Page 98 - Transformation Indaba Report

processes; the institutional culture of universities; and patterns of equity and
redress .
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b. Inclusive and equity-based student access, success, and support.
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c. Africanization in relation to curriculum, research, language, aesthetics and
governance (Metz, 2015); the capacity of universities to ‘read’ African.
d. A more just reconfiguration of power-relations embedded within the organisation
of knowledge, its disciplines and disciples and the construction of professional
identities and authorities.
e. Fair and inclusive distribution of authority within knowledge generation
processes, research subjects, objects, topics and trends.
f. The advancement of critical and post conflict pedagogies and an understanding
of the constitutive links between pedagogy, research and institutional culture.
g. The promotion of equitable and equalising relationships between higher
education and the state, private sector, interest groups, pressure formations and
broader society.

33. On the strength of the above, it is clear that one-dimensional or narrow conceptions of
the remit and nature of higher education transformation cannot suffice in our context.
This was the case, for example, with the Equity Index Report (2013), co-authored by
Makgoba and Govinder, which provided what turned out to be a highly flawed and much
discredited assessment of academic staff and staff equity, correlating this with research
productivity, and projecting this as a measure of the state of transformation of
universities. It has been criticized on a range of legitimate grounds, and this will not be
the subject of further elaboration (see Moultrie and Dorrington, Dunne, 2014). Whilst
racial staff equity is indispensable for transformation, it has to be linked to, and facilitate
the simultaneous transformation of other dimensions of the system including gender,
disability, class, and the structures through which these relations are mediated, including
curricula and epistemological frameworks, teaching, learning, research and engagement,
student access and success, governance and management, ethics of leadership and the
wider role of the university in society.

34. A more complete framing of higher education transformation must per force
recognize the interconnectivity and simultaneity of race, class, gender, disability and
other markers of social difference, with the systemic and institutional mechanisms
constructing and reproducing wider social inequalities and power relations in society
and the economy. We must reject reductionist, essentialist and one-dimensional
conceptions of transformation. After all, we talk about the higher education ‘system’,
suggestive of a more or less integrated, but contradictory ecosystem comprising
different social relations, practices, traditions, cultures, and so forth.

15 Here we have to avoid giving in to the seductive allure to reduce higher education transformation to equity targets; the
Baudrillardian warning of seduction followed by catastrophe should be heeded. The much critcized and largely discredited Equity
Index, co-authored by Makgoba and Govinder (2013), is a case in point.
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NelsoN MaNdela UNiversity • traNsforMatioN iNdaba • 2022 93