of exclusion and inclusion. Studies on how powerful disciplinary, research, higher
degrees, promotions and ethics committees are constituted and what patterns of
decisions emerge from their deliberations, are non-existent. One can, given
narrative accounts, simply speculate on their powerful role in replicating
discriminatory patterns.

f. In the case of material economies, privileges and benefits, financial and otherwise,
are circulated within established networks that reaffirm the power-positions of those
already on the grid. These include access to publication and research outlets and
wide networks of ‘buddy-systems’, nationally and internationally, whose sole gate-

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NelsoN MaNdela UNiversity • traNsforMatioN iNdaba • 2022 87