Counting on demographic equity to transform institutional cultures at historically white South African universities?

ABSTRACT

The post-apartheid higher education transformation project is faced with the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics and other senior staff. But when we shift the focus from participation rates to equality–inequality within historically white universities (HWUs), then the discourse changes from demographic equity and redress to institutional culture and diversity. HWUs invoke the need to maintain their position as leading higher education institutions globally, and notions of ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ have emerged as discursive practices, which serve to perpetuate exclusion. The question then arises as to which forms of capital comprise the Gold Standard at HWUs? Several South African universities have responded to the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics by initiating programmes for the ‘accelerated development’ of these candidates. The Accelerated Development Programme (ADP) on which this investigation is based was located at one HWU. The paper draws on interviews with 18 black lecturers who entered the academic workforce through the university’s ADP. Employing a theoretical framework of social and cultural reproduction, we examine how racialised, classed and gendered assumptions remain deeply entrenched in the values, norms and practices of historically white measured universities in South Africa. The findings suggest that it is difficult for even the most conscious and personally invested agents to interrupt the naturalised norms and values that form part of the existing institutional culture. Agents struggle to interrupt normalised practices because of the highly valued currency of capital possessed by dominant actors in the form of white-middle-class habitus, disguised as academic experience and ‘excellence’.

KEYWORDS:

• Bourdieu
• transformation in higher education
• institutional culture
• ‘accelerated development’ programmes
• cultural and social capital
• university rankings

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their critical input on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the apartheid era, the differentiation of the higher education system along racial and ethnic lines not only resulted in HWUs and historically black universities (HBUs), but inequalities were also shaped along these lines. For instance, whilst HWUs (English and Afrikaans-speaking) were located in urban areas and positioned as institutions of research, HBUs were ethnic-based institutions that were marginalised by their rural locations and limited to being institutions of teaching. Robus and Macleod (2006) propose that this urban–rural divide has created ‘white space as the desirable, urban centre and black space as the undesirable, rural periphery [which] dovetails with a discourse of “white excellence/black failure”’ (p. 473). Currently, HWUs remain advantaged and elitist while HBUs remain disadvantaged and under-resourced.

2. We use the apartheid-era racial categories as redress measures. ‘Black’ is utilised in this chapter as an overarching term for African, Coloured (mixed-race) and Indian individuals.

3. The current fallist student movement began in 2015 at South African universities under the banners of #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall to protest the increase of university fees and demand for the decolonisation of institutional practices and curricula (Heffernan & Nieftagodieen, 2016).

4. The colour-line refers to race and racism in society, or as W. E. B. Du Bois has noted:

the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line – the question of the relation of the advanced races of men who happened to be white to the great majority of the undeveloped or half-developed nations of mankind who happen to be yellow, brown or black. (2013, p. 119)

5. Former Model C schools are schools that were reserved for white learners in South Africa under apartheid (Roodt, 2011). After political pressure in the 1990s, Piet Clase (Minister of Education) introduced reforms to allow previously disadvantaged groups to access white schools (Hofmeyr, 2000) in a limited and conditional way. The model system was dismantled after 1994 when a single unified state was created.