Towards a transformation agenda for academic engagement in South Africa

Abstract

The starting point for this chapter is that South African universities need to engage with and respond to ever more complex development challenges, in a rapidly changing global economic, political, technological, environmental, and social context. Our universities need to link to global science, and to address local economic and social problems related to local resource conditions. Equally, they need to respond to the enduring legacy of colonisation, racial and ethnic segregation, and the resultant high levels of poverty, inequality and diversity . These transformation challenges are magnified for universities embedded in secondary cities, located outside the major metropoles, in regions with higher levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality, and fewer opportunities for economic growth. These universities too, have complex legacies with which they still grapple, of historical under-resourcing, weak institutional cultures and political demand from students. Here, there are stronger and more urgent pressures on universities to act as agents of change that support and catalyse inclusive socio-economic development at local and regional levels . A renewed call for transformation was at the forefront of social protests that emerged in the South African higher education system from 2015, calling for change to universities' mandates, orientations, institutional cultures, and curricula. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is also evident that the very nature, and perhaps even the survival, of the university in the form we know it is at stake. Institutions are forced to pivot rapidly to accommodate online learning and research, exposing fault lines in their ability to meet the needs of impoverished students, making calls for transformation all the more urgent, particularly in cities, towns and regions that have been poorly resourced for decades.