1

(Re)thinking (trans)formation in South African (higher) 
education

LEsLEy LE GRANGE
University of stellenbosch

In this article I outline two broad sets of changes characterising the South African higher education 
landscape. The first relates to, among other things, structural changes (such as mergers and incorporations), 
the reorganisation of teaching programmes (influenced by the mode 2 knowledge), and the introduction of 
performativity regimes, most notably a quality assurance body for higher education, the Higher Education 
Quality Committee (HEQC). These changes might be understood as outcomes of forces associated with 
the ascendancy of neoliberal politics and forces linked to a rapidly changing and globally interconnected 
world. The second relates to the need to transform higher education in South Africa so as to overcome 
legacies of apartheid as captured in policies that have been developed to redress past inequalities, including 
discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation and so on. It is in this area in particular that 
challenges remain, as reflected in the Soudien Report. I suggest in this article that both sets of changes 
relate to a broader crisis – a crisis of humanism. Moreover, education might be implicated in this crisis. 
And so I suggest that we might need to (re)think (trans)formation in (higher) education by replacing 
the term ‘education’ with the term pedagogy, where pedagogy is understood as a transformative event 
concerned with the person becoming present in context (Todd 2010).      

Introduction
I begin this article with a brief orientation to this work. Firstly, my discussion relates to what I have 
experienced and what I have seen happening around me. In Foucault’s (in Rajchman, 1985:36) words: 
“Each time I have attempted to do theoretical [academic] work it has been on the basis of elements of 
my experience – always in relation to processes that I saw taking place around me”. Secondly, I am 
both a subject and an object of what I describe in the article. I borrow Ball’s (2004:146) words: “Some 
of the oppressions I describe are perpetrated by me. I am an agent and subject within the regime of 
performativity in the academy.” Thirdly, my method of inquiry is writing itself. As Richardson (2001:35) 
points out: “I write because I want to find something out ... in order to learn something that I did not 
know before I wrote it. I was taught, though, as perhaps you were, too, not to write until I knew what I 
wanted to say, until my points were organized and outlined. No surprise, this static writing model coheres 
with mechanistic scientism, quantitative research, and entombed scholarship.” My interest is to find out 
more about broader processes impacting on my (and others’) work and to make sense of transformation 
processes occurring in South African higher education. Moreover, I wish to explore how we might rethink 
the notion of transformation, not as a process driven by macro-forces (whether global or national) but one 
that occurs at the micro-level.       

Transformation has become a buzzword and is often bandied around loosely. It might usefully be 
understood as a process that has no beginning and no end. In the context of higher education it is a 
term that has been used with reference to changes that the modern university is undergoing in a rapidly 
globalising world and also with respect to challenges within nation-states associated with issues such as 
access, diversity, equity and (e)quality. As far as the modern university is concerned, Jacobs and Hellström 
(2000:1) point to three significant developments in the transformation of the university research system 
over the past two or three decades:

The shift from science systems to global science networks• 
The capitalisation of knowledge• 
The integration of academic labour into the industrial economy, also known as the coming of the • 
knowledge economy.



2 Perspectives in Education, Volume 29(2), June 20112

Concerning the first development, we are witnessing research information being captured on international 
databases such as International Scientific Information (ISI), making it possible to compare countries’ growth 
in, inter alia, publications and citations levels. Countries are also compared on several criteria and placed on 
global ranking lists such as the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). 

The second development relates to the university becoming a partner with industry in transforming 
primary commodities into manufactured goods which are sold on a global market. It also involves the 
marketing and selling of academic qualifications on a global market. For example, knowledge is one of 
the key sources of revenue for countries such as Australia. 

The third development relates to the widely accepted idea that contemporary society is a knowledge 
society that is increasingly being driven by a knowledge economy. Watson (2003) argues that the role of 
the university in a knowledge society is changing as a consequence of two sets of pressures: “inside-out” 
and “outside-in” developments. The inside-out developments refer to intrinsic pressures concerned with 
a set of epistemological challenges. Watson refers to the theoretical intervention of Michael Gibbons 
and his colleagues – the shift from mode 1 (pure, disciplinary, homogeneous, expert-led, supply-driven, 
hierarchical, peer-reviewed and almost exclusively university-based) to mode 2 knowledge (applied, 
problem-centred, transdisciplinary, heterogeneous, hybrid, demand-driven, entrepreneurial, network-
embedded) (Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott & Trow, 1994). Outside-in developments 
refer to social concerns. These include aspects such as socio-economic patterns of participation, including 
who gains access to education, health care and so on. 

Each of these developments is, of course, a contested terrain. However, I shall not explore the 
contested nature of the developments here. Suffice it to say that these developments have wide-ranging 
implications for universities, particularly for academics who work in and constitute these institutions. 
They not only raise the question of the future role of the university, but also of the role of the academic – 
of what is meant by the concept “academic”. It is important to realise that South African universities have 
not been left unaffected by these developments.  

As a consequence of these developments (and others) the modern university has been described in 
dramatic terms, as an institution that is in crisis. For example, Jacobs and Hellström (2000:1) note, “After 
years of battering from without, the walls of the ivory tower are finally crumbling” and Readings (1996) 
argues that the modern university is “in ruins”. Readings (1996:119) characterises the contemporary 
university in terms of the idea of excellence so as to emphasise the dominance of the institution of 
performativity.1 He argues that when university managers invoke the term “excellence”, they unwittingly 
orient the question of value in favour of measurement and accounting solutions in preference to the 
question of accountability. Readings contrasts the contemporary university with earlier incarnations: the 
Kantian University of Reason (for which the founding discipline is philosophy) and the Humboldtian 
University (in which philosophy is replaced with literature). But, unlike its predecessors, the ideal of 
excellence conceals a kind of vacuity. As Barnett and Standish (2003) elaborate:

Globalisation and the decline of the nation-state create conditions where the currency of excellence 
can function ideally for a knowledge economy ... The modern university is dominated by procedural 
reasoning – in its emphasis on skills and on management systems, and in an incipient reduction 
of knowledge to information (all accelerated by computerization) – to the detriment of a proper 
attention to content and to traditions of inquiry. In the University of Excellence academic freedom is 
not so much threatened as effaced. 
Put differently, as a unifying principle excellence has the benefit of being entirely meaningless, that 

is, it is non-referential, as illustrated in an example where a university recently gave a person an award for 
“excellence in parking” (Peters, 2004:72). Peters (2004) argues that the idea(l) of excellence:

1 Performativity as used here refers to the way in which Lyotard (1984:11) uses it in The Postmodern Condition. 
As Lyotard (1984:11) writes, “The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the 
optimisation of the global relationship between input and output – in other words, performativity.”



3LE GRANGE — (Re)thinking (trans)formation in South African (higher) education 3

… signifies the corporate bureaucratization of the university. Universities have become sites for the 
development of “human resources”. Guided by mission statements and strategic plans, performance 
output is measured and total quality management (TQM) assures quality outcomes. 
Traces of these developments are evident in the changing landscape of the South African higher 

education system – and the technology of performativity is firmly entrenched in the country’s universities 
(cf. Le Grange, 2009). I shall show in the next section how these developments have impacted on the 
post-apartheid university. However, there is another side to the transformation of higher education that 
deserves particular attention, namely social concerns as they are related to higher education. Following the 
dismantling of legal apartheid, it was imperative to transform the higher education system in South Africa 
so as to overcome the legacies of apartheid. The vision of such a transformed landscape is captured in a 
series of policies that were developed to address this need, culminating in White Paper 3: A Programme 
for the Transformation of Higher Education. This need is captured in the White Paper as follows:

[Higher education] must lay the foundations for the development of a learning society which 
stimulate, direct and mobilize the creative and intellectual energies of all people towards meeting 
the challenge of reconstruction and development (DoE, 1997:7).
The same White Paper summarises the requirements for the transformation of higher education in 

South Africa as “increased and broadened participation, responsiveness to societal interests and needs, 
and cooperation and partnerships in governance” (DoE, 1997:10). These requirements include the need to 
“increase black, women, disabled and mature students”, and to develop “new curricula and flexible models 
of learning and teaching, including modes of delivery” (DoE, 1997:10). However, more than a decade later 
issues of access, equity and quality in relation to the core functions of higher education remain challenges 
and were the key focal points of the Higher Education Summit held in Cape Town in April 2010. I shall 
look at some of the changes that these developments have effected in South African higher education over 
the past decades. 

Transformation of higher education in South Africa over the past decade
Concerning inside-out developments, Jansen (2002:507) points out that South African higher education 
policy documents (produced after 1994) bear the unmistakeable fingerprints of Gibbons and his colleagues. 
In fact, some of Gibbons’s colleagues such as Peter Scott served as consultants for higher education 
policy development in post-apartheid South Africa. However, Jansen argues that the accommodation 
of mode 2 knowledge production in South African universities is uneven. For example, whilst mode 2 
knowledge forms thrive and are expanding at an institution such as the University of Pretoria (UP), there 
is little evidence of its success in a historically disadvantaged university such as the University of Durban 
Westville2 (as it was formerly known). I acknowledge the unevenness Jansen refers to, and that there is 
not a simple and linear relationship between policy and practice. However, some policies (or elements of 
them) do trickle down so as to influence practices (variously and in uneven ways). Therefore, I shall show 
how mode 2 thinking has penetrated South African universities and how it has (re)configured academic 
programmes. I shall pay particular attention to what might be referred to as teaching/learning programmes 
(for the sake of brevity I shall from now on just refer to teaching programmes). 

There have always been teaching programmes in universities. However, one outcome of the higher 
education policy developments of the late 1990s was the reconfiguration of teaching programmes at all 
South African universities, regarding both organisational and design features. Several universities have 
changed their organisational structures to create larger units such as schools and colleges, resulting in 
the abandonment of traditional academic departments organised along disciplinary lines. School and/
or programme directors have been appointed and the traditional posts of heads or chairpersons of 
departments have been done away with. In many instances these larger structures are organised around 
programmes and not disciplines. Furthermore, regarding programme design there has been a shift in the 

2 The University of Durban Westville has since merged with the University of Natal and the amalgamated institu-
tion is called the University of KwaZulu-Natal.



4 Perspectives in Education, Volume 29(2), June 20114

sense that academic disciplines do not necessarily inform the goals and visions of programmes, but instead 
the outcomes (some generic to all teaching programmes in South Africa and some specific to particular 
programmes). These outcomes are linked to the needs of both global and South African societies. The 
approach to curriculum design is one of “design down, deliver up”, where modules (that were traditionally 
organised around disciplines) now have to be (re)designed in the service of the vision and outcomes 
of a programme. This is how it works in theory – the extent to which these changes are reflected in 
practice varies depending on the institution. North-West University is an example of an institution which 
has made fairly comprehensive changes to its organisational structures regarding academic programmes 
(both research and teaching). At Stellenbosch University new programme structures were put in place, but 
academic departments were retained. Smaller programmes are located within departments, while larger 
ones extend across departments. The situation of having both programme chairs and departmental chairs 
does create tensions. For example, staff members are appointed by departments and departmental chairs 
manage operational budgets, but programme chairs are responsible for managing programme renewal, 
which might have staff implications over which they do not have control. 

How does this relate to mode 2 knowledge production? Mode 2 knowledge production concerns a 
shift in the way knowledge is produced in a socially distributed knowledge system – essentially it pertains 
to research. I have tried to show here that the influence of the advocates of mode 2 thinking on higher 
education policy development South Africa also resulted in a reconfiguration of both the organisation 
and design of teaching programmes. Mode 2 thinking therefore does not only relate to the production of 
knowledge, but also to its transmission and acquisition, in the sense that knowledge included in teaching 
programmes becomes reframed.     

Teaching programmes have further been affected by another development in South African higher 
education, namely the emergence of an audit culture associated with the rise of neoliberalism. The 
emergence of quality assurance (and related terms) in discourses on higher education might be understood 
against the backdrop of a rising culture of performativity in society, in general, and in education, in 
particular. In his seminal work The Postmodern Condition (a commissioned report on the university sector 
for the government of Québec) Lyotard (1984) introduces the term “performativity”. Since its coinage 
this term has been widely invoked in the criticism of contemporary education practice. As Barnett and 
Standish (2003:16) write: 

The term aptly exposes the jargon and practices of efficiency and effectiveness, quality assurance 
and control, inspection and accountability that have become so prominent a feature of contemporary 
educational regimes. Whatever is undertaken must be justified in terms of an increase in productivity 
measured in terms of a gain in time.    
The rising culture of performativity is closely intertwined with the ascendance of neoliberalism in the 

past four decades (cf. Peters, 2004). Ball (2003:216) argues that “performativity is a technology, a culture 
and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, 
control, attrition and change – based on rewards and sanctions”.  

My interest here is to look at how these developments have played out in South African higher 
education. The Higher Education Act of 1998 legitimised the establishment of a Higher Education 
Quality Committee (HEQC), responsible for monitoring and regulating the quality of all higher education 
programmes through a process of accreditation of such programmes/qualifications. On the neoliberal 
agenda the idea of self-regulation is evident in the work of the HEQC through systems and processes of 
peer auditing, evaluation and review, leading to what is referred to as the attainment of self-accreditation 
status on the part of higher education institutions. Self-regulation and self-accreditation are misleading 
terms because they imply an association with academic freedom and institutional autonomy. However, 
these terms do not mean the abandonment of state control, but the establishment of a new form of control 
– what Du Gay (1996) calls “controlled de-control”, or what Vidovich (2002) calls “steering at a distance” 
– so performativity remains the regulatory regime. Teaching programmes in South Africa not only have to 
be reconfigured because of mode 2 thinking, but are also subject to regulation by the state, although this 
might be by “remote control”. 



5LE GRANGE — (Re)thinking (trans)formation in South African (higher) education 5

By way of illustration I next discuss how an interconnected global knowledge economy has influenced 
the way in which the state funds research publications in South Africa. Universities receive direct state 
funding by way of subsidy income that is based on teaching inputs, teaching outputs and research outputs. 
Research outputs comprise completed master’s and doctoral research, and research publications. The state 
only gives funding for articles that have been published in accredited journals (peer-reviewed journals 
approved by the Department of Education). Prior to 2004 the national Department of Education (DoE) 
had a single list of accredited journals. Journals were included on this list based on submissions made by 
South African universities through their research divisions. The submissions were evaluated by a panel 
appointed by the DoE and decisions were made as to whether a journal was placed on the list (in other 
words, it received accreditation). Since 2004 this has changed. Journals are now automatically accredited 
if they appear on the International Scientific Information’s (ISI) master list, the International Bibliography 
of Social Sciences (IBSS) list and the DoE list for South African journals only. Editors of South African 
journals have been encouraged to have their journals placed on the ISI list. Of the three lists, ISI has by 
far the most journals, but is owned by a private company, Thomson Reuters, which is a multi-billion dollar 
USA company. The upshot of this is that a private company is now indirectly controlling which journals 
South African academics publish in. If academics choose to publish in journals (although they may be the 
best quality journals) not included on one of these lists, the income that their institutions receive will be 
reduced. This could impact negatively on the academic’s research funding, career advancement and the 
status of their institutions. South African academics and the universities in which they work have not been 
unaffected by this capitalisation of knowledge.   

I have attempted to show by way of a few examples how the transformation of higher education in 
South Africa might be understood within broader transformations occurring in global society, namely its 
transition towards what has been variously described as a knowledge society, learning society, knowledge 
economy and post-industrialised age. Wittingly or unwittingly South African universities, the academics 
who inhabit them and the knowledge they produce are affected by, and are also co-producers of, this 
epochal change. 

However, the South African higher education system remains challenged by several transformation 
issues that pointedly remind us that transformation is an ongoing process. These issues relate to structural 
matters (size and shape issues), staff and student diversity, and language and access (both formal and 
epistemological). We have witnessed several changes in the restructuring of the public higher education 
system regarding its size and shape, of which a key outcome was the reduction of 21 universities and 15 
technikons (akin to polytechnics in other countries) to 23 higher education institutions, divided into three 
categories: Universities, Comprehensive Universities (outcomes of mergers of universities and technikons) 
and Universities of Technology (former technikons or mergers of former technikons). The mergers and 
incorporations were introduced ostensibly to make the system more efficient – to reduce wastage as a 
result of duplication of programmes, etc. On the success of these mergers and incorporations the jury is 
still out. Many merged institutions have separate campuses (the predecessor universities/technikons) that 
mainly still function as separate units, which is, in certain cases, problematic. An example is North-West 
University, where the Mafikeng Campus is mainly black and the medium of instruction predominantly 
English, whereas the Potchefstroom Campus is mainly white and the language of instruction predominantly 
Afrikaans. The altered size and shape of the higher education system has also not resulted in dramatic 
increases in black graduates in key fields such as engineering and medicine. Moreover, across the board, 
the success rate of students doing three-year bachelor’s degrees through contact mode is only 22.5% 
(Letseka & Maile, 2008:2). Despite the altered size and shape, the system as a whole remains inefficient. 

The slow pace of transformation regarding staff and student demographics remains a challenge at 
institutions such as Stellenbosch University, which was recently slated by the parliamentary Portfolio 
Committee on Higher Education for the slow pace of its transformation regarding these two aspects. At 
the same institution there is an ongoing controversy about language of instruction – in particular whether 
Afrikaans is used as a barrier to formal access by black students. Other issues concerning formal access 
relate to whether a lack of finances should deny historically disadvantaged students access to higher 



6 Perspectives in Education, Volume 29(2), June 20116

education and thereby deny them life chances they deserve as citizens. The government’s National Student 
Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and occupation-specific bursaries (e.g. the Fundza Lushaka bursaries for 
initial teacher education), and the recruitment bursaries that individual institutions provide, are examples 
of laudable attempts to provide wider access to, and participation in, higher education. However, here, 
too, challenges remain, as witnessed by ongoing student protests at various universities, and calls by them 
for free higher education. Moreover, at the University of Cape Town there has been a debate recently as to 
whether race remains the best surrogate for admitting historically disadvantaged students to the university, 
or whether other categories such as class might be more appropriate (cf. Soudien 2010). 

Thus, there are ongoing challenges that universities in South Africa face which, it could be argued, 
are legacies of apartheid. But a specific issue worth noting, which has raised its ugly head in post-
apartheid higher education, is that of racism, evident through several incidents, most notably at the Reitz 
residence at Free State University, which involved the humiliation of black workers by white students. 
This incident (and other concerns) prompted the then Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor, to establish a 
Ministerial Committee on Progress Towards Transformation and Social Cohesion and the Elimination of 
Discrimination in Public Higher Education Institutions. The brief of the Committee was to “investigate 
discrimination in public higher education, with a particular focus on racism” (Soudien et al., 2008). The 
overall assessment of the committee was that “discrimination, in particular with regard to racism and 
sexism, is pervasive in our institutions” (Soudien et al., 2008). 

There are changes in higher education associated with a rising culture of performativity, but these 
changes thwart the development of personal capacity. All ideas are welcome, but the higher education 
system is guided by a genre of discourse whose end is performativity – in this sense performativity 
is anti-transformational. Despite policies that have been developed to transform higher education, 
discrimination remains prevalent and it is this issue I wish to pursue as a way of initiating discussion that 
critically examines the very idea of (higher) education, namely that education itself might militate against 
transformation. I shall try to show that, although we might assume that the role of education is to bring 
about change (to transform), the outcome might be formation (socialisation) rather than transformation.          

Transformation as becoming present
Almost two decades after the dismantling of legal apartheid race continues to define and divide South 
Africans. Race has come to take on a unique form in South Africa – it has become reinserted, entrenched 
and naturalised in complex ways in post-apartheid South Africa. As Soudien (2010:225) writes: “It fills 
every vacant space. It infects these to the point where its contagion is experienced, narrated and analysed 
as a kind of base-line ontology.”

South Africans are inevitably both the objects and subjects of racial categorisation. The different 
spaces we inhabit/occupy engender complex and often contradictory encounters with the construct “race”. 
Although race might take on unique forms in particular contexts, I argue that its manifestation (and that of 
other forms of discrimination) across the globe is part of a crisis of humanism, in which education might 
be implicated. In light of this, I turn to a discussion on education, specifically its link to Enlightenment 
humanism and its inherent tension in that it involves both formation and transformation. Following Todd 
(2010), I shall open up a discussion on “pedagogy as a transformative event”.

Education has traditionally been understood as an intervention into someone’s life – a process that 
makes a difference to a life. Therefore, education cannot simply be constituted as practices of socialisation, 
although novices need to be equipped with the cultural tools to participate in a particular form of life so 
as to ensure cultural and social continuity. For Biesta (2006:2), the danger of viewing education narrowly 
as socialisation is that socialisation contributes to the reproduction of inequalities. Therefore, education 
additionally includes individuation, that is, it focuses on the cultivation of the human person or the 
individual’s humanity. This idea that education is about cultivating the human person might be traced back 
to the tradition of Bildung – an educational ideal that emerged in Greek society and, through its adoption 
in Roman culture, humanism, neohumanism and the Enlightenment, became one of the central notions 
of the modern Western educational tradition (cf. Biesta, 2006). The upshot of these developments was 



7LE GRANGE — (Re)thinking (trans)formation in South African (higher) education 7

that the notion of a human being was configured in a particular way. For example, when Bildung became 
intertwined with the Enlightenment and, in particular, the influence of Emmanuel Kant, a human being 
came to mean a “rational autonomous being”. Consequently, the purpose of education was to develop 
rational, autonomous beings (Biesta, 2006). 

However, some have sought to question humanism (the Enlightenment idea of what it means to be 
human) and education based on Enlightenment humanism. For example, Heidegger (1962) points out that 
humanism’s response to the question of what it means to be human focuses on the essence or nature of the 
human being. He argues that the focus should instead be on the being of this being, on the existence of the 
human being, on the ways in which the human being exists in the world. The problem with focusing on 
the essence of a human being is that it opens up possibilities for defining “human” in particular ways that 
declares others as less human or non-human. The holocaust, apartheid, genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and 
Cambodia forcefully remind us of the manifestations of humanism. Levinas (1990:279) goes as far as to 
argue that the crisis of humanism began with the inhuman events of recent history, for example, the 1914 
War, the Russian Revolution refuting itself in Stalinism, fascism, atomic bombings, genocide, and so on.

Biesta (2006:9) provides an alternative to the Enlightenment understanding of education, which 
is based on the idea that it needs to produce rational autonomous persons. The educator in this instance 
takes on the role of midwife so as to release the rational potential of the human being. In contrast, Biesta’s 
idea is not based on the educator producing or releasing anything, but that education “should focus on 
the ways in which the new beginning of each and every individual can come into presence” (2006:9). He 
not only shifts the focus away from education as developing autonomous, rational beings, but also away 
from education’s socialising and reproductive functions. However, Todd (2010:5) points to the paradox of 
the term education, “since both in practice and theory it works in the impossible space of formation and 
transformation”. Thus, she brackets out the term “education” and inserts the term “pedagogy”, which she 
views not as a teaching-learning encounter or a political project, but as a transformative event, namely 
how the individual becomes present in the world. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Adriana 
Cavarero, she writes about becoming present as a second birth, a pedagogical birth. The birth is not 
from the mother’s womb, but involves our unexpected becoming as we speak and act in the world in the 
presence of others. Furthermore, one’s becoming present is uniquely singular and occurs in context with 
others – “uniqueness … emerges in a particular time and context” (Todd, 2010:6). 

A recently published work, Jansen’s (2009) Knowledge in the Blood, is illustrative of the limits 
of education and the possibility of viewing pedagogy as a transformative event. When Jansen began his 
work as a black Dean at the UP3 in 2000, he was startled at the views of young Afrikaner students about 
a past (including rigid feelings about black South Africans) that they had never lived. He discovers that 
their views had been formed through a process of socialisation involving the home, church, schools and 
sport. As an educationist, his response might reasonably have been to somehow intervene in the lives 
of students (and perhaps this was his intention when he visited schools, students’ homes, took students 
to the movies, etc.) so as to influence their beliefs or to change their views. Such a response would be 
conceivable given the context and that education’s occupation since Greek antiquity has been concerned 
with “influence”, “change”, “transformation” – how through education we might change people’s lives for 
the better or to conscientise people, as Freire suggested. However, Jansen’s narrative is, in part, about how 
he becomes singularly (uniquely) present in a particular context; as he spoke and acted in the presence of 
(young) white Afrikaners, he was transformed. He writes: “At UP I have had some of the most profound 
and life-changing experiences that any human being could expect to face in one career” (Jansen, 2009:7). 
From this, it is clear that becoming present in context is not an easy affair. Arendt (in Todd, 2010:9) 
asserts that when our lives are spoken in a way that enables us to appear to others, we set in motion 
unpredictable outcomes; in our exchanges with others our actions strike others and are released into the 
world, generating unpredictable reactions, even unpredictable sufferings. Arendt writes that these (inter)

3 The University of Pretoria is a historically white and Afrikaans university whose monocultural identity is being 
challenged (and is changing) in post-apartheid South Africa.



8 Perspectives in Education, Volume 29(2), June 20118

actions are “boundless because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation” 
(Todd, 2010:7). Jansen’s narrative is also about how young Afrikaners become present in context.

Importantly, it might not be grand narratives, macro-events or elaborate policies that will effect 
transformation, but events at the micro-level at which human beings become present in context – it is at the 
level of the miniscule that newness could emerge. The power of the miniscule or singular event has been 
documented in the field of physics as early as the 19th century and evidenced by Maxwell’s words:

... the system has a quantity of potential energy, which is capable of being transformed into motion, 
but which cannot begin to be so transformed till the system has reached a certain configuration, to 
attain which requires an expenditure of work, which in certain cases may be infinitesimally small, 
and in general bears no definite proportion to the energy developed in consequence thereof (in 
Pindar & Sutton, 2001:11).       

Conclusion
In this article I discussed the transformation of higher education in South Africa following the dismantling 
of apartheid. One way of connecting all the aspects that I have discussed (globalisation, neoliberalism, 
the technology of performativity, higher education policy, education itself) is to investigate how these 
forces play a role in the production of human subjectivity. Forces of globalisation have influenced higher 
education (policy) in South Africa, but globalisation has resulted in the domestication/homogenisation of 
subjectivity (cf. Guattari, 2001). Moreover, modern education itself has produced subjectivities that are 
passive and uninspiring (cf. Le Grange, 2008). Despite its dream of transformation, education by definition 
inevitably becomes formation – socialisation remains a powerful element in it – or at least when we invoke 
the term “education”, it necessarily sets up a tension between transformation and formation. 

I have attempted to open up the possibility of imagining transformation differently by considering 
pedagogy as a transformative event (as Todd has termed it). Viewing pedagogy in this way shifts the 
discussion away from the aims, objectives or outcomes of education. It shifts the discussion away from 
what we might need to do to bring about change in the future. As Todd (2010:9) writes:

Viewing pedagogy as transformative event in fact means shifting our understanding of the relationship 
between education and time, which would radically alter our focus on educational phenomena ... It 
means paying attention to the singularly different ways students take their place as speaking and 
acting subjects and it means engaging with the ‘who’ of education and not simply the ‘what’.
Pedagogy as transformative event does not lie in invoking old ideas and using old formulae. 

Transformation lies in becoming present in a world of supercomplexity, where the biosphere intersects 
with the mechanosphere, and systems with the life world, where suffering is evident in the ecologies of 
mind, socius and nature. The vectors of escape from domestication/homogenisation lie in interaction with 
the world as it is. I end with Kappelar’s (1986:212) words: “I do not really wish to conclude and sum up, 
rounding off the argument so as to dump it in a nutshell for the reader. A lot more could be said about any 
of the topics I have touched upon … I have meant to ask the questions, to break out of the frame … The 
point is not a set of answers, but making possible a different [higher education] practice …”

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