(Re)Imagining and (Re)Enacting Competing Policy Imperatives: The Case of Post-Apartheid South African Higher Education

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Following international isolation, regional destabilization, and racial segregation during apartheid, post-apartheid South African public universities confront competing policy imperatives: national racial justice, educational equity, and social cohesion; regional development cooperation/solidarity; foregrounding African paradigms and knowledge systems; and earning international recognition within a competitive and globalized higher education market. My dissertation research examines the intensifying pressures faced by post-apartheid South African public higher education institutions to respond simultaneously to these global, regional and national demands/mandates that often conflict in the missions and daily functioning of public universities.

The dissertation project is a 6-month multi-phase institutional ethnography of one of the country’s top-rated, desegregated and formerly-White South African public university. The university sits at the intersection of global, regional and national pressures and tensions, and so affords the opportunity to study how the competing imperatives shaping higher education policy and practice are conceptualized, contested, institutionalized, and experienced. The research is informed by sociological institutionalism (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999, 2004) and draws on the horizontal, vertical and transversal axes of comparative case study methodology (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) to address the limitations of binarized global-local approaches to studying impacts of and responses to globalization in post-colonial contexts.

Data consists of more than 100 hours of audio-recorded interviews with 26 top and mid-level administrators, 15 faculty and staff members, 30 non-national, and 19 black and white South African students; on-and off-campus events and meetings; institutional documents (e.g. strategic frameworks, surveys, reports, and enrollment statistics); news articles; and over 500 pages of field notes and memos. The data was analyzed through concept mapping, which involves sifting through research texts and documenting emerging interpretation in a series of visual, relational concepts. The visual mapping technique allowed for a conceptual understanding and a holistic overview of patterns in the data, thus helped with the formulation of emerging analytic ideas as they were being conceptualized (Butler-Kisber 2010).

Findings show that, to hold together the conflicting post-apartheid policy imperatives, South African public universities admit significant numbers of black students from neighboring African countries. The regional students make the universities appear more racially integrated and internationalized, and responsive to regional calls for geopolitical redress. However, black South Africa student activists’ racialized and narrowly nationalistic conceptions of racial justice trivialize and delegitimize advocacy for cross-national/racial solidarity in ways that raise questions about the roles of public universities in South Africa and across the world: to whom they belong and serve, what knowledge they value and generate, and their role in the battle for increased racial and social justice within and across countries.

Author

• Upenyu Silas Majee, University of Wisconsin - Madison