1 Introduction

Like Euro-American universities, postcolonial historically white institutions (HWI s) were created by white men to serve the intellectual needs of white men. On a global level, this history has meant that white men have had a head start on women and, more recently, the black majority, in terms of perceived competence and intellectual prowess. In South Africa, the situation is further complicated by the dual legacies of colonialism and apartheid, out of which emerged distinct types of universities divided along racial lines. The desegregation of higher education (HE) since the dawn of democracy in the early 1990s has come with its own set of challenges – specifically within historically white liberal institutions that have had to contend with institutional cultures that have emerged from the country’s racist legacy.

Nevertheless, South African state legislature has attempted to address this legacy, through policies such as the South African Qualifications Authority Act (SAQA 1995) and the Department of Education’s (DoE) White Paper on Higher Education (DoE 1997), both of which envisioned greater and more equitable access to higher education for all South Africans, together with producing highly qualified graduates by regulating the quality of curricula. Of course, widened access has not always correlated with success for the vast majority of the poor and working-class students who enter the academy, a state of affairs that has also affected the changing demographics of staff. Moreover, Saleem Badat (2010a, 2010b) has argued for the need to maintain the balance between transformation and quality in the higher education landscape, while also emphasizing that transformation in HWI s is often read as compromising the latter. It is evident from the above that the transformation of higher education in South Africa has been framed around issues of access, quality and racialized access (DoE 1997), with very little attention given to what happens to the historically marginalized once they enter HWI s.

Most of the insights from this chapter emerge from our positioning as two black female academics working within an HWI in South Africa. In the chapter itself, we problematize the issue of transformation when conceiving of the historically white South African university as a particular type of social body in which those who inhabit it are vested with legacies of power that, in fact, can be reproduced, regardless of how those bodies are racialized and gendered. We argue that race and gender alone cannot be taken as the sum total of the transformation agenda, especially because both have the potential to systemically reproduce and uphold the very structures they are supposed to dismantle. The issue becomes less about the kinds of bodies we find within institutional walls and more about how power is distributed and accounted for. In so doing, we propose an understanding of the transformation agenda that accounts for difference while also complicating the limiting, assimilative vocabulary that characterizes it.

2 Historically White Universities and the State

All universities are structured hierarchically and thus participate in the mechanisms of power. Globally, notions of diversity and inclusion (which fall under the general umbrella of “transformation”), as discussed by Radebe and Maldonado-Torres in Chapter 13 of this book, attempt to acknowledge the impact of inequalities within the academy. In the South African setting, transformation is almost exclusively shaped by considerations of race and gender. Over the years, there have been a number of ministerial task teams and commissions (usually following undeniably racist incidents) that have interrogated higher education’s structural processes related to progress in the recruitment, retention and progression of black South African academics.

Recommendations from these commissions feed into national policies and thus have contributed to shaping systemic responses to multifaceted challenges in academic staffing, which include the “slow pace of transformation, the ageing workforce, and the relatively under qualified academic staff workforce” (Department of Higher Education and Training [DHET] 2015). The systemic interventions account for observable and quantifiable structural transformation. However, the cultural transformation of HWI s is less overt and is therefore susceptible to further scrutiny.

The efforts of HWI s to eradicate structural and systemic oppression have focused largely on constructing an optical illusion, by increasing the participation rates of black and women’s representation in higher education without paying careful attention to the daily practices and cultural values of these universities. The illusion here lies in the mistaken assumption that increasing black faces in the academy solves the problem of diversity. Although we cannot overlook the achievements made within the sector since 1994, it is worth exploring how current issues that arise as a result of historical forces influence contemporary reality.

Emerging scholarship within the first 10 years of democracy, such as David Cooper and George Subotzky’s “The Skewed Revolution: Trends in South African Higher Education” (2001), paints a compelling picture of the impact of social class on the participation rates of black students in higher education. Policy documents that have signalled substantive efforts towards redressing historical inequalities in the sector include the White Paper (DoE 1997), National Plan for Higher Education (Ministry of Education [MoE] 2001) and the Report of the Working Group (MoE 2019), all of which have largely affected transformation efforts, at least at the level of representation.

Black Africans, who had restricted access to education in the apartheid years, with the intent of preparing them for working-class occupations, have increasingly gained access to higher education in the last three decades. Despite this progress, the vast majority of black students entering the academy have not been adequately exposed to literacies that would ensure their success in the sector as it currently stands. Students from working-class backgrounds participating in formerly white institutions that, more often than not, are embedded in white, middle- and upper-class cultural norms, belief systems that sustain the practices of those institutions, and literacies they were not exposed to in the schooling system, often experience HWI s as exclusionary. As demonstrated by the #RhodesMustFall movement and the calls for decolonization of the curriculum, for instance, HWI s continue to present as self-aggrandizing ivory towers predicated on exclusion well into the contemporary era.

Although most black Africans are classified as working class, the black middle class has always existed (though it was contained during apartheid) and continues to increase. The South African middle class enjoys educational advantages that translate into being exposed to literacies that better prepare and support learners for entry into higher education. The stratification of access to literacy according to social class highlights the importance of thinking about transformation as more than a racial justice project, because an increase in black participation can also become exclusionary in practice if it privileges only those who already have the privilege of epistemic access. This is just one of the ways that the limiting language of race risks trapping us in transformation agendas that continue to marginalize poor and working-class students.

An overemphasis on race and gender alone might lead us to mistakenly deduce that any HWI that adopts any transformation strategy as one of its core intentions expresses a commitment to rocking the proverbial academic boat, so to speak. Nevertheless, transformation interventions may themselves become mired in the maintenance of the status quo. One way in which HWI s may be implicated in this is through the recruitment of black and female academics who are “safe bets” (Hlengwa 2015): people who possess the kind of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) that is aligned with the established values of a university and, therefore, are likely to reproduce rather than transform its dominant institutional cultures. These “safe bets” are not only easily assimilated into institutional life but also come to embody stratification by class, by coming into these spaces with the “correct” and, therefore, more palatable cultural practices. In this sense, cultural capital comes to denote middle- and upper-class mobility that reinforces structural and systemic inequality at an institutional level and a social one. “Safe bets” are thus safe in that they inadvertently (or even unconsciously) ensure the comfort of the establishment.

Nevertheless, scholarship on the changing demographics of the academy in South Africa would have us believe that diversifying race and gender representation shifts universities’ organizational cultures, requiring the “old” academic guard to be open to co-developing variations of cultures that the “new” academics usher into the academy (Fourie 1999). However, it is precisely this kind of surface-level understanding of transformation that limits the implementation of truly transformative policies and procedures that insist on being practised in the daily life of an institution. As demonstrated by “safe bets”, the introduction of new academics into established institutional spaces does not necessarily indicate transformation. Instead, new academics are less likely to disrupt the status quo precisely because doing so is not only tantamount to career suicide but also comes at immense personal and emotional cost.

Transformation discourse does not account for the psychologically corrosive nature of antagonistic and dysfunctional academic spaces, primarily because these discussions happen informally, behind closed doors, between friends and trusted confidants, or when junior academics decide to leave academia altogether. Although changing staff demographics is unequivocally necessary, not enough care or accountability (apart from policies) is taken and practised to ensure the safety of young, black academics once they are in the system. It would appear that transformation ends once the numbers that confirm representation rise. Representation matters, but safety should be a high priority even within the exceptional society of the ivory tower if the purpose of transformation is to have any efficacy on the ground. The corollary here is those new academics who (perhaps unconsciously) have a vested interest in maintaining spaces of privilege precisely because the “elite” social body of the academy is almost exclusively predicated on hierarchy and, therefore, power.

Louise Vincent’s work on “the limitations of ‘inter-racial contact’” (Vincent 2008) is instructive here, since she problematizes the widely practised liberal assumption that transformation involves opening up universities to different races, by pointing out that racism continues to circulate and reproduce itself despite measures taken to increase “diversity”. Vincent is referring to students in her article, but her observations may easily be applied to staffing.

Advancing her observations a step further would also imply that intraracial contact within institutional spaces cannot be taken for granted. In other words, the diversification of staff profiles in HWI s does not necessarily mean that perceived transformation agents cannot themselves be agents of violence. In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Slavoj Žižek (2008) maintains that there are two forms of objective violence: symbolic violence, which refers to the ways in which language can be instrumentalized in the service of violence, and systemic violence, which refers to “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (Žižek 2008: 2). If we apply Žižek’s definitions to the operations of power within the hierarchical system of the academy, we see that symbolic violence is already embedded in the concept of diversity, a concept that maligns those who have earned their way into the academy in the same way as everyone else but are inscribed with otherness through the ways in which their very presence is defined and read. The one who represents diversity is made other, hence the debates around maintaining standards while transforming the academy.

According to this logic, those who are read as “diversity” arrive at HWI s already deficient and have to earn a perception of efficiency among students and their colleagues. By the same token, the good transformation story is a story of numbers, of representation, the “smooth functioning” (Žižek 2008: 2) of a system and not a narrative of the personal or individual cost thereof. Violence is inevitable in any hierarchical system. It is most covert in a system that assumes innocence and camaraderie within intraracial contact but neglects structural and systemic inequalities that are part of institutional life.

3 Power and the Politics of Intraracial Contact

According to Foucault, every aspect of human life is shaped by relations of power (Foucault 2020: 8) and the social body is “the effect … of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals” (Foucault 1982: 785). In speaking about power in the South African higher education sector, we are also speaking about its (re)production through those racialized individuals who constitute the social body of any university. We are still speaking about what transformation is and what it does because we have a limited vocabulary for what diversity and transformation mean.

The relationship between power and subjectivity established by Foucault here is extended to all institutions in his later work, and is thus relevant to our present purposes. Njovane (2015) reflects on the ways in which racism is covertly reinforced through exploitative and abusive relations of power in the academy despite overt policies meant to guard against its reproduction. She argues that this state of affairs is mitigated by the difference between overt and covert forms of racism, the latter of which may be concealed beneath the appearance of inclusion on the surface (Njovane 2015: 118). South African higher education is neither exceptional in its dealings with racism nor is it immune to power relations that infect personal and institutional ways of being. Those who are read as representing transformation arrive in institutional spaces already mired in the politics of power, delimited and defined from without.

These observations may be read as an account of the ways in which institutional identities and cultures ossify (or become fixed) in established patterns of being, particularly when these patterns have historically facilitated the smooth passage of certain kinds of bodies. In applying Ahmed’s observations to South Africa, the smooth passage through historically white institutional spaces is determined by race and gender, and by age, class, ableism and a myriad of other intersectional determinants. The gradual transformation of student and staff demographics in HWI s does not always come with the challenge of transforming the ossified patterns themselves, precisely because “safe bets” are easily assimilated into the existing system. The problem arises when the obverse is true, when “misfits” are introduced into a system designed to malign them. Although “safe bets” and “misfits” may both represent diversity, there exists a volatile conflict between them since at stake is either the maintenance or disruption of the status quo, respectively.

While the conflict may remain ideological, it is easily complicated by the introduction of power into an already unstable intraracial dynamic, an introduction that can lead to abuses of power that are not easily identified or accounted for because there has yet to be a vocabulary for doing so. It is simpler, even easy, to explain abuses of power by white agents in HWI s, because we already have the vocabulary of racism to explain these. When abuses of power are intraracial or are enacted by those who represent transformation, however, the vocabulary provided to us by the language of racism arrives at an impasse. Our language skirts around the phenomenon, and this is telling, since it exposes the naive assumption that intraracial contact in HWI s falls outside the power structures that govern the entirety of human life.

There is a parallelism between Ahmed’s analogy of the institutional garment and Mamphela Ramphele’s argument, that it makes sense that South Africa’s historically white universities “founded by white males for white males … have very strong male cultures … Racism, sexism and authoritarianism are deeply embedded in the cultures of many institutions” (Ramphele 2008: 201). Ramphele’s contention emphasizes the ways in which HWI s are not only founded on the racial negation of those who do not present as white and male but are also predicated on the functionality of power. Although her observations tend to repeat the prevailing gendered and racialized understandings of transformation, they also gesture towards a need to further investigate how whiteness can be instrumentalized by any body with the potential to weaponize power in destructive and abusive ways within the academy.

The imperative brought about by our proposed intersectional understanding of transformation through its relation to (ab)uses of power is not only to introduce “misfits” into an institution but also to dismantle the old garment of assumed innocence in the service of co-creating a new one. HWI s have yet to shed the old garment, and this is not without reason, since shedding it is dependent on the acknowledgement that such a garment exists in the first place. Inasmuch as the assimilation of female, black and brown bodies into higher education has been the doctrine, systemic changes have been slow in – or else hindered from – explicitly disrupting established “authoritarian” cultures. As the gradual increase of “misfits” in HWI s reaches a critical mass, their presence and dis-ease are politically suggestive, since they challenge us to oppose the smooth functioning of institutions predicated on authority without accountability.

A reductive preoccupation with whiteness, patriarchal and paternalistic liberalism and the ageing professoriate of universities delimits a more intersectional approach to transformation that holds individual academic citizens accountable for the ways in which they exercise power, regardless of their race. Additionally, since higher education institutions constitute at least one of the sites of contestation in the redress of deeply embedded forms of structural and systemic oppression in South Africa, it would be irresponsible not to broaden our vocabulary about all the ways in which the sector needs to transform. We need a larger linguistic base to draw from.

The vocabularies of race and gender that underpin contemporary discussions around transformation in this context are far too restricted, since they do not fully account for the reality of how power is mobilized within institutional spaces. This is largely because, on its own, power does not have an inherent utility. In fact, “power exists only when it is put into action” (Foucault 1982: 788). This means that although higher education institutions can indeed be shaped by their respective institutional cultures, power relations reveal themselves through the ways in which individuals and groups assert their (inter-)subjectivity within these spaces. Understood in a Foucauldian sense, power has a latent potentiality; it “acts upon [people’s] actions: an action upon action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future” (Foucault 1982: 789).

Understood in this way, power arises from a constellation of individual actions within institutional spaces, actions that have a bearing on how the communal body of the institution functions through time. If we extend Ahmed’s metaphor of the “old garment”, we see that it is not only the existence of the garment that should inform our deliberations on institutional life, but also the action of putting it on and taking it off, because the latter reveals how power gains and retains its efficacy. Similarly, when our understanding of power is limited to the literal whiteness of HWI s, we stand to miss its arguably more destructive discursive potential. Without diminishing the destructive impact of overt and covert racism within the higher education system, it is imperative that our conversations about transformation face the reality that the old adage, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, applies to the academy too.

Working within the Foucauldian framework allows us to see how the pervasive narrative of inclusion blinds us to the profound fact that even those bodies that are supposed to represent transformation can have a stake in the maintenance of the proverbial “old garment” denoted by whiteness in HWI s. On a discursive level, the destructive potentiality of whiteness relies on the power differential between the agent of violence and “the other (the one over whom power is exercised)” (Foucault 1982: 789). In other words, our preoccupation with racial inclusion has, unfortunately, limited our capacity to understand or explain how black academics can be agents of violence also, much like their white male predecessors and/or counterparts.

There appear to be several reasons for this. One potential reason appears to be the hierarchical nature of the academy, which explicitly reinforces relations of inequality through its very structure. This means that those who are in positions of power are always subject to the temptation to mobilize this power for either good or nefarious ends. Secondly, although institutional policies meant to mitigate abuses of power may be in place, the hierarchical nature of institutions limits their usefulness precisely because academics who are abused in the powerplay are often those who are also in precarious positions, such as postgraduates, contract staff, young academics and sometimes even white academics. Thus, power reveals itself to not only corrupt the powerful but also absolve them of accountability in a manner that mimics the exclusionary mechanisms of the apartheid university. Thirdly, for better and for worse, the essentialization of race within prevailing understandings of transformation has the unintended result of equating racial and gendered identification with ethical practice.

A similar phenomenon has been observed in newly liberated postcolonial states, where the liberated heads of state and government officials tend to inherit the brutalist, authoritarian methods of their oppressors. If we conceive of the state as a hierarchical system, predicated on the exercise of power over individuals and groups, we can see how the postapartheid white university is built upon a similar model. Black academics in HWI s might hope, as civilians in postcolonial states do, that superficial measures meant to ensure transformation would be transformative, but the reality is that the story is far more complicated than it would appear to be on the surface. While we cannot underestimate the importance of representation, we also must not lose sight of the nuances of our universities as psychosocial bodies that should (at least in theory) be predicated on ethical practice in the service of a transformation that is constructive in its practice.

The mechanics of power, together with the assimilative discourse surrounding transformation in HWI s, ostensibly means that black people are inducted into the status quo rather than joining the academy as agents for the co-creation of new cultures. An example of this can be observed in the mechanisms of mentorship programmes. The increasing entrance of young academics into the South African higher education sector – usually young black women and men – mitigates the ageing professoriate, who are engaged in providing mentorship to these early-career academics. But despite their good intentions, mentorship programmes are underpinned by notions of integration. Sabelo Ndwandwe (2020), for instance, reminds us that the invitation to integrate within models of mentorship rarely acknowledges the set of values and codes of behaviours that institutions require and how these are historically linked to colonialism and other forms of domination.

By definition, mentorship is about making people “fit” an institution rather than making room for them to exist within it. Ultimately, it is not institutions that demand certain ways of being from young academics but rather the individuals that make up these institutions who do this. It is not so much Ahmed’s proverbial garment that stands in the way of true transformation but rather the individuals who instrumentalize this garment.

Also drawing on Sara Ahmed (2000), Ndwandwe argues that an assumption exists that higher education institutions themselves are neutral and can accommodate differences. This becomes the breeding ground to “cunningly reproduce colonial structures of power and at worse, colonial subjects” (Ndwandwe 2020: 15). The reproduction of subjection through power is hardly cunning, however, since it constitutes the very fabric from which the institution is made. It is a social fabric fully invested in the politics of power. Moreover, HWI s of the liberal inclination in particular are far from neutral – no institution is – since they also participate in the politics of optics. They are invested in being seen as progressive, so the introduction of transformation agendas, particularly in the guise of mentoring programmes, must fit this image.

By virtue of participating in a transformation programme, those who are mentored are also positioned as transformation agents, and those who present as “misfits” bear the brunt of the responsibility of advocating for, conceptualizing and demonstrating innovative ways of responding to the changing academic climate. Those who are mentored contribute to the optical illusion of embodying the desired demographic representation to legitimate academic departments and institutional committees. Given the language used to describe young academics – words like “junior staff”, “younger staff”, “mentees”, etc. – it is clear that their contribution to and agency within departments and committees is largely theoretical rather than real, more symbolic than actual.

4 Conclusion

If the social bodies of HWI s are truly committed to transformation, they need to become realistic and intersectional about the ways in which they define and implement diversity measures. This would involve more pragmatic interventions that not only invite certain people into institutional spaces but also ensure their relative safety by mitigating the ways in which power is (ab)used within the system. It is worth noting that we do not conceive of institutional spaces as akin to a home – we do not think that the academy needs to be “safe” in the same way that a home is. Rather, we conceive of safety as active steps to eradicate violence from academic spaces and institutions. Additionally, an intersectional approach to transformation holds accountable all those vested with power, regardless of what they may appear to represent on the surface. While useful, the limiting language of whiteness leads to the misrecognition and misrepresentation of interracial and intraracial interactions inside institutional walls by essentializing race and being naïve about the corrupting power of power.