The universities in the South must stop pandering to complacency. They must restore their commitment to academic excellence and welcome the best minds and those who carry with them the potential to be the best regardless of origin. (Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Once upon a time, in the South, there flourished a proud and prestigious collection of universities. Their names were whispered in awe across the countryside, their reputations so gilded that even the trees seemed to bow when the names were uttered. The residents of the South took immense pride in these institutions, boasting far and wide about their glorious academic traditions. If knowledge were a religion, then these universities were the grand cathedrals where wisdom was worshipped, and degrees were dispensed like sacred relics.
But Zarathustra, a wandering sage from the North, decided to see these famed institutions for himself. His curiosity had been piqued by the relentless hymns of praise sung by the villagers about the intellectual prowess and grandeur of these universities. What he found, however, was not the temple of learning he had expected but rather a grand illusion — one that was carefully constructed, fervently maintained, yet teetering precariously on the edge of self-destruction.
For years, wise sojourners from across the countryside travelled the South, arms heavy with gifts of intellect, ambition and rigorous scholarship. Like the three wise men following the star, they came seeking truth and enlightenment. And like the biblical magi, they were welcomed with open arms — at least initially.
The universities in the South thrived on these sojourners. They invested in them, paraded them at conferences, used their expertise to climb global rankings and ensured that their contributions bolstered the prestige of the South’s academic empires. But once the sojourners had given their best, they were swiftly shown the door. “Thank you for your service; now kindly return to your villages or elsewhere and don’t look back — lest you turn into pillars of salt!” the South elders seemed to say.
Worse still, some were trapped in a purgatory of academic servitude, neither allowed to leave nor fully embraced. They were offered something that looked like jobs, but they were merely unemployed employees. They were like resident prisoners, warned that should they step beyond the hallowed walls of the South, there would be no return. It was a bizarre form of intellectual feudalism — one where the serfs were scholars, and the lords were self-satisfied gatekeepers who mistook bureaucracy for excellence. Let’s forget about the wise men for a second and focus on the current myth of excellence in the universities in the South.
Zarathustra, ever the impartial observer, noticed something deeply unsettling. The universities in the South, for all their pomp and pageantry, are not quite what they claimed to be. Better still, it appears that there is a progressive retrogression happening now.
The truth was that the sojourners — those inconvenient visitors who were so quickly dismissed — were often the real drivers of excellence. They published research, secured grants and elevated the institutions they served. Yet, the South’s residents, convinced of their self-sufficiency, deluded themselves into believing they could thrive without these intellectual labourers.
“How does a body survive without breath?” mused Zarathustra. “How does an institution sustain itself without those who fuel its lifeblood?”
Meanwhile, the South’s villagers continued to revel in their supposed academic superiority, oblivious to the slow decay gnawing at the foundations of their beloved institutions. It was a grand spectacle of self-deception. Slowly, occupants of the universities in the South are becoming deeply entitled. They take their membership as that which they are entitled to, rather than what they deserve based on their merits. For the most part, residents in the South believe they are entitled to be financed and funded because their forebears fought wars in the past. Nonetheless, being funded should be the right thing for the leaders of the South if and only if the residents are deserving of the funds, and work hard for those funds. A decaying form of entitlement, says Zarathustra.
Zarathustra soon turned his attention to the students — those noble heirs to the great traditions of learning. Surely, he thought, if the institutions were failing, the students would be the first to demand better. But alas, what he found was another revelation entirely.
The children of the South were not so many students as they were revellers. They partied with great vigour, indulged in a buffet of distractions and approached their studies with all the enthusiasm of a cat watching the rain. However, faced with some economic models and self-funding pressures, the universities in the South seem to transgress from the ethos of a university. Degrees are no longer earned in rigorous fashions in the current dispensations; they seem to be dispensed like ceremonial robes at a coronation.
Instructors, weary of the repetitive cycle of academic underachievement, chose instead to lower standards. After all, why demand excellence when mediocrity could be achieved with so much less effort, while money is made? Better to let students graduate and maintain the illusion of success than to insist on actual competence. And so, the great universities of the South are transformed into glorified conveyors of belts, churning out graduates like mass-produced figurines — polished on the outside, hollow within.
One day, while strolling through Jacaranda-South with a professor friend, Zarathustra encountered some of the South’s finest professionals — graduates who now held crucial positions in government, healthcare and engineering.
“Surely,” he thought, “these must be the best and brightest, the torchbearers of the South’s great intellectual heritage.”
But as he talked to them, he realised that they were the intellectual equivalent of candles in a storm — dim, flickering and on the verge of being extinguished by the mildest breeze of critical thought. The professor recognised some of them as former students. “Ah, yes,” he sighed. “That one was a spectacular failure in my class. That one — well, he barely understood the difference between a bridge and a plank. And that one? He was famous for being consistently wrong in every discussion. And now they run the South.”
Zarathustra shuddered. These were the policymakers, the builders, the healers. And they were as lost as sheep without a shepherd. Surely, there is a looming catastrophe.
As Zarathustra prepared to leave the South, he delivered his final verdict: “The universities in the South are failing the future. By lowering standards and prioritising quantity over quality due to financial and economic gains, they are sowing the seeds of grand mediocrity. And mediocrity, dear villagers, is a plague. It infects everything — policymaking, construction, healthcare, education. If this continues, the South will not be a beacon of knowledge but a wasteland of squandered potential.”
The future, he warned, belongs to those who embrace intellectual rigour, competition and critical thought, rather than entitlement. The universities in the South must stop pandering to complacency. They must restore their commitment to academic excellence and welcome the best minds and those who carry with them the potential to be the best regardless of origin. They must refuse to be governed by petty bureaucrats with the intellect of garden gnomes prowling for wealth at the expense of merit in a supposed merit based edifices.
If they fail, Zarathustra cautioned, the South’s universities will become like the five foolish virgins of biblical lore — arriving at the banquet of the future with no oil in their lamps, unable to see, unable to lead and ultimately left behind.
And with that, Zarathustra departed, leaving the South to its fate. Would they listen? Would they reform? Or would they continue dancing in the dark, convinced that the flickering shadows were enough to guide them?
Edmund Terem Ugar is a PhD candidate in the department of philosophy and a researcher at the Centre for Africa-China Studies at the University of Johannesburg. The views in this piece are those of the author alone.