A crisis of public purpose
African and South African universities face a deepening crisis of legitimacy. Across the continent, inequality is widening, public institutions are under pressure and democratic trust is weakening. Universities operate amid unemployment, social fragmentation, ecological disruption, technological change and growing scepticism about whether higher education serves the societies that sustain it.
At the same time, many institutions have become increasingly organised around competition, performance indicators, rankings and market value. Research productivity, graduate output and international visibility dominate institutional agendas. These priorities matter, but they can narrow the university’s purpose.
The question facing African higher education is therefore larger than how universities can improve their performance. It concerns what kind of institutions universities are becoming and what forms of public life they are helping to build. In this context, community engagement can no longer remain a peripheral activity. It must move to the centre of university life.
Beyond the ‘third mission’
Community engagement is still widely described as the university’s “third mission”, positioned alongside teaching and research. This language appears to acknowledge its importance. In practice, however, it often keeps engagement at the margins. It becomes outreach, service, volunteering, impact reporting or a set of short-term projects carried out beyond the campus.
Such an approach leaves the university’s internal knowledge structures largely untouched. Academic expertise remains central, while communities are approached as recipients, beneficiaries or sites of intervention.
African universities require a more ambitious understanding. Community engagement should be recognised as part of the university’s core epistemic work. It is one of the places where knowledge is produced, tested, challenged and reworked. It brings disciplinary knowledge into contact with lived experience, local histories, cultural memory and practical intelligence.
The key question is therefore not simply how universities can do more for communities. It is how universities can create relationships in which knowledge, authority and responsibility are shared more fully across institutional and community settings.
The university as a relational institution
The conventional image of the university presents it as a bounded institution. Knowledge is produced inside the university and then transferred outward to society. This model is increasingly inadequate. Universities are shaped through their relationships with students, communities, public institutions, social movements, professional fields, cultural traditions and wider political forces. Their identity is continuously formed through these interactions.
The university should therefore be understood as a relational institution. This shift matters because it changes how university transformation is imagined. Institutional change does not emerge from policy declarations or managerial plans alone. It develops through relationships, practices and sites where people begin to work together differently.
Transformation often takes place in small and dispersed settings. It appears where a curriculum is reshaped through community knowledge, where a research agenda emerges from a public concern, where students learn through collaborative inquiry or where historical exclusion is confronted through sustained engagement. Taken together, these practices can reassemble the university around a stronger democratic and public purpose.
Redistributing epistemic authority
At the heart of this argument lies the question of epistemic authority. Who has the right to define a problem? Whose knowledge is treated as credible? Who participates in shaping research questions, curricula and institutional priorities?
African universities remain marked by colonial histories that privileged certain languages, disciplines, methods and knowledge traditions. These inheritances continue to influence what counts as legitimate knowledge and who is recognised as a knowledge-bearing subject.
Community engagement can help unsettle these hierarchies. This does not mean abandoning disciplinary knowledge. Universities must continue to cultivate conceptual depth, rigorous inquiry and specialised expertise. The task is to place these forms of knowledge into serious dialogue with local knowledge, lived experience and community-based forms of understanding. Such dialogue strengthens scholarship. It expands the questions researchers ask, deepens the interpretation of social problems and makes knowledge more responsive to context.
It also advances epistemic justice. Communities enter the university’s knowledge processes as contributors rather than objects of study. Their histories, interpretations and practical intelligence become part of how knowledge is produced.
A democratic and developmental role
African universities occupy societies facing urgent and interconnected challenges. These include poverty, unemployment, unequal schooling, fragile health systems, displacement, environmental degradation, food insecurity and the uneven effects of digital transformation.
Universities cannot solve these problems on their own. They can, however, become more active participants in the social processes through which responses are developed. This requires movement away from a model in which knowledge travels in one direction from expert to recipient. It calls for collaborative inquiry, shared problem definition and contextually grounded experimentation.
Community engagement, understood in this way, becomes both democratic and developmental. It is democratic because it widens participation in knowledge production. It is developmental because it connects academic work to the material and social conditions shaping people’s lives.
This orientation is especially important in the Global South, where imported models of university excellence often pay too little attention to local realities. African universities should resist measuring their value only through standards produced elsewhere. Their public worth should also be judged by the quality of their relationships with the societies in which they are embedded.
Reimagining teaching and student formation
Placing community engagement at the centre also has major implications for teaching. Students need more than disciplinary content and professional preparation. They need opportunities to develop ethical awareness, civic judgment, collaborative capacity and the ability to work across differences.
Community-engaged learning can connect abstract knowledge to complex social realities. It can require students to listen carefully, revise assumptions, negotiate uncertainty and recognise the limits of their own expertise.
These are essential intellectual capacities. Such learning can also deepen disciplinary understanding. Knowledge becomes more demanding when students must interpret its meaning in real contexts. Concepts are tested against material conditions, competing perspectives and practical consequences.
Community engagement should therefore form part of the university’s educational architecture. It should not be confined to extracurricular volunteering or occasional fieldwork. Curriculum design, assessment and professional education should create structured opportunities for students to engage with communities as participants in shared knowledge work.
The limits of managerial engagement
Community engagement can easily be weakened by the institutional systems designed to support it. Universities often translate engagement into targets, metrics and annual reports. Projects are expected to produce quick, visible and measurable outcomes. Funding cycles encourage short-term interventions, while academic workload systems seldom recognise the time required to build trust and sustain relationships.
This managerial approach can strip engagement of its democratic substance. Relationships develop slowly. Public trust cannot be produced within a reporting cycle. Co-production requires negotiation, continuity and an openness to outcomes that cannot be fully predetermined.
Universities need forms of institutional support that protect these qualities. This includes long-term funding, workload recognition, curriculum space and evaluation systems capable of recognising relationship-building, public learning and social repair.
Institutional leaders should ask whether community engagement is shaping teaching, research and decision-making. They should examine whether community partners participate in defining agendas and whether universities are prepared to change through the encounter. Engagement has limited value when the institution remains untouched.
A new public-good imaginary
African universities need a renewed public-good image. This idea should move beyond the idea that universities serve society mainly by producing graduates, research outputs and innovation for the economy.
These functions remain important. Yet the public university also has a democratic responsibility. It should cultivate critical inquiry, expand public understanding, confront inherited injustice and contribute to more inclusive forms of social life.
Community engagement is central to this work because it brings the university into sustained contact with the worlds it claims to serve. It asks institutions to listen, to share authority and to accept that knowledge is produced across many sites. It also requires humility. Universities hold powerful forms of expertise, but they do not possess a monopoly on insight, memory or intelligence.
The future of the African university will depend on its capacity to enter into reciprocal relationships with communities and publics. Through these relationships, the university can become more responsive, more democratic and more worthy of public trust.
Reassembling the African university
The future of African higher education will not be secured through expansion, branding or rankings alone. It will be shaped in the relational spaces where universities engage public problems, confront historical exclusion and bring different forms of knowledge into sustained interaction.
Community engagement belongs at the centre of this task. It is not an additional mission attached to the university. It is one of the principal ways the university produces knowledge, educates students, renews democratic life and fulfils its public purpose. African universities should therefore stop treating engagement as work conducted at their edges. The edges are precisely where the university’s democratic future is being assembled.
Aslam Fataar is a research professor of Higher Education Transformation in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Stellenbosch University