Introduction - The University, Then and Now

Summary

The University, Then and Now

The modern university in its Western iteration has always been defined by a tension between its elitist historical role and its modernist imperative to democratise access and equality. The modern university in its colonial form before 1857 was created to form a comprador class of educated natives, along the lines of Thomas B. Macaulay's 1835 ‘Minute on Education in India’: ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ Whether directly created by the colonial state or by missionaries, its rationale was assimilationist.

After 1857, especially in anglophone colonial territories, the rationale changed – it was to create the personnel for native administration. The rationale was no longer assimilation and incorporation but administration, order and difference.

As a settler society, South Africa created both kinds of universities, which ran parallel to each other after 1950: a tier of universities with a civilising liberal or nationalist mission internal to white society, and a tier of universities with functions defined by the imperatives of indirect rule – not to be assimilated but to be deployed in racial enclaves, to administer own affairs, or in the bantustans to administer ethnicised political communities.

Post-apartheid South Africa inherited these two tiers of university systems, but politically tended to think of them not in terms of their different rationales, but in terms of their resource differences – as advantaged and disadvantaged. The question might have been how to reconcile the two tiers, with their different colonial rationales – did one become the ideal and the other the pathology needing to catch up? Or should there be a synthesis of these two inheritances in order to create something new? These were the choices after 1994. As I see it, policies opted for the former rather than the latter. Historically black universities were put on the catch-up route or absorbed, while the elite white English- and Afrikaans-medium universities retained their status and were normalised as ‘world class’.