Transformation and Continuity in the University in Africa

Overview of “The University in Africa” symposium, University of Cape Town, 21 Oct 2006. A key stage in the path of transformation is a broadly-founded reconsideration of the core purposes of the university – the generation of new knowledge through scholarship and research, and the transmission of such knowledge through teaching and learning, and through the network of relationships that connect the university with wider society. While many universities face challenges of adjustment to a changing world, and these challenges are often acute in Africa, the transformation agenda for universities in South Africa has particular characteristics that are part of the broader processes of social and economic reconstruction after apartheid. These issues have promoted, and will continue to promote, many-stranded conversations. A contribution to these debates was made by a colloquium at the University of Cape Town, in November 2006 which combined positions from within South Africa with those from Zimbabwe, Botswana, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, the West Indies, the United Kingdom and the USA. The pages that follow summarize and interpret the positions that were offered and developed at the colloquium. “Transformation” is a broad term, and there is a danger that its practical value as a concept is inversely proportional to the breadth of its use. For convenience, we can conceptualize institutional transformation as two, mutually reinforcing domains. On the one hand are practical necessities, hard but easily calibrated, and underpinned by legislated imperatives. This domain includes moving towards equity in student recruitment and enrollment, correcting for prior and continuing discrimination and disadvantage through academic development programmes, and aiming for student graduation profiles unbiased by race, gender or social class.This domain also includes setting and achieving appropriate objectives for employment equity and ensuring the renewal of the university’s intellectual capital such that there are no arbitrary or unfair barriers to the best people building careers in the university if they so wish. On the other hand are the less tangible, but equally important, aspects of transformation; the traditions, symbols and customs of daily interaction that, together, constitute institutional culture, and the ways in which knowledge is conceived, constructed and transmitted. This essay is focused on this last aspect – on what Tony Bogues calls “epistemological transformation”. But these domains remain part of a whole and inseparable in their unity.