State power, transition and new modes of coordination in higher education in south africa

This chapter focuses on national pressures as they relate to the changing state-institutional relations, education policy and new modes of government coordination in higher education in the context of transition and the consolidation of South African democracy. It argues that there is a sense in which a particular form of institutional articulation between higher education institutions and Government is reflected in peculiar forms of institutional responses. These responses have resulted in unintended synchronies and synergies between institutional academic projects and the logic of globalisation and values rooted in the ideology of neoliberalism underpinning the Government’s macro-economic strategy: efficiency, performance, competition and individualism. It is not the root cause of the adoption of this logic that is the focus of this chapter, but the explicit alignment of the discourse and emerging perspectives.