Page 99 - Transformation Indaba Report

35. Whilst this document does not attempt to develop a theory of higher education
transformation, it hopes to provide a heuristic and critical framework for enabling us
to recognize the multi-dimensionality, interconnectivity and relational nature of that
which we seek to transform. The precise ways in which specific institutional cultures
‘construct’ these relations is a matter of further empirical investigation, not possible in
this framework document.

36. Furthermore, there can be no absolute state or end point of transformation for the
simple reason that societies are inescapably in states of transition and change is a
permanent feature of life. We must resist simplistic, cartoon-like media descriptions of
universities as either ‘transformed’ or ‘untransformed’, as if this depicts a singular
empirical datum. Transformation per definition is a set of social changes at various
internal states of transition along a continuum. We must insist on asking ‘what’ exactly
is being referred to when we characterize the ‘state of transformation’ in a particular
setting, and how this relates to other elements in the same system. Hopefully, a more
complex system revealing uneven, contradictory and convergent processes of change
and resistance to change will emerge, so that we can appreciate the full ‘balance sheet’
of social transformation in higher education.

37. As we build a better understanding of the uneven, contradictory ‘states of transition’
within this system, and the powerful mechanisms and constructs shaping institutional
cultures, it must be borne in mind that there is always a level of indeterminacy of how
these mechanisms and constructs shape individual behaviors; that we are talking
about a living system inhabited by human beings who are irreducibly complex, whose
identities and responses to their worlds cannot be ‘fixed’ in a static set of
representations of social orders, and that they always have the capacity for self-
reflection and change. After all, true transformation such as that envisaged by our
Constitution cannot only emerge on the basis of the law, policy, compliance or force.
It has to emerge as deeply personal, emotional, intellectual, if not ‘spiritual’ (in the
sense of the human spirit) from within us all if it is to lead to a lived experience.

VII. The Transformation Barometer
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38. Diversity toolkits and transformation plans are littering the higher education landscape,
globally. The establishment of well-resourced diversity offices is a common feature of
higher education institutions in Western-Europe and North-America. On our continent,
‘The Working Group on Higher Education of the Association for the Development of
Education in Africa in 2006, developed a toolkit for mainstreaming gender in higher
education in Africa in collaboration with the Association of African Universities’ (2015,

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The themes and indicators require more thinking and development, especially in relation to qualitative
indicators.
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NelsoN MaNdela UNiversity • traNsforMatioN iNdaba • 2022 94