Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo is an Associate Professor in Higher Education Studies at the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies, University of Johannesburg.

He recently published an opinion article that first appeared in the Daily Maverick on 12 July 2024.

We need to reconsider the very purposes of higher education, who the university is for, its role and function(s) in society, and, most importantly, how the university can exist outside of the pressures and demands of the marketplace.

Much has been said about the recent general elections in South Africa which resulted in the ANC losing its governing majority in Parliament for the first time since the 1994 democratic breakthrough.

There are uncertainties and fears over the future of the Government of National Unity (GNU) that the main parties announced immediately after the polls in May.

A flurry of opinion pieces has since been written on the GNU and what it means for new political realities and realignment in the country. Some have reflected on the fragility of perceptions of the investor community and the GNU itself, and how it may help prevent corruption and the plundering of state resources.

However, not much has been said so far about the potential implications the GNU may have on our public universities, and how they continue to struggle to respond to the post 2015/2016 #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall protests. The country’s shift from single party national governance to the GNU offers us an opportunity to rethink and reimagine a new social contract in South African public universities, one rooted in social justice, democratic thought and inclusivity.

On a new social contract

In his influential book, Scholars in the marketplace: The dilemmas of neo-liberal reform at Makerere University 1989-2005, post-colonial thinker Mahmood Mamdani cautions us against the dangers of the commercialisation of public universities, where the university increasingly becomes subservient to and docile to the needs of the private market and its corporate interests.

This is similarly true in South African public universities where we are witnessing gradual encroachment and the undermining of the public good, with the introduction of crippling (and colonising) forms of performance management, managerialism, ratings, rankings, benchmarking, and a publish-or-perish approach, among others.

With more and more students becoming fee-paying clients who are entitled to the curriculum goods of the university, and academics becoming the factory producers of research outputs, the neoliberal agenda in the country seems to be in full swing.

As the authors of the book Black academic voices: The South African experience remind us, this is further exacerbated by the growing mental health issues, anxiety and depression among both staff and students who point to the university’s institutional culture(s) as primarily responsible for their marginality and structural oppression.

As the country deliberates on the GNU, our first pressing task must be to focus on rethinking and reimaging the very purposes of higher education in the country, who the university is for, its role and function(s) in society, and most importantly, how the university can exist outside of the pressures and demands of the marketplace.

Other urgent tasks facing South African universities

The second urgent task that continues to confront public universities in the country is the question around the access and success of black students. Great strides have been made in improving formal/physical access to the university, with approximately 186,565 first-time entering black students in public universities. This adds to the more than a million enrolment in South African public universities that we have at the moment.

What remains a challenge is the other type of access – that is, the intellectual and epistemic access to the curriculum and knowledge of the university.

Simply put, a large number of our curriculum offerings in South African public universities remain Eurocentric, white, alienating and disregard African and global south knowledge(s). The curriculum is not designed with the African student in mind. Ours is largely a badly packaged and wrongly sequenced curriculum that privileges the global north and reminds those of us who are black that we are non-beings who have no role to play in global knowledge production. Thus, we need to be intentional and deliberate in ensuring that African and global south knowledge take centre stage in all our curriculum and teaching and learning spaces.

The third urgent task that confronts South African universities, is the question of precarity, employment insecurity and casualisation in the sector. Using the latest publicly available data from the Council on Higher Education (CHE)’s VitalStats, we now know that by 2021, out of 151,431 of all staff members in South African public universities, 86,549 (57%) were part time and on short-term contracts.

Reading the same numbers by race, 62,413 black staff members were on short-term contracts, compared with only 24,140 white staff members. It also appears that the employment insecurity and casualisation in South African public universities affects women more than men, with 47,244 of women staff members on short-term contracts compared with 39,293 men.

The worst of the worst in the sector remains the country’s postdoctoral research fellows (postdocs), who are neither staff nor students – they are something in between. These are short-term scholars who are often employed on a 12-month contract, with no medical aid benefits, no pension, no leave, etc. Postdocs receive an untaxed monthly stipend, with their contract renewal depending on the production of two research units per year.

Currently in South Africa, there is no national legislation or framework that governs the wellbeing, rights and responsibilities of postdocs. As a result, as Heidi Prozesky and Francois van Schalkwyk remind us in their 2024 research, we only have a rough idea that there are at least 2,867 postdocs in South African public universities.

But then again, questions abound: how many of these postdocs are South African? What is the total number of women postdocs and their fields of specialisation? How many have been absorbed into permanent academic careers in public universities, and how many have left the sector? These and other pressing questions remain unknown to us.

What is to be done?

The current uncertainties of the country’s GNU deliberations and negotiations offer us an opportunity to reflect on the future of the higher education system. That demands that we at least think about three central organising questions moving forward.

Firstly, what are the purposes/roles/functions of higher education in South Africa? Rather than always playing catch-up and lamenting the pressures and demands of the “knowledge economy”, rankings, being rated, etc, we should be clear in fashioning an alternative vision for the country, one that practically and philosophically responds to the African and global south challenges and possibilities.

Secondly, how could we best respond to the Fallist demands for curriculum transformation and decolonisation in our courses/modules? Instead of adopting narrow and integrationist responses to curriculum design, we need to redesign our curriculum with our own worldviews, underpinned by our knowledge, our own experiences and our own complex lifeworlds.

Thus, we must endeavour to read the world and the word from Africa.

And finally, it is abundantly clear that precarity, casualisation and employment insecurity have become the new normal in South African public universities. How can we ensure that we absorb precarious staff members into the different public universities in a sustainable, ethical and developmental manner? This would help bring stability not only to the staff members themselves, but would also benefit the public higher education system as a whole.

Answering these and other pressing questions will ensure that the country’s GNU offers us a new social contract in South African public universities.

*The views expressed in this article are that of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect that of the University of Johannesburg.