A University Revisited

Many people contributed to the ideas and arguments presented in this book. For the technical assistance received, we would like to thank Rhodes University archivist, Wynand Van Der Walt; Zizi Mlonyeni, the current librarian of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) archives; Andre Mohammed, the former chief archivist at UWC; and Fatima Sadan, who created the index. While researching and writing this book, we engaged in extensive discussions with Cornelius Thomas surrounding both his important scholarship and his lived experience of UWC in the 1970’s, which provided further depth and nuance to the arguments developed. In a similar vein, we are also immensely grateful to Karen Press, who meticulously edited multiple drafts of the manuscript while also helping us cohere and strengthen our intellectual arguments through her deeply insightful editorial commentary. Additionally, we wish to thank the acquisitions editor at Peter Lang, Alison Jefferson, for her patience, understanding, and stewarding the book to publication.

We want to fulsomely acknowledge inspirational mentors who played significant roles in shaping our respective careers and our individual intellectual and political thought and activism. In the case of Anderson, the late, groundbreaking anthropologist George Clement Bond at Columbia University, and founding Director of the Center for African Education, was a generous senior colleague and a guiding force supporting his research and scholarship on South Africa. Additionally, Anna Neumann, Professor of Higher and Postsecondary Education at Teachers College, was instrumental in heightening Anderson’s sensitivities to the mutually inclusive nature of teaching and learning as dynamic subjects of both research and practice. Estela Bensimon, a preeminent scholar of equity in higher education in the United States, and Founder of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California, has profoundly shaped Anderson’s thinking about the immersive capacity of research to advocate for and inform institutional change and student success. Lastly, former Temple University President and dear colleague, JoAnne Epps, who died tragically while serving in office, personified a lifelong commitment to justice and fairness. For Anderson, Epps’s selfless leadership remains a lode star of integrity in higher education.

Van Niekerk would like to pay tribute to June Pym, an extra-ordinary high-school educator who originally inspired him on the Cape Flats through her humane pedagogical practice and incredible self-sacrifice. He would also like to thank close friend and comrade Saleem Badat, a former Director of the Education Policy Unit (EPU) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and a prior Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University. Badat inspired Van Niekerk to become an academic through thoughtful guidance over many years as an activist, academic leader, and influential intellectual of the liberation struggle in South Africa. The late Harold Wolpe, an acclaimed Marxist theoretician and founding Director of the UWC’s Education Policy Unit, made a major scholarly and policy contribution to the transformation of South Africa’s higher education system in the country’s democratic transition. The profound loss of Wolpe’ s guiding friendship is still felt to this day. Finally, Gavin Williams, was an exceptional Ph.D. supervisor and incredible friend of the family during Van Niekerk’s time at the University of Oxford. Williams’ critically insightful guidance regarding important scholarly and intellectual questions on the doctorate are still being pursued, such was his penetrating acuity.

The book represents a collaborative labour of love and determination, both individually and collectively. Our respective partners and families have always been there for us and merit special mention. Anderson’s wife Usha, and their two children, Maya and Kiran, as well as his father, Arthur, his late mother, Norma, and grandparents, Doris, Ludwig, Philip and Jessica, all inspired a profound appreciation for the transforming power of education amid many challenges and experiences of dislocation. Van Niekerk dedicates the book to his son, Oisin, and his daughter, Nia, who are now undertaking their own postgraduate educational journeys. The book is also a tribute to his grandmother, Charlotte, who facilitated Van Niekerk’s educational development with devoted support and against tremendous odds.

The inspiration of this volume emerged from a conversation on the robustness of institutions of civil society in periods of crisis during the height of the global pandemic in 2022. Our observations on the multifaceted response to health pandemics such as COVID-19 and HIV-AIDS, led further to a critical reflection on the explanatory power of collaborative research at universities and colleges and their untapped potential of traversing disciplines when seeking to effectively respond to global crises.

Whether spanning epidemiology, public health, the sociology of the public good, the economics of scarce (medical) resources, and state responsibility to citizens made vulnerable by a pandemic, the most impactful higher education interventions involved collaborative research contributions from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. In recognising such contributions, we began investigating how our individual disciplinary approaches could be brought to bear to reflect collaboratively on our own varied immersive historical experiences at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa before and after the fall of apartheid.

Our conversations on the university as an institutional and democratic site of civil society in periods of conjunctural crisis, were also animated by emerging social movements such as Fees Must Fall and Black Lives Matter in South Africa and the United States, respectively. We were particularly interested in how these movements influenced the relationship between student mobilisation, challenges to teaching and learning, and the complexities of robust academic leadership. In revisiting the UWC experience, our intention was to better understand how the development of pedagogical choices involving students, academics and leaders at the university could inform critical thinking about contemporary higher education in the context of crises.

Drawing on the liberatory pedagogy of Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, we were especially interested in the dialectical consequences of mobilisation and state contestation on the teaching and learning of materially disadvantaged students attending higher education. At the core of these reflections, important questions emerged involving singular forms of politicised and ideological mobilisation and the erosion of institutional autonomy of systems of higher education globally due to increasingly hostile state dictates. Furthermore, from an institutional or organisational perspective, our inquiry concurrently focused on how university academic leadership sustained effective operations when challenged by an intimidating and fiscally disciplining state.

Given our shared interest in these questions, the next challenge involved how best to proceed collaboratively. We concluded that our specific experiences immersed within UWC were key to developing a methodological approach capable of weaving together distinct disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives. This shared institutional history led us to adapt an immersive case study methodology to critically examine the university in different conjunctural periods. Our view was that a broadly historicised reflection of UWC offered salient lessons for contemporary higher education globally in a period of ideological, political and fiscal crisis.

Our combined experiences, covering a diverse range of roles at the institution, offered a unique opportunity to advance a reflective, historicised study of UWC between 1960 and 1995. One that allowed for a tracing of the evolution of an institution which began as an invention of the apartheid state before eventually establishing its emancipatory foundations in Black Consciousness, and subsequently implementing South Africa’s first non-racial open admission policy in defiance of apartheid.

Our starting point for collaborative analysis was an invitation by the lead co-author, to revisit his sociological study of pedagogy, compensatory education and open admissions at UWC in the late apartheid era. In critically reengaging with this study, a historised analysis of UWC’s evolution drawing attention to the significant role of student mobilisation and the development of Black Consciousness during the 1970s is provided. Finally, the sociological-historical nexus was meaningfully expanded by the introduction of a social policy perspective which deepened the analysis of the relationship between the conjunctural conditions and the politics of ideology undergirding the university as a public good.

In collaboratively examining anew, prior data collected over several decades, our book is an open invitation to reconsider the democratic role of universities and colleges as crucial institutions of civil society during periods of political crises and heightened global instability. In so doing, we would like to acknowledge and thank the publisher, Peter Lang Inc., for facilitating our collaboration by granting permission to reprint prior materials included in this new project and volume.

The relationship between student mobilisation, pedagogy, and academic leadership in higher education animates the current debates impacting universities and colleges in an era of increasing intolerance and state interference on campuses globally. In periods of intense political contestation and instability, it is arguably necessary to reflect on the lessons of historical events to illuminate critical questions challenging the democratic and transformative missions undergirding the access and equity practices of higher education institutions.

At the same time, it has also become somewhat fashionable to furnish reductionist critiques of past events, political movements and radical changes, framed with teleological hindsight, which of course tends to be 20/20. A case in point can be found in recent analyses of South Africa, 32 years after the fall of apartheid. Indeed, the optimism surrounding the coming to power of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994, as part of a government of national unity, in the nation’s first fully democratic and non-racial national election has given way to more sober and critical views of the country’s post-apartheid future.

The major dampening of expectations relating to both the ANC and South Africa’s long-term outlook was made abundantly clear during the most recent national election in 2024. Increasingly mired in misrule, corruption and policy failures, the ANC failed to win the majority vote after having enjoyed three decades of relatively uncontested support. The 2024 electoral results have also prompted the reassertion of long-standing and patronising critiques concerning the inability of Africans to exercise self-government, leading to the inevitability of post-colonial government failures in Africa (Diamond, 2013; Fukuyama, 2015; Rotberg, 2003).

Accepting such pessimistic conclusions about the plight of South Africa obscures, however, the many sacrifices and successes of social forces acting “from below” that led to the political negotiations to end apartheid and avert a potential civil war. There are countless examples of how ordinary people and civil society organisations contributed to the fall of apartheid. One such story concerns the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

Created in 1959, UWC was initially classified by the apartheid state as a “coloured” institution designated primarily for the education of coloured students, many of whom resided in the part of the Cape Province that would be renamed the Western Cape Province after 1994.1 In the decades that followed, UWC evolved determinedly—albeit at times contradictorily—into a radical “open university” intent on shedding its apartheid roots. In 1982, it became the first post-secondary institution in South Africa to adopt a policy formally opposing the use of racial criteria to guide admission of students to South African tertiary education.

UWC paid a heavy price for its principled efforts to educate all students regardless of racial classifications, as the apartheid regime slashed state subsidies to the university and engaged it in a protracted legal and ideological struggle over the right to govern itself independently and determine its own educational policies. Despite powerful opposition, UWC blazed a path of resistance to apartheid that, prior to the 1994 election, earned it the unofficial title of “the future university of South Africa.” For those who had the privilege of participating directly in UWC’s activities or witnessing its bold commitment to non-racialism and democratisation during this period, the experience and anticipation of what “might be possible” in the “new” South Africa was palpable and left an indelible impression.