The University in Contemporary South Africa: Commodification, Corporatization, Complicity and Crisis

Abstract

In this paper I  ask uncomfortable questions about universities in South Africa in relation to social justice.[1] “Ruthless criticism” was “one of Karl Marx’s principal maxims”[2] – “ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”[3] Marx “applied the …maxim to his own views too, constantly discerning what was genuine and what was false in what he had written,”[4] always “wide open to empirical evidence.” His “concepts and definitions were open-ended and adaptable to new and changing historical situations.”[5] Judith Butler clarifies that Marx practices the “ruthless critique not of ‘everything existing,’ exactly, but of everything established, even institutionalized as the establishment over time.”[6] Critique, of ideas, conditions and the existing state of affairs, is the process of self-clarification and clarification with others to inform social action to transform “human society in the interest of its perfection and welfare.”[7] It is a reminder that human societies are ultimately made