Dec 2008 inside book .p65


431

In search of a merged identity: the case of

multi-campus North-West University, South

Africa

F KAMSTEEG*

Abstract

South Africa’s post–apartheid governments have taken far–reaching policy measures to

transform the system of higher education, do away with its strongly segregated character,

and develop an efficient and internationally recognised system that provides equal

chances for all ethnic groups. Since 2002 higher education has become the explicit

target of a government policy, geared to cultural development and intervention, including

the enforcement of a series of mergers between traditionally white and black universities

and former technikons (currently universities of technology). This process has caused

intense debate at the level of leadership and among policy makers in these institutions,

but little is known of how this ideological battle over educational development has

affected daily academic practice. This paper gives a first, somewhat tentative discussion

on the current effects of the changes in higher education in South Africa, and in

particular at one of the institutions affected: the newly merged North-West University

(NWU). The article is based on documentary research and three personal visits to the

university; in the process a joint research project was initiated between the VU University

of Amsterdam (VUUA) and NWU. This paper attempts to shed some early light on how

efficiency and social equity goals are met within NWU’s institutional merger, beginning

from a cultural perspective that focuses on the construction of ‘merger narratives’. The

paper also gives a voice to critical reactions, narratives of resistance that have emerged

from the university shop floor.

Keywords: South African tertiary education, North-West University, historically white

institutions (HWI, or H Advantaged I) and historically black institutions (HBI, or H

Disadvantaged I); mergers; Council on Higher Education (CHE).

Disciplines: Anthropology; Management Studies; Organisation Studies; Higher Education

Studies.

Introduction

In terms of developmental goals, South Africa has long claimed a
special position in international politics and policies. As in other
cases of politically sanctioned regimes the Western world expended
most of its developmental effort on supporting groups, organizations,

* Dr Frans Kamsteeg, an anthropologist with extensive experience in the field of

university management and research in organisational studies, is attached to

the Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Culture, Organization & Management,

VU University Amsterdam (VUUA). Email: fh.kamsteeg@fsw.vu.nl. This study is

a position paper on a proposed internationally funded project dealing with the

merger process at NWU.

TD: The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, Vol. 4 no. 2, December 2008, pp. 431-451.



432

and individuals struggling to liberate themselves from their
oppressors. With the demise of the apartheid regime after 1990,
support for societal reconstruction in what became known as the
‘rainbow nation’ meant a new step in development cooperation. The
peaceful transition and the relative wealth of the country quickly
fostered the assumption that in the post-apartheid period the
government would be capable of handling the formidable task of re-
structuring a new South African society largely unaided, without
major external developmental interventions. Ending social inequality
– the principal target being the legacy of apartheid – and establishing
a politically democratic attitude and practice among a divided
population have for the last 14 years been the prime objective of the
central government in this transition period. Subsequent elections
have put this task in the hands of a single political party, the African
National Congress (ANC) that came to power in 1994 with the support
of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of
South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Since then, the government
has focused on the issue of how to expand the economic
modernization project started by the previous regime, and
simultaneously effect ‘societal transformation’, redressing the
institutionalized and practical inequalities created by successive
apartheid governments. This transformation endeavour has even
been labelled the ANC National Democratic Revolution (Duvenhage
2007). Education has from the outset been envisioned as an important
vehicle in the project. Huge differences in access to education and
imbalanced teaching levels are but two of the many obstacles that
currently hamper education, preventing it from playing a significant
role in the transformation process.

This study is based on documentary source material and information
collected at the time of three visits to North-West University (NWU)
between February and November 2008. It should be noted that NWU
acquired its current form in 2004 after the campuses at Mafikeng,
Potchefstroom and Vaal Triangle were merged within the framework
of policy guidelines laid down by the government. The study focuses
on one particular aspect of the transformation of the South African
educational system, namely the state’s restructuring of the
institutional landscape of Higher Education (HE) by implementing a
vast project to merge universities from 2002 onwards. The NWU merger
has had a marked impact on the three NWU campuses. Each campus
has its own historical background and educational approach, and
each, in turn, has responded in a unique manner, impacting on the
particular ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ surroundings and the ethnic and class
complexities of its specific learning environment. Additionally, the
way the institutions were centralized, how their values were revised,
and how the trajectory of integration was shaped (whether in specific
programmes or not) have all affected the quality of academic teaching
and research; the administration of the campuses; and the nature of
community service.

I shall begin with a section on government policies on the merging of

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universities and then turn to the specific case of the North-West
University merger. I will present the NWU case as an ambivalent
merging process with significant post-merger integration challenges.
I shall then pay brief attention to recent work in similar endeavours,
before dealing with post-merger integration processes played out at
the shop-floor level at NWU. Both at the institutional-structural level
and the life-world level, some narratives of success and failure (Vaara
2002, 2003) are analysed, drawing on different experiences and ways
of reasoning. I will also sketch some important themes that emerge
from the discussion.

Four years into the merger, the North-West University still appears to
be in search of an institutional identity that will unify the three
campuses and be shared by the university in its entirety. Although
NWU is currently concluding a process of academic alignment, there
remain significant differences between the various campuses with
regard to teaching, research performance, and institutional culture.
These impact on the prospects for a merged identity, which is one of
the principal goals to be pursued.

This article is a first contribution to a longitudinal research project
that aims at the assessment of the South African merger policy on the
basis of an extended, in-depth (multiple) case study of one specific
university, NWU. NWU brought together traditionally black
disadvantaged and white advantaged universities, with huge
differences in institutional cultures and identities. The study aims
to trace the complexities arising when this higher educational
institution had to undergo rapid change, most evidently because of
the fact that three geographically-separate and culturally-distant
campuses were brought together under one central institutional
management – as a result of government-led policy. With its focus on
the examination of culture and identity processes - in the form of
sensemaking through narratives - the study claims to add value to
dominant managerial perspectives on higher education mergers. With
the choice of such a perspective the study will also link up to recent
debates on identity and change at higher education institutions.

1. From the White Paper to the merging reality

South Africa’s higher education history, after a relatively quiet period
in the early twentieth century with the foundation of the University
of Cape Town (UCT) in 1918, entered an era of turmoil in the early
1990s (Jansen 2003). The newly established government and its
successive ministers charged with the Education portfolio considered
(higher) education a major vehicle of societal transformation, one that
they hoped would go some way towards redressing the legacy of
apartheid. The National Commission on Higher Education initiated
a programme of change in 1996, and by 1997 this culminated in a
policy milestone: the White Paper on Higher Education (1997; see
also CHE 2004, 2007; Jansen 2002). During the apartheid period,
higher education had developed into a markedly unequal system,

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with disproportionately scattered institutions varying a great deal in
size, student enrolment, research capacity, funding, quality of
management, etc. The major divide was between historically white
institutions (HWI, or HAdvantaged I) and historically black
institutions (HBI, or HDisadvantagedI). This was in line with the
previous regime’s policy of racial separation. Prior to 1994 no
government had attempted to bring about a fairer balance; instead
the situation was the outcome of deliberate discriminatory policies
and a curious laissez-faire policy on tertiary education.

From the outset the ANC government adopted an interventionist
approach, directed specifically at educational change. This was the
driving force behind the White Paper which gave one single actor,
the government, comprehensive power to plan, control and fund the
entire sector. The White Paper defined the ‘size and shape’ of the new
system, emphasizing programme-based planning and collaboration;
implementation was to be via regional co-ordination and partnerships.
Quality assessment, monitored by the Council on Higher Education
(CHE), was the third major policy strategy developed in the document
and was to provide a sound basis for decisions on structural
rearrangements. Mergers did not receive much attention in this
document, nor had they done so in the previous National Commission
on Higher Education report (Jansen 2003: 3). The issue only came to
the fore in the term of the second Minister of Education, Kader Asmal,
in 1999. In 2000 he received a report compiled by the CHE team,
entitled Towards a New Higher Education Landscape: Meeting the
Equity, Quality and Social Development Imperatives of South Africa in
the 21st Century. However, this document still did not give a clear
indication on how the number of institutions could be reduced by
judicious merging. It did however proclaim that ‘bedrock’ teaching
universities should become separated from comprehensive research
universities and it promised the end of the binary system. The
university sector as a whole, reacted by organising a number of
effective protests. This temporally halted far-reaching restructuring
(Balintulo 2003: 454ff). Nevertheless, the idea of linking institutional
and social redress did not disappear for long. In 2001, The
Restructuring of the Higher Education System in South Africa, saw the
light of day, presenting a far-reaching programme of mergers as the
most appropriate mechanism to bring about transformation, equity,
sustainability and productivity (Balintulo 2003: 457). The document
also provided a list of merger goals and a fairly concrete number of
institutions that had to be merged.

The development in subsequent policy documents demonstrates that
the ends of the reorganization of higher education were believed
achievable through a deliberately interventionist merging
mechanism, i.e. reducing the number of institutions of higher
learning. These ends were defined in terms of social development,
equity, and quality – in line with the general transformative agenda
of the post-apartheid government. Close reading of the 2001 document
shows that in addition to its development ends (enhancing access

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and equity for staff and students; and the building of new institutions
with cultures and identities transformed beyond the racial and ethnic
past), other important economic and efficiency goals were pursued,
such as creating economies of scale, and the improvement of the
sector’s manageability (Jansen 2003: 9). Both the HWIs and the HBIs
felt threatened by the proposed top-down operation announced by
the ministry. Despite these reservations, once agreed at the Ministry
(in December 2002), the policy was implemented.  By 2004 the
government-mandated merger programme had reduced 36
institutions of higher education to 23: there were to be 11 traditional
universities, six universities of technology and six comprehensive
universities (See table below). In this operation the former technikons
disappeared, either becoming part of one of the comprehensive
universities, or transforming into universities of technology. Among
the primarily academic ‘traditional’ universities several of the higher
ranked HWU were exempted from merging. The general goals of
transformation remained as a set of prerequisites for all institutions.

Scheme of the most important merged institutions since
2004

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The fairly generally formulated, transformative character of the
educational policy intervention had radical implications. It was
designed – and implemented – in a context of political transition,
which made it a (probably) unique and a highly hazardous operation.
Indeed, tertiary education in post-apartheid South Africa presented
itself as a potentially explosive situation. Jansen (2003: 157-159)
lists four major transitional conditions, namely:

1. A system deeply marked by racial inequalities (among both staff
and students);

2. HBIs (universities and technikons) that suffered severe governance
and management crises;

3. declining student enrolment, as a consequence of which the better
(white) institutions received the good students and the formerly
black institutions the poor students; and

4. a chronic fragmentation and huge imbalances countrywide that
reflected the former apartheid government’s goals and strategies,
the black institutions mainly being located in marginal rural areas.

It was conditions such as these that were targeted for government
intervention. Simultaneously, these circumstances were also serious
obstacles to success within the confines of tight time schedules.
Moreover, the transition process had a twin logic: it was not just the

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legacy of apartheid that was to be overcome, because incorporating
South Africa into the globalised world – through education – was
equally important. The objective of the Asmal administration that of
a single interventionist move, focused on reducing inequality and
fostering internationalisation – the latter without having much idea
of the implications this might have in terms of substance and
organization.

Although understandable as an attempt to correct the effects of many
years of political and economic repression, the policy chosen
underestimated not only the material, but also the social and cultural
effects of the past, where – despite the weakness of the system as a
whole – particular groups and institutions had vested interests to
defend. It was only logical that the government’s explicit steering
role in the merging process would produce resistance. It is these
macro-conditions that determined much of what has been happening
at the micro level, and that to some extent was reproduced at the
local level, where university management often played a
comparatively strong steering role. These circumstances will be
discussed in greater detail below.

2. A merger case: into the North-West University arena

In the wake of the world-wide stream of mergers and acquisitions of
the last decades there have been a substantial number of publications
in the field of organization studies. Merging as an organizational
change phenomenon has been studied from many angles:
strategically oriented studies, human resource-oriented perspectives
and cultural perspectives. The latter approach emerged following the
discovery of culture as a metaphor for organizational processes in
the 1980s. As mergers were intended to improve corporate
performance, it was only logical that studies on merging often
reflected a normative (e.g. ‘synergy’), and managerial orientation,
which tends to downplay the complexity of the phenomenon (for an
overview of the literature, see Vaara 2002; Angwin & Vaara 2005).
An important sub-theme in the merger literature is (the level of) post-
merger integration, which is often described in terms of ‘success’
and ‘failure’, but generally these studies – despite their cultural focus
– pay little attention to the stories of the actors involved, or to the
specific contexts in which actor perspectives are framed. Even in
cultural perspectives, stressing the importance of the variance in
norms, values, and beliefs of merging organizations often ignores
the complex interplay between culture and the daily social and
political manoeuvring of protagonists involved in merging processes.
As Angwin & Vaara (2005) argue in a special issue of Organization
Studies, we need empirically better documented, refined, and
embedded research that goes beyond the myopia of many of the
prevailing cultural perspectives, in which culture is often predicated
as either favourable or adverse to merging success. A study of the
institutional merger of South Africa’s North-West University aims to

TD, 4(2), December 2008, pp. 431-451.

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take up this challenge by reconstructing ‘merger narratives’ that can
substantiate the (often ambiguous) imperatives involved in a merger.

The new NWU came into being on 1 January 2004 after a brief but
intensive preparatory period under the chairmanship of Theuns Eloff
(now the university’s vice-chancellor). The process involved a merger
of the former Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education
(PU for CHE), located in Potchefstroom, as well as its Vanderbijlpark
campus, some 90km further to the east; the former University of the
North-West (located in Mafikeng); and the former homeland University
of Bophuthatswana, some 200km to the west on the Botswana border.
This was followed by the incorporation of the staff and students of the
Sebokeng campus of Vista University – an apartheid-styled
correspondence university.

Officially the university now has three campuses, each with a separate
governing body and administration: Potchefstroom, Mafikeng, and
the Vaal Triangle (Vanderbijlpark). The three geographically separated
campuses are different in size and character. Potchefstroom’s staff
and student population is predominantly white. The former university
had some academic standing and, despite its location in a rural area,
attracted students from different parts of the country. Mafikeng is
the capital of North West Province, and houses an almost totally black
campus that predominantly attracts students from the surrounding
rural area; it has a limited academic tradition and in earlier days the
university attracted many students from Botswana. The smallest of
the three NWU campuses, based in the Vaal Triangle (a highly
industrial area), has a mixed staff and student population and has
long been a Potchefstroom satellite. In 2004, much to its own surprise,
it was assigned independence from Potchefstroom. The latter remains
in many ways still NWU’s dominant campus, if only because it hosts
the hub of administration, known as the Institutional Office.

The research of which this text is the first outcome, was born from a
suggestion by the present rector of the Potchefstroom campus to start
a collaborative research project between the VU University Amsterdam
and NWU on the impact of the merger - a project that falls under the
existing memorandum of understanding between the two universities
and those of other international multi-university collaborative
agreements. It is also in accordance with an internal call (until now
unanswered) by the university’s vice-chancellor, Theuns Eloff, for a
research project to be undertaken on the outcomes of the merger.
The reasons for the initial lack of response are as yet unclear, but
this present project has taken up the challenge. The feasibility of
conducting a longitudinal multi-site ethnographic study of the NWU
merger was in general received favourably at all three university
campuses as well as at the Institutional Office - by staff members,
academic researchers, and students alike. This implies that an
assessment can be made of the extent to which the development goals
of the institutional merger operation have been reached. To glean
results of this wide-ranging nature calls for the (re)construction of
the needs, experience and behavioural patterns of all institutional

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actors. In other words the project calls for a collaborative research
effort by experienced and junior researchers (from both VUUA and
NWU) as well as students from various disciplines and backgrounds.
Giving shape to such a collaborative project is in itself complicated;
one might venture to say that in a certain sense it is impossible to
fully organize and manage the project in a top-down manner.

The design for this study as a multi-researcher effort will be built on
the idea of doing research ‘with the organization’, rather than making
a study ‘of the organization’ from the outside (Neyland 2007). The
multi-site ethnographic research design is a complex endeavour, yet
turning it into a joint research process including both insiders and
outsiders requires further reflection and agreement on role
definitions and the scope of the fieldwork. This will be further
elaborated following Bartunek and Louis’ insider-outsider
conceptualization (1992), combined with Moeran’s implementation
of the observant participation position (Moeran 2006). Such an
approach has many advantages (such as broad support of the
organization) but it also implies a joint social responsibility. For
example, collaboration aimed at improving research capacity, and
on a wider scale contributing to NWU’s role in social development of
the country, is envisioned as a possible additional benefit of the joint
project. Yet there are obvious risks. In a situation where the external
political context is of crucial importance, any changes in the situation
may have a direct impact, while a variety of local interests (within
and outside of the university) will also require a great deal of political
sensibility on the part of the researchers involved.

3. A theoretical framework: narrating the merger1

The scope and depth of organization theory requires that the
researchers provide justified choices on the approaches to be utilized
for the project. Organizational research has predominantly been
quantitative in nature, with a strong managerial perspective when it
comes to governance questions. Yet organizations are more than
structures, they are socially constructed spaces, life worlds, inhabited
by real people, who in their meaning-giving activities constantly
change organizational reality (see Alvesson 2002, Bate 1997, Watson,
2001). This sensemaking always takes place in an environment where
meaning has to be negotiated (Czarniawska 1997). Capturing these
sensemaking processes requires a specific approach that is sensitive
to their complexities. Retrieving cultural meanings on a merged
institution that has drawn together a wide variety of people with

1 Parts of this theoretical section have been taken from an unpublished text prepared

during a three-day workshop at Mafikeng, November 2008. This text is the fruit

of an intense co-constructed effort on the way towards a fully-fledged research

design for the longitudinal project. I wish to thank Gideon Rossouw and Kiran

Odhav in particular for their contribution.

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experiences, identities, and expectations that are markedly varied
can be fruitfully carried out by carefully reconstructing the
‘narratives of change,’ drawn from what John van Maanen (1988) calls
‘tales from the field’.

Some of these ‘tales’ on higher education mergers in South Africa
have been collated by Janssen (2002, Janssen et al 2000). Although
these inspiring studies on the ‘micro-politics’ of university change
(Gibbon, et al 2000) are empirically well informed and highly
illuminating. they only do partial justice to the richness of experience,
and ambiguous attitudes of those involved in the merger. Moreover,
these studies have mainly focused on college mergers; the merging
of universities since 2004 is still largely unrecorded. The present
study, and its projected continuation, positions itself as following
this line of research.

Specific research in organization theory and models on mergers is
often bifurcated in a failure-success perspective. The work of Finnish
organizational theorist Vaara is useful in pointing to the limitations
of “rationalistic explanations for the difficulties in post-acquisition
integration” (2003: 859) and shows that little is known on the role of
‘irrational’ features which can impede organizational integration. The
‘success rhetoric’ of the rational model leads to a superficial
categorization, which does not recognize the role of ambiguity
inherent in complex social processes. Acknowledging this complexity
creates the opportunity for utilizing different perspectives to develop
an understanding of the processes that follow from a merger. While
Vaara’s work focuses on business organization perspectives, this
approach can also be applied in the context of mergers of academic
institutions in the tertiary sector.

This approach is located in recognizing the importance of language,
and Vaara relies on Cziarnawska (1997) to reflect on the role of
narratives as central to an understanding of the social construction
of organizational phenomena. The standard approaches in
organizational theory can be typified as ‘managerialist’, but Vaara
points out that these do not pay attention to the narratives through
which the organizational outcomes of mergers are constructed, and
that the ‘managerialist’ approach does not recognize the role of these
narratives in the social construction of outcomes and the decision
making processes which role players adopt in post-merger
integration. The narrative approach, in short, allows for a perspective
that provides for a sequential account, locates intentionality, and
sees discursiveness linked to subject positions and identity (Vaara
2002: 215-217). This acknowledges the identity-building processes
at work for individuals, including their location within the
organizational context.

Scapegoating strategies and conspiracy theories can be linked to
particular discourses and one of the conclusions that Vaara’s analysis
makes, is that both the success and failure versions of narratives can
be overly optimistic or pessimistic, depending on their slant. They

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reveal and exemplify “discursive elements through which these
phenomena are socially constructed and through which managerial
actions are legitimized and naturalized” (2002: 237). This means that
actors are able to re-frame the question of failure/success, and that
there is not a monolithic, fixed construction placed on their
interpretations (ibid.: 239). Vaara also describes “four interrelated
tendencies that illuminate why the frequent problem of slow progress
during post-acquisition integration occurs”, on the basis of “focusing
on sensemaking processes surrounding the integration issues”
(2003: 1). These tendencies are: inherent ambiguity on integration
issues; cultural confusion in social interactions and communication;
organizational hypocrisy in integration decision-making; and the
politicization of integration issues. Some of these become visible in
the following section, which discusses some of the early, as yet
tentative merger narratives. The corroboration of their relevance
requires more systematic research.

4. Some initial narrative assertions: on goals, challenges,
and distrust

In its Institutional Plan 2008-2010 NWU claims to have “achieved most
of the objectives set out in the Merger and Incorporation guidelines
of the Department of Education” (p. 1). The mission focuses on six
areas: high quality teaching and research; implementation of
expertise (both commercially and community directed); values; sound
(financial) management; and transformation. Apart from the goals set
for internal purposes, there is a clear awareness of the role that the
outside world expects universities to play under the new higher
education regime. NWU will

transform continually in terms of positioning, academic profile, unity,
equity and redress. In doing this, it will contribute to the transformation
of the South African Higher Education system to help meet the
country’s social, economic, developmental and environmental needs (p.
6; my italics).

Throughout the document there is an outspoken consciousness of
the wider political relevance of complying with these demands
(“supplying innovative solutions to challenges faced by the scholarly
community, the country, the continent and the world”). Each element
of the mission from the document has been translated into an
elaborate set of concrete targets.

NWU is projecting itself as a value-driven university. The Potchefstroom
campus entrance, for example, conveys this message in neon letters
to the personnel and students who enter the campus (“value-driven
we make a difference”), although at the other campuses this is not so
openly communicated. This focus on values is translated in terms of
a single institutional culture for the university which stresses
community, tolerance, respect, and human rights. These are to be
understood as key values (integrity, commitment, accountability and

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responsibility) to be captured in a Code of Ethics and Conduct that
should be debated at all university levels and taken up in individual
performance agreements. Two issues are given prominence among
the themes defining NWU’s specific culture: diversity and human
rights. Responsibility for the university’s implementation of these
issues (plus that of equity) has been assigned to a specific department.
Religion is only mentioned in passing, which is remarkable given
the fact that historically Potchefstroom is nationally known as a
Protestant university. In fact religions (emphatically plural) are only
named as possible sources that contribute to university values.

The culture theme does have a prominent place in the values
discourse as it is given shape at the university’s Institutional Office.
In December 2007 the results of a NWU Culture and Climate Study
were published (although not widely spread); the implementation of
its outcomes (“relevant issues raised by staff”) is one of the targets
formulated in the Institutional Plan, which also announces additional
research (position papers and a student survey) to promote
development and to spread the NWU values on diversity. This process
is to be closely linked to the branding of NWU’s corporate identity, a
process that began in 2004. The branding project is organized from
the Corporate Communications office, which has spent much effort,
time, and money on building the image of a solid, but dynamic
organization that meets the demands made by its environment in a
creative and distinctive manner. It is in the brand products that an
effort is made to show the specific quality of the university as a merger
outcome. I give three examples:

� After a long process of discussion and deliberation the corporate
logo has recently been finalised. It is to consist of three carefully
interwoven “U’s”, each in the colour of the original university/
campus before the merger (blue, green, and maroon). These colours
are used (separately or together) in all corporate publications and
on the website.

�· An additional symbol is being used to link the merged institution
to South African society. Wherever possible publications show a
multi-coloured ribbon (the three university colours merging)
clearly referring to South Africa as a rainbow nation. Merging
diversity at the university is suggested to have broader societal
meaning.

� The NWU website shows the same ‘diversity in unity’ suggested in
the mix of colour. Website texts are, moreover, written in the three
relevant languages (English, Afrikaans and Setswana). The
university’s language policy is officially multi-lingual – there is
even a programme that provides simultaneous class-room
translations, which is heavily promoted nationally and has won
several prizes.

These are only a few examples of NWU’s corporate branding strategy

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to convey its message of a successful institutional merger. Without
going into detail all corporate expressions over the period 2004-2007
have spread this same message (see for example, the Annual Report
2006, 2007; Profile, Pocket Statistics 2007). The list of successes is
long and maintains among other things, that:

� student enrolment is increasing;

� the number of undergraduate and honours diplomas continues to rise;

� the racial composition of contact students shows a representative
balance;

� female students now outnumber males;

� staff numbers have grown (those of professionals more than non-
professionals);

� white staff members still outnumber blacks, but the balance is
changing (particularly among male staff);

� the university’s financial viability is rising;

� external (research) funding is increasing;

� weighted research output continues to increase (to sixth position
nationally); and

� the income from industry, science councils and state departments
for contract research and development is rising.

To a certain extent this can be interpreted as an example of what
Goffman (1959) called front-stage identity-building. Significant
figures indicate that progress is indeed being made. This does not,
however, mean that feelings of success are shared by all at each of
the campuses. At the management and support staff level, both at the
Institutional Office and at the campuses, this is generally the case,
but among researchers and teachers at the faculties there are mixed
feelings. Particularly at the Mafikeng campus there are signs of a
distinct critique of the way the new institution is governed and
presented to the outside world. This is of course a well-known
phenomenon, particularly in mergers where one partner is dominant.
Post-merger integration then often shows evidence of feelings of
powerlessness and mistrust among the weaker partners (see e.g.
Buono and Bowditch 1989). At shop-floor level in the Mafikeng
departments, and even among some of the managers, there are critical
voices of being ‘overpowered’ by Potchefstroom change managers and
scientists. These critics are reluctant to speak of the merger; they
talk instead of ‘acquisition’ and incorporation in local terms
‘Potchefication’. The Mafikeng ‘narrative of resistance’,2  gleaned from
respondents, can be paraphrased as follows:

2 Merger narratives at Vaal Triangle campus are notoriously less outspoken.

TD, 4(2), December 2008, pp. 431-451.

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‘Potch’ has always been politically a very conservative university,
dominated by a white Protestant elite that has long been
supportive to the Apartheid ideology and the regime built on it.
They see Mafikeng as a place for black rural students, and it serves
them well to have a substantial number of them. The new NWU
institution is a kind of apartheid in disguise, but presented as a
successful attempt to transform the university landscape (and
Potchefstroom) away from its apartheid past. The Institutional
Office, still situated on the Potchefstroom campus, is developing
and implementing plans like a bulldozer, without listening to the
periphery. Research is concentrated at Potch – the other campuses
are for teaching only. The dominant language at Potchefstroom is
still Afrikaans, which excludes most black students from the better
programmes. There is hardly any teacher mobility between the
campuses either. The official language policy does not recognize
the real language problems most black students have. Procedural
streamlining has been done according to the Potch model. The
academic programme alignment is now going to follow the same
path. Income-generating projects also largely benefit the Potch
campus, which has, moreover, the better research and teaching
facilities. Although the university is presented as a single
institution, which represents the new equity and redress ideology
designed by the government, at best it is a federal organization,
with one centre dominating the periphery.  We have been the
product of apartheid, and now we are used again as a loincloth of
post-apartheid transformation.

It is clear that imagery plays a dominant role in this strong narrative
‘from the margins’, as much as it does in the narratives of success
and progress expressed by NWU’s institutional management. In fact,
all shades between black and white are to be found in the images
they contain. These narratives are weapons from what could be called
an arena where different players – with different power positions –
struggle over meaning. All figures and events, their interpretation,
and subsequent presentation then become contested. The current
general management, and the vice-chancellor, Theuns Eloff in
particular, do acknowledge that the merger is still fragile in term of
its culture and identity. There are shortcomings Eloff sees as
challenges that have to been taken seriously while continuing along
the chosen path. EISH!, (2008) a student quarterly, has a telling
interview with the vice-chancellor, in which he summarises the
present situation and the priorities for the future as follows (emphasis
is mine), thus providing a totally different narrative:

NWU has done very well as a merged university during the last
few years… Recent achievements include… an improved
throughput rate, strongly improved research outputs, financial
success, and general student stability on all three campuses. We
have maintained the balance between unity and diversity, made
good progress with employment equity, and have made a
constructive start with academic alignment. There is a special focus
on quality and unity. The 2008 quality drive will be directed … at
the … HEQC audit and the unity drive … at alignment, synergy

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and building a sense of unity.

Unity … falls into three aspects … the academic alignment process
must gather even stronger momentum, and I implore especially
our academics to throw themselves into this with passion; synergy
… the NWU must be more than the sum of its parts; building a
sense of unity is difficult and costly, but also unavoidable and
desirable. The success of the intercampus social days … bears
testimony to this. The balance between unity and diversity should
be carefully managed.3  However, social meetings, including sports
events, are only the first – and probably the easiest – means to
contribute to better integration. Attempts at academic encounter
and exchange that might lead to integration, are most probably
more difficult to become effective (EISH! 2008).

A similar urge for unity was expressed by Prof. Annette Combrink,
the campus rector at Potchefstroom, on the occasion of the official
opening of the academic year 2008. She mentioned NWU’s values,
new governance structure and the transformative efforts designed to
facilitate the move towards institutional cohesion. Comparable
messages were conveyed by the respective campus rectors in their
opening ceremony speeches at Mafikeng and Vaal Triangle
(Combrink 2008).

To sum up: what has been achieved at NWU in the first four years of
its existence as a merged institution? The institution has been
restyled, the multi-campus structure being the most prominent
outcome, creating a single operational management centre and
separate campus administrations. NWU has even been awarded the
prize for the best governed university in SA. The university – at least
the Potchefstroom campus – has become pro-active as a business
partner that sells knowledge. And there are more organizational
improvements that could be mentioned. As far as the societal goals
are concerned less progress appears to have been made, despite the
fact that in a comparative South African perspective, NWU has probably
made more progress than other merged universities. Although the
merger has created a more representative and diverse student
population when the institution as a whole is taken into
consideration, overall ethnic representation among students and staff
(administrative and academic) is still highly uneven between the
campuses. Academic programmes are currently being aligned, a
process that does not always run smoothly between campuses and
faculties; this adds to existing critical narratives, with respondents
indicating that NWU’s reality is still a place of contested meaning-
making. Institutional identity discourses constructed by its
administrators are regularly questioned at shop-floor level; evidently,

3 The back cover of the magazine has some pictures of the social event Eloff mentions,

showing a relaxed setting in which employees from the various campuses, are

taking part in various activities together, wearing clothes with the respective

campus colours.

TD, 4(2), December 2008, pp. 431-451.

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446

perspectives diverge most frequently between employees at the
Potchefstroom and Mafikeng campuses, while the Vaal Triangle
campus generally takes a less outspoken middle position.

5. Some tentative interpretations and concluding remarks

In present-day South Africa social and economic development is the
outcome of a neo-liberal free market policy combined with and/or
restricted by certain government measures. These measures are
basically driven by the desire to establish equity and redress the
inequalities of the apartheid era. Black empowerment and the
corresponding affirmative action are the main pillars of this policy of
redress. The restructuring of the system of (higher) education is one
of the government’s interventions made to enhance the speed of the
developmental process. Increasing the level of education among
(black) South Africans is viewed as a pivotal means of providing
society, and the private sector in particular, with educated people to
achieve the projected economic growth. To reach this goal, the
government has enforced the policy of merging institutions of higher
education. The ideology behind this project is to target social redress
(establishing equity of access, and ethnically/racially representative
institutions). Another goal is to create better integrated, well-
organized and financially sound institutions of higher education.
The present South African higher education field can thus be seen
as a developmental ‘laboratory’ in which the general policy of
combined neo-liberalism and state intervention is played out. Yet,
although the general path of the restructuring of the sector has been
government imposed (e.g. the list of merged institutions is a political
decision, not the outcome of a free discussion), the process and
progress in each merged institution has not yet been strictly
monitored. Assessment of the outcomes of the merger process is a
recent step. and indeed there are major differences to be observed,
not only in terms of the route each institution chose to follow, but
also in the extent to which institutions have managed to meet their
targets – those set by the government and those they themselves have
defined.

NWU management is conveying a fairly self-confident image of
success. The governance structure is in place; administrative
procedures (including tuition fees and staff salaries) have been
‘aligned’, and financial indicators are positive. Integrating culture
and identity, although on the agenda from the beginning, is a goal
that still has a long way to go. As an anonymous informant, one of
the architects of the merger, once told me: ‘It is received wisdom that
culture follows structure’.

Yet the critique described above does not only come from the
departments of the ‘outer’ campuses at Vaal Triangle and Mafikeng.
On a recent visit to the university, the Minister of Education, Naledi
Pandor, indicated that she was impressed by the statistics provided,
but expressed doubts about whether NWU was really a merged

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institution, given the three distanced campuses. She thus not only
echoed a concern experienced by many at the campuses of Vaal
Triangle and more particularly at Mafikeng – it would seem that other
merged institutions in the country have similar issues that need to
be addressed. The minister’s comments sounded a warning, and
demonstrated that she felt that NWU’s merger structure was a ‘federal’
structure, which might not be appropriate in the ANC’s ‘democratic
revolution’ and its demands of redress, despite the official picture
emanating from the available statistics.

Although the minister only made these remarks in passing and amidst
other more eulogising comments (e.g. on NWU’s entrepreneurial
spirit)4  a recent analysis of institutional culture(s) in South Africa by
Higgins (2007), published by the Council on Higher Education,
suggests that they might not be without wider significance. Higgins
argues that one of the major obstacles for redressing (ethnic/racial)
inequality in higher education institutions is the dominant culture
of whiteness, understood as the dominance of Anglo-Saxon values
and attitudes. Taking on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital he
further refines the ‘whiteness critique’ by broadening this category
(following Steyn & van Zyl 2001) to include

Euro-American worldview, English-speaking as mother-tongue,
maleness, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, (upper) middle-class-
ness, South African nationality, urban background, etc., (Higgins
2007: 110).

The dominance of this complex of values and practices (or in short,
cultural capital), he continues, is responsible for the experience of
alienation and anomie of the subordinated, or, in South African terms,
under-privileged black people. In a situation with three separate
campuses, of which the dominant campus clearly represents the
culture of whiteness (in the sense of cultural capital described by
Higgins), it is doubtful, or at least questionable, whether the social
ends of the government’s ‘merger project’ can really be achieved in
the immediate future. Critical voices from academics at the various
NWU campuses reflect a persistent mistrust of the Potchefstroom
administrators; this has tended to dominate institutional
reorganisation. This also points to another critique on the present
university culture, an issue that Higgins describes as the ‘dominance
of new managerialism’ (ibid.: 112).

The South African Higher Education project to merge institutions is
a political project par excellence. It is an expression of the ANC
government’s perspective on national development, their ‘national
democratic revolution’ ideology. At a general level the government
has opted to support neo-liberal economic policies, while in the

4 It would be an interesting sub-theme to this research project to study whether

this entrepreneurial spirit can be linked (in the Weberian sense) to the markedly

Protestant background of the Potchefstroom campus.

TD, 4(2), December 2008, pp. 431-451.

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domain of government institutions preferential treatment (black
empowerment) is chosen as the major strategy of the social
transformation agenda. In education – generally considered a
powerful vehicle of development – we see a similar dual strategy of a
liberal market policy on the one hand and top-down managerial
intervention and control on the other. In the higher education sector
that is most clearly visible in the merger operation. Institutions are
merged for efficiency reasons and obliged to display an
entrepreneurial spirit to augment their financial resources. Apart
from ‘solving’ some of the economic problems of the higher education
sector, the merged institutions are designed as vehicles to tackle the
equity problem in its broadest sense. The NWU merger is an example
of how this governance model unfolds: a mix of market logic and moral
politics, based on the genuine belief that both will, in the end,
contribute to improving the standard of living and quality of life for
the majority of previously disadvantaged South Africans. Despite the
strong moral drive of government, religion does not play a public
role in underpinning political decision-making and ensuing
government policy measures. As such, it might perhaps be considered
a case of secular political theology. NWU has conformed to this
ideology by adopting an explicit defence of value pluriformity and
diversity. Despite the fact that the vast majority of staff on all three
campuses have a Christian orientation, and manifestations of this
regularly occur, explicit references to the university’s Christian
character have disappeared from university policy documents.

Attempts to bring about change in culture and identity processes
must take into account that these attempts are never uncontested,
certainly not in merging situations. Further study is required to
identify the various arenas of conflict and cooperation. This will
hopefully ensure development and future sustainability of an
institutional identity that will be conducive to real communication,
mutual understanding, exchange of ideas and cooperation. The
leading question in such research on NWU post-merger processes of
organizational integration and identity-building, might well be how
these are being reflected in, culturally constructed, narrative
discourses, because these can be retrieved from experiences and
opinion of the relevant university constituencies: students, staff, and
management. To enable scientific as well as political dialogue on
these issues, it would be highly productive to create joint interpretative
spaces (Rynes, Bartunek, Daft 2001) in which researchers, lecturers,
managers and students from various disciplines can share, in an
integrated manner, their experiences and opinions.

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