Universities are ethical institutions. They shape how society thinks, argues, judges and imagines its future. At their best, they cultivate critical reason, democratic judgment and public responsibility. Their task is not only to produce knowledge but to build the conditions under which knowledge can serve justice, repair and the public good.
This article reflects on patterns that are increasingly visible across higher education in South Africa, the African continent and beyond.
It speaks to what happens when the language of transformation is separated from the practices that give transformation depth, credibility and public value.
My concern is a style of university politics I call academic populism. Its danger lies not only in public rhetoric but also in how it enters the everyday life of institutions: departments, committees, appointments, supervision, curriculum debates, faculty meetings and informal conversations.
Academic populism and the weakening of transformation
Academic populism reduces complex questions of transformation, justice, expertise and institutional authority to slogans, accusations and factional positions. It often begins with legitimate grievances about exclusion, hierarchy and slow institutional change
These concerns are real and must be taken seriously. The problem arises when they are advanced by accusation rather than evidence, symbolic positioning rather than argument and factional certainty rather than open inquiry.
Academic populism weakens transformation by replacing ethical judgment, fair process and critical reason with performance, suspicion and moral simplification. The result is a damaged institutional culture in which trust is weakened, expertise is dismissed, disagreement is treated as disloyalty and justice becomes vulnerable to capture by factional interests.
Transformation and critical reason must therefore be held together. A transformed university must repair historical exclusions, including the deep class and socioeconomic injuries carried by working-class and first-generation students and scholars.
But it must do so through practices that are fair, intellectually serious, anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, non-sexist and able to withstand scrutiny. Transformation must be lived as an ethical culture, not performed as a slogan.
This matters because the university’s public purpose is not secured through policies and strategic plans alone. It is sustained or weakened in everyday academic microcultures, where trust is built or broken, where disagreement is treated as part of academic life or as disloyalty and where appointments are made with integrity or shaped by factional pressure.
Belonging, exclusion and the ethics of difference
Transformation must grapple honestly with who belongs in the university and on what terms. Race remains a powerful marker of historical injury and continuing inequality.
Class and socioeconomic status are part of this same history, shaping how exclusion is lived, carried and negotiated inside the university.
They affect who speaks with ease, who feels out of place, who understands institutional codes, who has access to networks and who is treated as naturally capable.These conditions do not define people’s intellectual ability, but they shape the terms on which students and academics encounter the university, as well as the forms of support they need to flourish.
A serious transformation project must therefore hold race, class, gender, language and nationality together as interconnected dimensions of redress, belonging and institutional justice.
Efforts to build local scholarly pipelines for historically excluded communities are essential. This requires investment in postgraduate development, mentoring, research support and equitable academic career pathways. It also requires serious attention to who can afford postgraduate study, who has access to academic networks and who carries family and financial obligations while trying to become an academic.
But transformation loses its ethical force when it bends towards exclusion rather than expansion. When colleagues are framed as problems based on origin, nationality or background, the language of transformation is being misused.
Scapegoating does not build institutions. It narrows the university’s ethical imagination and converts the real work of redress into the politics of blame. Xenophobia, whether directed at migrants, refugees or continental African colleagues, is a pathology masquerading as transformation. It weakens African scholarly solidarity and should be so named.
A democratic university requires more than formal diversity. It requires a shared public ethic that recognises the deep injuries of race, class, language, gender and colonial history, while still building a common institutional life.
The ethical task is to pursue redress while maintaining openness across race, class, gender, sexuality, language, nationality and belief. The question of belonging, therefore, cannot be separated from the institutional practices through which universities judge, appoint, teach, supervise and deliberate.
Critical reason, fair process and institutional trust
Universities serve the public good by developing the capacity for critical reason: the disciplined ability to examine evidence, question assumptions and make judgments that can withstand public scrutiny. Critical reason asks not only what we believe but why we believe it. Not only what we want but whether it is justifiable.
Critical reason has not always been honoured in practice. Claims about standards, excellence and merit have too often been used to block access, delay redress and protect inherited advantage. This cannot be ignored. But the answer is not to abandon critical reason. The answer is to reclaim it for transformation.
A university that pursues equity without rigour produces neither. A university that defends rigour while resisting equity reproduces exclusion. The public good requires both: intellectually grounded equity and ethically accountable rigour.
This matters especially for working-class and first-generation students. They are not served by lowered expectations or symbolic gestures. They are served by serious teaching, explicit induction into disciplinary knowledge, honest feedback, financial and academic support and institutional cultures that recognise the full weight of their social conditions.
This is not only a philosophical commitment. It has concrete institutional consequences, most visibly in how universities make appointments and promotions. When appointments are made without clear criteria, fair procedures, proper attention to scholarly merit or evidence of commitment to effective and ethical institutional systems, trust weakens. The impression is then created that personal loyalty or factional positioning matters more than academic judgment.
Equity and redress must be central to all appointment processes. But redress loses its moral force when it is detached from procedural fairness and academic integrity. An appointment process that cannot withstand scrutiny corrodes trust, regardless of its intentions.
Fairness is not the enemy of redress. It is one of the conditions that allows redress to carry legitimacy. Yet these practices of judgment and fairness are increasingly under pressure from broader institutional forces that reshape how academic work is governed and valued.
Academic populism does not emerge in isolation. It spreads through university systems already shaped by measurement-driven systems that can reduce academic work to targets and outputs. When these pressures narrow the space for judgment, academic populism fills the gap with gesture and alignment. Both tendencies can displace the careful, honest thinking on which a university depends.
Building the public-good university
The task is to build a transformed university oriented towards the public good. Such a university must support all students, particularly first-generation and working-class students. It must advance redress, defend academic expertise, reject xenophobia, racism, classism and sexism and pursue justice with ethical judgment rather than factional certainty.
It must also keep open the space for disagreement. Disagreement, when grounded in evidence and mutual respect, is not a threat to transformation. It is a sign of institutional health.
A university that cannot sustain principled disagreement cannot sustain serious transformation. Where critique is treated as disloyalty, the conditions for genuine intellectual and institutional renewal are already being eroded.
Reclaiming critical reason is not an obstacle to transformation. It is essential to it. Universities must be brave enough to transform and serious enough to reason.
Aslam Fataar is a research professor in Higher Education Transformation in the department of education policy studies, Stellenbosch University.