The university in contemporary South Africa: Commodification, corporatisation, complicity, and crisis

Post-1994, the arc of university development in South Africa has resulted in commodified, corporatised, crisis-ridden universities, as part of the wider crisis of the South African political economy under neo-liberal hegemony. I illustrate the different dimensions of the crisis and offer some ideas on a different future for universities that breaks with their current dubious trajectories. I argue that important as they are, renewed and transformed universities will not come into being through intellectual, epistemological, and theoretical work alone, unless such work is itself part of political struggle and connects with political action and struggles by individuals and social groups committed to a different kind of society predicated on logics other than the destructive and dehumanising ones of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism.