South Africa’s universities are outgrowing a transition-era governance settlement

South Africa’s university governance model was built for a noble and urgent purpose. In the years after 1994, the task was to democratise institutions that had been shaped by apartheid hierarchy, exclusion and authoritarian culture. The legal architecture that emerged from that moment sought to widen participation, protect academic freedom, balance autonomy with accountability and ensure that universities would no longer be governed as closed enclaves. That framework, rooted in the Higher Education Act, was historically necessary. But that is not the same as saying it is still sufficient. The question for 2026 is not whether the model made sense for a democratic transition. It is whether it is adequate for the universities South Africa now has and the world those universities now inhabit. Increasingly, it is not.

The current governance structure is simple enough on paper. Council governs the institution. The Senate is accountable to the council for academic and research functions. The institutional forum advises council on issues affecting the institution, including transformation, equity, mediation, dispute resolution and institutional culture. This arrangement assumed that representation, consultation and shared legitimacy would stabilise universities. But the same structure also reveals the model’s weakness. Council carries too much. The Senate is important but constitutionally subordinate. And the institutional forum can advise on exactly the issues that most often destabilise South African campuses, yet it cannot decisively resolve them.

That might still have been workable if governance failures were unusual. They are not. South Africa has seen repeated episodes of institutional breakdown, administrative and governance contestation and parliamentary intervention across multiple universities. Parliament’s own interventions at Fort Hare in late 2025, including an urgent oversight visit and a subsequent call to restore corporate governance, make clear that this is not merely a matter of routine campus disagreement. A system that repeatedly requires crisis oversight is a system under structural stress.

The problem is intensified by the fact that South African universities bear social burdens that many other university systems do not bear with the same force. They are not only sites of teaching and research. They are also housing systems, welfare buffers, food-security points, major employers, digital service platforms, research engines and theatres of public legitimacy. Student debt, delayed financial aid, accommodation shortages, labour tension, safety failures and contested transformation are not external to governance. They are governance. Yet the current model still assumes that many of these pressures can be managed through advisory consultation and periodic apex oversight. In practice, they are often merely deferred until they become crises for management, council or the minister.

The environment around universities has also changed more sharply than the governance model has. The framework designed in the late 1990s implicitly assumed that universities would be governed within a more stable public-service environment. That assumption has weakened. Universities now operate amid electricity instability, water risk, municipal decay, crime, cyber vulnerability and public distrust. The Department of Higher Education and Training’s own governance guidelines, approved in 2017, already acknowledged serious practical weaknesses in council governance, including concerns about the independence of some external members and the quality of some internal selections. Those guidelines were a warning that the problem was no longer only individual misconduct or institutional bad luck. The design itself was under strain.

The future compounds the problem. Universities are now being reshaped by generative AI, cybersecurity threats, new labour-market demands and accelerated technological change. UNESCO has warned that generative AI in education requires immediate policy action, long-term planning and human capacity development. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 analysis says AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity and technology literacy are among the fastest-growing skills through 2030. A governance architecture built for the politics of post-apartheid inclusion cannot simply be assumed to be fit for institutions now confronting digital risk, AI governance and faster cycles of strategic disruption.

At this point, readers may raise two obvious objections. The first is: is a new model really different from the current one or is it just the same arrangement with different labels? The second is: if one creates three pillars, does that not simply create three competing centres of power inside the university? Both objections are fair and both must be answered.

The proposed model is not the current model with cosmetic renaming. It would differ in three substantive ways. First, it would replace the broad, constituency-heavy council with a smaller professional governing board selected through a statutory competency matrix. The point is not to abolish participation but to stop confusing representation with governance capacity. Universities facing fiscal risk, infrastructure fragility, digital exposure and executive instability need concentrated fiduciary competence at the top. South Africa’s own governance guidelines highlight the importance of stronger governance capability and more robust practices in councils.

Second, the model would strengthen the senate not by making it supreme, but by clearly protecting its domain. The Senate should have final authority over curriculum integrity, academic standards, research quality, admissions principles and scholarly ethics. The issue is not whether the senate exists now. It does. The issue is that the current model leaves academic authority too entangled in a broader governance system where council is overloaded with every kind of pressure, academic and non-academic alike. A modern system should ring-fence academic authority more clearly, not merely proceduralise it.

Third, the advisory institutional forum should be replaced by a social compact chamber with defined powers over the very issues that repeatedly destabilise campuses: student support frameworks, residence systems, codes of conduct, safety protocols, institutional culture and formal mediation. Under the present legal design, the institutional forum advises council on these matters but does not decide them. That is precisely why so many legitimacy conflicts travel upward unresolved until they harden into crisis.

But the second objection is just as important. A three-pillar model would indeed fail if all three bodies had roughly the same powers. They should not. The answer is not three equal sovereignties. It is a differentiated authority. Comparative systems show this clearly. In Finland, universities are governed by a board, a rector and a university collegium, with the board as the supreme decision-making body. In the Netherlands, the executive board manages the university, while the supervisory board oversees it in broad terms. These systems vary in their histories and cultures but they share one important principle: governance works when domains are clearly separated.

That principle should guide reform in South Africa. The governing board should have final authority over fiduciary and strategic matters: executive appointments, budgets, major contracts, audit, infrastructure, compliance, digital risk and institutional resilience. The Senate should have final authority over academic matters. The social compact chamber should have defined authority over matters of social legitimacy and conflict. And because overlaps are inevitable, every institution should also have a formal overlap protocol written into its statute. Matters should be classified in advance as exclusive, joint or consultative. Joint matters should go through a standing joint process with fixed timelines. If deadlock persists, the statute should specify whose domain prevails or triggers independent mediation. The answer is not to pretend tensions will disappear. It is to constitutionalise how they are resolved.

This is where the present system is weakest. It assumes that participation plus council oversight will somehow absorb contradiction. But South African universities are now too complex, too politically exposed and too socially burdened for that assumption to hold. They require a governance design that recognises three distinct institutional logics: fiduciary governance, academic governance and social-legitimacy governance. At present, the first is overloaded, the second is boxed in and the third is too weak.

South Africa does not need less governance. It needs a new governance settlement. The post-apartheid model opened the university to democracy. The next model must make it governable under conditions of volatility, inequality, infrastructural insecurity and digital disruption. A framework built for 1997 cannot be expected to carry 2063 unchanged. Redesign is no longer a betrayal of transformation. It is becoming the only way to preserve it.

Professor Fulufhelo Nemavhola is the deputy vice chancellor at the Durban University of Technology and he writes in his personal capacity.