Perspective Chapter: Reflections from the Field – The Struggles of a Senior Manager in Pursuit of Social Justice and Equity, the Case of Walter Sisulu University in South Africa

Abstract

In this chapter, I provide a perspective about what can constitute the struggles of the educational development practitioner for social justice and equity from the position of a senior manager. I enunciate the case of three crisis events about educational development from the social realist explanatory program, which draws on the critical realist philosophy, by arguing that what can be the crisis cases in the academic project can take place because the actors in such cases might be informed by the privileged discourses of economic rationality and neoliberalism (ER-NL) instead of social justice and equity (SJ-E). The instrumentalist and personal interests can allow for what can ultimately become more of the reproductive than what ought to be transformative outcomes. Such cases are antithetical to the value of university education as the public good. The analysis about the cases took a particular focus on the university education phase of its development as the two management and governance regimes were grappling with the institutional transformation change in general and the challenge of the academic project. The scholarly engagement of the cultural and human systems for some crisis events during the “change of guard,” albeit with demonstrable silences about the critical construct of quality enhancement, allowed for what could be finally declared as the exploratory research. The significance of such exploratory research is thus the advancement of what ought to be the theorization and conceptualization about social practices in contexts of historical and structural disadvantage and their expressively veracious considerations.

“We will not go quietly! We have been screaming for too long!…..…if we are sentenced to death, …..I should go to the gallows singing, in order to indicate my determination for the other people who may come”

President Thabo Mbeki, 2021 [1]

1. Introduction

The main goal and objectives of this article are to reflect on the important aspects in the academic project as the discursive spaces for social justice and equity (SJ-E), which are enacted by agency. By the academic project, the article refers to the main elements of intellectualism in university education, which entails knowledge production, utility, and embodiment, and how the utility dimension in particular ought to constitute the struggles of the senior managers in education institutions. When some crisis events were reported as corporate social irresponsibility in one case of a university education in South Africa [2], not much was discussed as the idea of social justice and equity at the systemic levels of academic leadership and of management systems before the corporate level. To close the gap, this article revisits that discussion under the new topic, as an elaboration about the agenda for excellence which needs to be understood and explained as the concerns, choices, and projects about the idea of university education and for advancement of human flourishing. In a university education context, the latter refers to the constitutional imperative about the equity of epistemological access for the quality of academic success.

The main thesis for this article is that the struggles of the oppressed against the intransigence of the powerholders constitute the interplays between human nature and the objective conditions. Such struggles become more dynamic and developing when what ought to be the right choices and the emancipatory projects in contexts of historical and structural disadvantage seem to be promoting the economic rationality based on neoliberal thinking than what ought to be the enhancement strategies for human flourishing. For example, academic excellence, practical wisdom, and institutional integrity, as espoused values in one case of university education, could be easily undermined at the point of leadership, management, and governance systems, unfortunately by the very custodians of such systems. Such can be the dialectical relationship of human nature and the objective material conditions in which the human systems, for example, a senior manager, ought to engage both the idea of university education as the structural system, but most significantly, as the cultural system, and in that way providing what could be the practical alternatives to economic rationality and neoliberal thinking. Progressive and reconstructive forms of social justice and equity can work well for an institution, which makes the right choices and embarks on the emancipatory projects that can promote and monitor for academic excellence in ways that are both relevant and responsive to the profiles of students the institution registers in its academic programs.

Therefore, Reflections from the Field was about the journey, the “agenda for excellence” when the right choices and emancipatory projects about social justice ought to be enhanced against the backdrop of economic rationality and neoliberalism (ER-NL). The cases indicated how the instrumentalist and personal agendas can be quite enduring, which therefore constitutes more of the continuities than the discontinuities from the old regimes of order and of truth. Despite the affected students, having inherited the social and sociocultural conditions, which were never of their own making, such conditions would remain enduring. The scholarship value for such an agenda was, therefore, about engaging the iterative events and processes about the academic project, by focusing on what were apparently the synchronous and diachronous structural mechanisms over time as a social realist account about the struggles of the oppressed against the intransigence of the powerholders.

The struggles of a senior manager constituted the call for deep dialogs and sustained conversations about the struggle of the oppressed against apathy, which can play out in three ways the inaction of those who should have acted, the indifference about social injustice, which can be explained only as the perpetuation of the status quo, and ultimately the silence of the voice for social justice and equity, all of which the powerholders can be quite complicit. In that way, scholarship about the ideal of the equity of student access for the quality of academic success in university education ought to entail the knowledge of and for excellence in context-specific and actor-driven ways. That is only possible when the notion of knowledge can be deconstructed as the idea of Being and Becoming about social justice and equity, and thus making explicit the need for a backlash to the mainstreamed discourses! Such struggles need not be regarded as a precedent or misguided facts about students autonomous learning, that is, when the students, for example, cannot be held accountable for learning. However, such struggles call for reflexive praxis on the part of the broader academic enterprise, when, on the part of staff, academic freedom cannot remain unfettered, and on the part of the institution, such struggles can be the case of unmediated institutional accountability.

Therefore, against this brief introduction and observations, this article is organized around the basic logic of reproduction-understanding-broadening-advancement in research. While the SJ-E projects are generally understood to be the main project of the university education, especially in the Global South-South context, its mainstream practices need to be theorized by drawing from powerful lenses, especially for the university education sector, which is fast embracing the business management models as part of its management, leadership, and governance systems. Such broadening strategies about the concept will potentially advance the scholarship about the concept, especially in consideration of what could be value addition when the academic project and quality can be understood as dialectically related more to the social justice discourses than the mainstream cases of ER-NL. As such, the article is structured according to the following main sections,

1. The discussion of social, justice, and equity as a concept, which needs to be central to the value of an academic project in the Global South-South context and its idea of university education for the public and common good.

2. The examination of the relevant philosophical and theoretical perspective for better understanding and explanations of the contemporary challenges about the concept (SJ-E).

3. An outline of the historical and developmental phases in one case of university education whose academic project was punctuated, over time, by glaring crisis points, and thus raising the concerns and projects on the part of the actors thereof.

4. A social realist account of the dissonances and discrepancies in the aspirations and reality about the academic project and its actors at the levels of academic leadership, management systems, and governance structures when the SJ-E discourse ought to be measure.

5. A discussion about the value of transformative agency, including the rationale for why SJ-E in the academic project still needs further iterations as the subject of scholarly inquiry in context-specific and actor-driven ways.

2. The complexity of power relations in the politics of being and knowledge

The need for understanding and explanation of the SJ-E project in RSA has its roots from the inception of the current constitutional democracy. The White Paper III on the Transformation of Higher Education in South Africa [3] outlines several principles and the following one is quite illustrative about the issues at hand in this chapter.

“Promote equity of access and fair chances of success to all who are seeking to realize their potential through higher education, while eradicating all forms of unfair discrimination and advancing redress for past inequalities.” (p.14).

To realize this principle, the National Plan for Higher Education [4] would be quite explicit about the need to produce the graduates needed for social and economic development in South Africa. Furthermore, the Higher Education Act (101 of 1997, as amended) [5] would empower the department of education with the responsibility to develop policies and regulations to govern the public university system in South Africa. The Act also served as the basis for the establishment and governance of all universities. The development of the system would be steered through three key mechanisms linked to the implementation of legislation, policy, and regulations: planning, funding, and quality assurance. Such mechanisms would be implemented in three points of national agency,

1. The National Department of Education (later to be renamed Department of Higher Education and Training) in terms of planning and funding.

2. Quality assurance and promotion as the mandate of the council on higher education (CHE), and

3. The South African Qualifications Authority on program registration after accreditation by the CHE,

Therefore, the policy choices and strategic plans going forward would have to be measured against such noble foundations and principles, especially in consideration of social inequalities and the equity imperatives, which had their origins from the structured racist apartheid system. Such choices and plans would perhaps take the main variables, drawing from the realist stance (to be explained later), about

1. The significance, the character, the trajectory that each transformation phase would take, and about

2. The dynamics involved in the transformation project in the complex relationships of structural, cultural, and human systems.

Quite earlier on after the advent of constitutional democracy in South Africa, two observations were made about the state of the university education both at global and in the South African context. The first, and at a global context, was raised by [6] in his reference to, “The university without condition.” The second, at the local context, one was raised 3 years down the line, by [7] when he raised a rhetorical question, “When does the university cease to exist?” Then, two logical questions can emerge from the two observations. The first, is, what are these conditions that seem to make a university to cease? The second, what is in the nature of a university, anyway, that can be a subject to conditions that make its being to cease? The assumptions for such questions, which would be in line with the observations, would be what a university identity is, as a ‘Being’, suggests what it is not, which is a presupposition. The implications thereof, in turn, is that, while university education is a national project, its existential nature is also in terms of the global developments.

Therefore, it would make the major constitutional imperative to understand the value of the SJ-E projects, where the university education system ought to play a prominent role. The constitution of South Africa requires that no section of society should be unjustly and unfairly excluded from opportunities, resources, benefits, and privileges. In fact, Section 33 of the Constitution (RSA, 1996) declares that.

“Everyone has the right to just administrative action that is lawful, reasonable, and procedurally fair.”

2.1 The Main discourses about university education

To further elaborate on the idea of a university as briefly alluded to above, one more source is quite significant for the required descriptive analysis of the struggles of a senior manager as discussed in this article. Firstly, [8] provides what could be regarded as the instructive cases about the importance of a discourse in our understanding of university education, and why it becomes a subject of transformation. The first major discourses, from [8], for example, relate to the nobility of the enlightenment values (truth and emancipation) as democracy, truth, citizenship and social justice, and equity. The second is the economic rationality discourse, which is linked to the imperative of knowledge economy and its related narrative of skills development. What is of interest for me are the discursive resources that university education practitioners can draw on for the truth about and the emancipatory choices and project about the other, at the local and implementation level.

2.2 Social justice and equity as the main objective of university education in the global South-South

Contemporary theories, namely, critical realist-oriented theories challenge the mainstream theories that have as their tenets based on the deontological positions and the self-referential explanations. Such theories tend to be dislocated from reality about a social reality/phenomenon. To counter such a weakness, critical realism allows the analyst to adopt a paradigm that is commensurable with the context and in ways that can be culturally relevant. By the power for transcendence, the analyst is then able to question a type of science (pseudoscience) that selects what counts as reality and what reality to count to promote interests or socially constructed views. Therefore, a social justice project that seeks to reflect university as a public good ought to adopt a kind of descriptive analysis that reflects these complex issues about a social phenomenon. For example, a consideration of Nancy Fraser’s framing of social justice, [9] is helpful to identify the political and economic dimensions of social justice that, with knowledge systems thereof allow for the understanding of the complexity of the transformation project in the South African in context. This is the context, which is still steeped in and conditioned from the past system of social inequalities. Fraser has always viewed social justice from the perspective of participatory parity — how social beings are able to participate as equals, but she originally saw it from a two-dimensional perspective (recognition and redistribution) — called a two-dimensional view of social justice. She now includes representation as another dimension into this view and calls it a three-dimensional view of social justice and she calls this a theory of post-Westphalian democratic justice.

Table 1 indicates Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice that can help to illustrate why, when the logic of university education ought to be about the public good, the results of the transformation project remain more reproductive about academic quality than transformative. It is when such a logic is based on the notion of social justice from the lens of participatory parity and equitable redistribution of resources. From a realist ontology stance, one would have to consider the political and economic dimensions as disentangled, and also how each of these dimensions is also taken upon as the cultural dimensions in open and complex social systems.

Dimension	Social Injustice	Affirmative response: addresses injustices with ameliorative reforms	Transformative response: addresses the root causes of inequality
Political	Misrepresentation, lacking right to frame discourse, norms, and policies	Representation, of social being	Reframing, of parity and rights
Economic	Maldistribution, of resources: economic inequality	Redistribution, of resources	Restructuring, of economic model
Cultural	Misrecognition: attributes of people and practices accorded less respect, status inequality	Recognition, valued, respected, esteemed	Re-acculturation; plurality of perspectives, but always fallible

Table 1.

Conceptualization of Fraser’s social justice and equity framework.

3. Surfacing the ontological assumptions about social justice and equity

Both the introduction and the discussion in the previous sections have briefly referred to the ontological assumptions that one can draw upon to understand and explain the dynamics about social justice and equity. In response to the need for human flourishing, the social world can be analyzed and discussed from the realist social theory, which allows for understanding and explanation of the social phenomenon as a dialectical relationship of structure, culture, and agency. Such a scholarly project requires for the understanding of the interplays of the latter in analytically distinct ways. In that regard, this article is contributing to the fastincreasing body of knowledge, by focusing on the value of agency as the subject of research. Therefore, the related questions, as the motivation for the critical realist-oriented research project, in this article, are,

1. What constitutes the idea for university education if it is not about access to the public and common good aptly expressed as the academic/intellectual project?

2. If the answer to the latter is in the affirmative, how could such a project reflect social justice and equity as a value system, and how such a system can be enacted in systemic ways?

Table 2 portrays what [10] describes as the three domains of the empirical-actual-real in his explication of the critical realist theory. The life world is made up of the transitive and intransitive nature of the objects at the domain of the real, which can allow themselves or not as the subject of our inquiry. What then leads the critical oriented analyst is the transcendental question, that is, making an educated guess about what could be the structural mechanisms/conditions at the domain of the real, which can allow for the events and processes to be realized at the domain of the actual and further to how such events are experienced and observed at the domain of the empirical. The realist position about such dynamics of the social phenomenon is that the properties and powers of the subject of inquiry may lie dormant at the real, and not realized as events, but remain active. The same applies about the domain of the actual and the empirical. Understanding the subject of inquiry as deep ontology, as stratified reality (from right to left of Table 2), and as emergence (from left to right) then provides for a powerful way of explaining the dynamics of the complex and open social systems, for example. The simple analogy about this logic is that a tree may fall in the forest without such event being experienced. Let alone that such trees do grow as events, in particular ways, which may be transitive or intransitive to our reasoning. Such is the value of emergence in understanding and explaining the open and complex social systems, according to the critical realist philosophy. But how would such social systems be explained in terms of time and space?

	Domain of Real	Domain of Actual	Domain of Empirical
Mechanisms,	◊
events, and processes	◊	◊
Experiences and opinions	◊	◊	◊

Table 2.

The three domains of reality [10].

Table 3 elaborates on the power of emergence as reflected in Table 2, by adding the dimension of structural, cultural, and human systems as operating in terms of time and space. The value of Table 2, as representative both of critical realism philosophy (the three domains about reality) and social realism (the social world as organized in terms of the structural, cultural, and human systems) is about thinking, hypothetically speaking, about the elements of structure, culture, and agency (SCA) as analytically distinct and determining causal efficaciousness (the relative weight of each element on the other, especially structure, culture as sense and meaning making expressed as beliefs, norms, and standards). In this way, the structural and cultural systems take the macro level, which is enduring because it derives from history and social relations, to which the human system responds, but at the micro level, hence it is regarded as the level of mediations. Therefore, a study that draws on the social realist theory as an explanatory program, which is anchored on the critical realist philosophy, seeks to analyze, and explain these SCA interplays, as the synchronous and diachronous structural mechanisms, which are emergent (Table 2) and over time (Table 3, resulting in either the state of morphogenesis or morphogenesis or the variation of the outcomes).

Table 3.

Archer’s morphogenetic approach [11].

To elaborate on Fraser model [10], and from the point of realist ontology, it would, therefore, be helpful to delineate the three dimensions as historicity of emergence, as an analysis of the conditions that allowed for what is actualized and further observed and experienced as social injustice, as affirmative actions about such injustices (for example, the profiles about the third band universities [2], which tend to be ameliorative than disruptive about the injustices of time and space. The value of this realist approach, where social reality is understood as deep, multi-layered, and complex, is to allow for how what appears as social ills can then be evaluated, and thus improved in sustainable ways. To illustrate this point, [11], for example, makes the following conclusion about the value of what could be a realist-oriented method for such an evaluative exercise.

“If improvement is the purpose of evaluation, then it needs a theoretical frame that can hold both a recognition of the independent, material reality of the world (ontological realism) and a recognition of the constructed and partial nature of people’s interpretations thereof (epistemological relativism) while keeping ontology and epistemology analytically distinct.” (p.11).

For example, the level of social injustice (Table 1) is quite typical of the old racist apartheid system in the South African context, which is still conditioned in the structural and historical disadvantage (Table 3). The affirmative responses about social justice and equity indicate when the idea of university education as the public good (assumedly as the progress that the new democratic state has made) is not transformative enough to address what could be the actual root causes, which is the ideal level of emergence (Tables 2 and 3). In this case, the current profiles of the university education sector in South Africa (RSAHET) [2] constitute a state of illegitimacy for some when the notion of the public good seems to be more about the reproductive outcomes (in this case, students from working-class families who happen to be the main feature of the historically disadvantaged universities and their low teaching and research outputs) than what ought to be the transformative outcomes. The main challenges about the RSAHET sector are, therefore, when student-staff-curriculum/knowledge profiles are framed as progressive and socially reconstructive, while in fact, they remain reproductive of the historical and structural disadvantage. This happens when university education, although it is espoused as the public good, its power relations, and the materialist conditions reinforce social injustices, or do not go far enough to yield transformative outcomes. In that case, while the transformative outcomes are espoused, the actual results can easily be affirmative responses basically due to the default positions and the fault consciousness about how the relational nature of power and economics might be perpetuating social ills, namely the disadvantage, exclusion, and marginalization of one (the oppressed) by the other (the powerholders). It takes consciousness about these relations as mired in complexity that such social ills might be abolished or at least be ameliorated. In this way, Fraser’s theory of social justice (Table 1) allows for the understanding of the university profiles, and further to the discussion of the transformation constraints, as the evidence of the imperatives of social justice and the ideals of humanity not yet realized. The realist lens thereon allows for a critique of the transformation project about quality (Table 3) as the result of structural and causal mechanisms and their emergent powers and properties (Table 2).

From this point, the main sections of this article refer to the one case of Walter Sisulu University in South Africa, where the author had to engage the three crisis cases of academic exclusions, program accreditation, and institutional quality audits, which would play out in explicit ways in 2019/20, 2021/22 and in 2023, such developments were the result of the historical and structural disadvantage. The article then provides a normative description of these crisis cases as emergent from the previous phases about the institutional transformation project, applying both the critical realist analysis and the social realist explanation in such cases, and thus allowing for the ideal of the theory-methodology-practical program, which is required for any project about scholarship, before the conclusions can be made.

4. A University in pursuit of identity and importance for the public good

The case about Walter Sisulu University (WSU) is its power to present the opportunity about understanding and explanation of academic project as the struggle terrain of a senior manager in pursuit of the agenda for excellence as social justice and equity. For this article, WSU was chosen by means of convenient and purpose sampling. The critical element was access to the data, amongst which were the organizational records and the personal experiences and observations of the manager, at least per the critical realist and social theory (CRST) (Tables 2 and 3). Critical about WSU was the first national institutional audits, which took place in 2020/11 and the second one in 2022/23. The second audit coincided with the change of guard at WSU, which would usher in the new institutional strategic plan 2020–2024, “An Impactful and Technology-infused African University,” a university “In Pursuit for Excellence.” What would remain quite instructive, for the purposes of the discussion in this article, would be the potential continuities from the old regimes of power and of truth, as evidenced in the crisis events during the transition from the previous regime of 2015–2019, “An Engaged University for Rural Development and Urban Renewal.” Therefore, this article problematizes this issue of potentially self-reproductive systems as the challenge of practice, and thus of the theory about social justice and equity by situating the case of a senior manager whose story is reflected in three main crisis points about his struggle for restorative justice for all.

Table 4 provides the context in which the senior manager had to pursue the SJ-E choices and projects. Soon after the WSU establishment as the result of the merger of three legacy universities, the Assessor Report by the National Ministry of Education called for the institution of the Administration Regime (2012–2013), which would have to release the executive management team and to disband the university council by taking over its powers. This Administration Regime also had to respond to the first institutional audit report of 2011, which had foregrounded, amongst others, the crisis event of student exclusions, while still grappling with the enduring challenge of program accreditations.

Institutional Key Performance Areas over time	Phase I (2005–2011)	Phase II (2015–2019/20)	Phase III (2020–2024)
	A Development University, which is Scientific, Innovative, Technological, and Entrepreneurial	An Engaged University for Rural Development and Urban Renewal	An Impactful and technology-infused African University.; “In Pursuit of Excellence”
Institutional Strategic Planning and Implementation for viability and sustainability [12, 13, 14]	Upon the university merger of 2005, which ushered in the new substantive regime of 2006–2011 (Phase I), the DoE Assessor Report about the Governance Crisis at WSU: Dissolve the University Council, release the Executive Management, and subject the University under Administration [12]	Phase II is consequent to the Administration Regime of 2012–2013, and the Interim Phase of 2014–2016, when the Vice Chancellor assumed Office in March 2016 to 2020 [15]	Phase III refers to the current Regime of 2020/21 to 2024/25, the phase of an Impactful and Technology-infused African University. A University in “Pursuit of Excellence” [16]
	Recommendation 2: “The HEQC recommends that Walter Sisulu University develop a distinctive and unique niche for itself as a developmental university, benchmarked against other institutions, and taking into account the human, financial and physical resources available to it”, p.10.	To implement the Divisional and Governance Model for institutional viability and sustainability [12, 15]	The university is rocked by a very scathing Institutional Audit Report on the 3rd year of Institutional Strategic Plan 2020–2024 [14, 16]; Local media captures the saga as, “Official audit identifies serious flaws at WSU” [17]
Curriculum design and program development [12, 14]	Recommendation 26: “The HEQC recommends that Walter Sisulu University ensure that there is capacity and that there are resources at faculty, school and departmental level in curriculum design and programme development; incorporate the insights from the evaluations as part of improvement plans to improve programme quality; and ensure that student feedback is collected and used to inform programme improvement”, p.12.	To promote academic excellence in undergraduate and postgraduate studies [15]	5 academic programs are alleged to be unaccredited by the national accreditation body; Non alignment with the requirements of the HEQSF; The Official Response by the University Council [18]; The media captured the crisis as,; “WSU Council calls for accountability on accreditation debacle”, [19]; WSU’s internal auditing diploma accreditation withdrawn [20]
Student Academic Development for epistemological access and success [13, 14, 15, 21]	Recommendation 20: “The HEQC recommends that Walter Sisulu University firmly implement its academic exclusions policy”, p.12.	WSU to implement the academic monitoring and support strategy for integrated academic development, as the mechanism to mitigate the potential damage to students as the result of the academic exclusion policy [22].; WSU students’ year in turmoil after they were suddenly deregistered [23].; Walter Sisulu university admits it was wrong in removing 127 students last year [24]	“A Special Senate meeting held on February 28, 2023, resolved to suspend the implementation of the G7 Rule for the 2022 Academic Year’s final performance results” [25]; Registrar’s Circular of 28 February 2023, about “G7 Rule Suspended-2022 Academic Year Performance Final Results” [26]

Table 4.

A tabular representation of the WSU phases on which the struggle of a senior manager in the agenda for excellence was socially embedded.

According to the rule G7 of WSU General Rules and Regulations [27], and in accordance with the Section 37(4) of the Higher Educations Act (Act 101 of 1997) [5] as amended, students who do not perform as expected in terms of.

G7.3 – Exceed duration.

G7.1 – Not enough credits to proceed to the next level.

G1.2 – Fails the course/module twice are excluded from all academic programs or modules at WSU for a period of a year.

Although the G7 Rule cases dated back to 2009, 2011, and 2014, there was strong evidence that these cases were not managed in a responsible way. The institutional registrar’s circular of 28 February 2023 [28] announced about “A Special Senate meeting held on February 28, 2023 (which had) resolved to suspend the implementation of the G7 Rule for the 2022 academic year’s final performance results” [29]. Prior to this announcement, two media articles reported as follows about the saga of G7 Rule/management of the academic exclusion policy in 2020 and 2021 in succession,

“WSU students’ year in turmoil after they were suddenly deregistered.” [23].

“The university assumes full responsibility and offers an unqualified apology to affected students and their families. We assure you that the matter is under investigation and that consequences management will occur where necessary.” [24].

The second crisis related to unaccredited academic programs, arguable in the case where an academic program ought to be the main currency of any university institution, and as regulated by means of the program accreditation criteria (CHE, 2004), in the case of South Africa. The institutional report of 2011 constituted a third crisis event at macro level. The report had 30 recommendations and with just five commendations.

From an organizational design principle, it could, thus, be argued that the student/academic exclusions (Crisis Case 1) were more of the learning and teaching processes at operational level, accreditation of curriculum development and program management (Crisis Case 2) at functional level, while the institutional audit report (Crisis Case 3) reflected the challenges at strategy level. The crisis events (Column 3) ensued despite the first two columns, as the recommendations of the CHE about the quality systems (Colum 1). The anomaly of the crisis event about academic exclusions became more serious when students were registered for 2020 academic year only to be de-registered few months later. This was not the first case, as the HEQC recommendation 20 had resulted from the similar case in 2009. Strangely, the three crisis cases also played out in explicit ways in 2019/20, 2021/22, and as emergent during the second phase of the national institutional audits of 2021–2023 when the WSU institutional audit report was released during the final stages of preparing this article [14]. The cumulative effect of these crisis events would indicate the case of social reproductive systems, at least from the social scientist who draws from social realism (Section 3). Consequently, Phase III of the WSU Regime (2020–2024) would have to address the complexity of the systemic challenges, which should have been addressed during the previous regimes of 2015–2019, especially Phase 1 and Phase 2. In the social realist lens (Table 2), the WSU Regime of 2020–2024 inherited the conditions, which were never of their own making, as such conditions were the result of the social and sociocultural phase of the previous regimes. The institutional values were already compromised, at least based on the three crisis events, whereby student learning seemed to constitute a disjuncture with the institution’s professed (academic) excellence, whereby curriculum development and program management seemed not aligned to (practical) wisdom, and about strategic planning and implementation, which seemed to be antithetical to (institutional) integrity.

At the core of these observations shall, therefore, be the main claim for this article that, the struggle of a senior manager constituted the struggles of the oppressed against the intransigence of powerholders. Such struggles are dynamic and developing in the ever-continuous relationships of the human nature and the objective material conditions of time and in space. In the next sub-section, I describe how the crisis events took place against the backdrop of the struggles of the senior manager.

4.1 A developmental university which is scientific, innovative, technological, and entrepreneurial (2005–2011)

The crisis events 1, 2, and 3 in Phase III emerged from what had always been the endemic dysfunctional culture of the academic project, which was been at the coal face of the struggle terrain of the senior manager, as punctuated by the major events during the pre-administration phase. Upon the establishment of WSU, the then national Ministry of Education [28] made the following statement,

“In order to give our nation value for (higher education) investment, universities must attend to the low throughput rates at first-year level, must develop effective academic development programs (not pass one pass all), and must promote enrolment ion key disciplines of science, engineering, technology, and commence.”

About WSU, the first institutional audit post constitutional democracy had the following statement to make about the agenda for excellence as the operational terrain of the senior manager,

Commendation 2: “The HEQC commends Walter Sisulu University on the work done by the center for learning and teaching development (CLTD) in supporting both staff and students; in improving student success; in helping staff improve their teaching, program design, and assessment skills; and providing resources to build institutional capacity to deliver on its mission”, p.9. [13].

However, this commendation about “the center” would prove to be the major hurdle as the WSU academic project seemed to be conditioned by the heavily structured and historical social and sociocultural context (Table 3).

4.2 An engaged University for Rural Development and Urban Renewal (2015–2019/20)

As indicated on Table 1, the commendation about the CLTD role had to be juxtaposed with the following two recommendations,

Recommendation 19: “The HEQC recommends that WSU develops an appropriate institution-wide strategy on teaching and learning, and assessment, to ensure the success of students, and which is consistent with the University’s aspirations to be a developmental university that has specific teaching and learning goals, and which is linked to academic and pastoral support systems,” p.12. [13].

Recommendation 4: “The HEQC recommends that Walter Sisulu University strengthen its reporting and monitoring mechanisms in all areas with special focus on student success, throughput, and graduation rates….; and ensure that the appropriate divisions take responsibility for the implementation of policies and plans,” p.11. [13].

Central to the main argument for this article are, therefore, the systemic interventions that the center for learning and teaching development (henceforth, “the center”) had to embark upon in pursuit of the academic enterprise as social justice and equity projects. Such projects must ensure that the equity of student access to university education leads to the quality of their academic success, especially for students from working-class families, who are already historically and structurally conditioned to perform poorly in the academic spaces as generally organized for a typical South African context!

4.2.1 The academic project, agenda for excellence as social justice and equity

The Centre, soon after a commendation from the CHE 2011, adopted as its Slogan, “Agenda for Excellence”. Such a slogan sought to bring to life the three main institutional values of Excellence-Wisdom-Integrity, which had to be elaborated on as the expressively veracious considerations, the structural and cultural system points as enacted by human/agency system, according to Table 3! For example, the Centre sought to guard against the potential complacency, whose source could be the misplaced cultural system (beliefs, values, norms, and standards), which is always dialectically related to the structural system (the roles, functions, and responsibilities). At the point of human system, the Centre had as its head a senior manager in charge of the staff complement which included specialists in the education development field.

The senior manager, who himself was the product of the fast-growing movement and the emerging field of higher education studies in South Africa post constitutional democracy, had to deal with the dilemma and paradoxes of the position by means of what is explained in the body of knowledge as middling out [15]. Buttressed between the top down and bottom up, and with the top-down weighing heavily on his responsibilities, the art of management had to involve the ways of thinking, of doing and of making about the positions in such a manner that, while the policies and strategies could be conceptualized and coordinated effectively and efficiently as the Agenda for Excellence. Such an implementation approach should not undermine the value of the academic project and its ideal bottom-up approaches for a typical university education! It is from the bottom-up approach that the value of scholarship ought to count more than the ostensibly powerful position of the Office of the Vice Chancellor and Principal in the idea of university education. Such would be the call not just for the idea of scholarship where position and practice can be easily conflated, but also about activism when the right choices and the emancipatory projects must be for social justice and equity as the attainment of the common and public good. The Centre had been established against the historical and structural conditions which were never of own making to the senior manager and his team of professionals, but the conditions to which they had to respond by means of a concerted effort of social action and human agency. It was against such a compelling background, therefore, that the institutional strategy on academic monitoring and support for integrated academic development (henceforth, WSU AMS-IAD Strategy) was conceptualized and implemented as part of Phase II (WSU 2015–2019 Phase) and in response to Phase I (WSU 2005–2011) (Table 1).

4.2.2 The WSU AMS-IAD strategy, the conceptualization and academic leadership at the operations level

From its conception, the center had to grapple with the ideals of a sociocultural approach than what was already identified as the neoclassical approach about learning!! From the cultural system point (Table 3), the value of excellence had been the main feature of WSU upon her establishment in 2005. By 2015, the center had to adopt such an agenda more as an engagement process, a reflexive dialectical process, which could allow for transformative agency to emerge, than what had already appeared to be reproductive outcomes when the idea of university education as the public and the common good can be contested in power relations and in materials interests. It would have to be the center’s philosophical position that the notion about excellence would have to be made explicit as scholarship of engagement [2], institution-wide. During Phase II, the “war cry” for the “agenda for excellence” was deconstructed into a mantra code-named, Profile-Develop-Recognize, which was made up of the following four basic elements of Data-Information-Knowledge-Practical Wisdom, where knowledge, as the prerequisite for wisdom, would become a contested issue along the complexity of power relations in the politics of knowledge and of Being and Becoming!

1. The enduring institutional profiles since merger required explicit forms of engaging data about the quality of the curriculum, about the quality of staff competence, and about student academic performance, which could be translated into useful information about the academic enterprise.

2. Translating such information by means of powerful knowledge would require drawing from powerful theories, which ought to be able to account for the interplays of structure, culture, and agency beyond the surface ontology and their self-referential explanations.

3. The net result would be the struggles for the SJ-E projects as the actual and practical wisdom in the idea of university education for the common and public good.

Therefore, the “agenda for excellence” entailed strategy development and implementation along the Data-Information-Knowledge-Practical Wisdom Logic, through which the reflexive dialectical process about the right choices and emancipatory projects would have to entail social justice and equity in ways, which can allow for the transformative agency to emerge! In this way, the struggle of a senior manager and his team constituted the response to the three recommendations (Columns 1 and 2 of Table 1), especially against the compelling evidence about the Crisis Cases 1, 2, and 3 as already experienced from the first phase of the national institutional audits of 2005–2011 (the words, cases, and events are used interchangeable in this article).

Figure 1 reflects these four critical elements of the WSU AMS 2015–2019/20, where student learning is not only dialectically related to teaching competences (operations level) but also both emerge at the level of program management and the level of management systems (business level). In this way, the WSU strategy AMS-IAD 2015–2019/20 sought to make loud the voice for social justice and equity by being explicit about the programs and services, which would permeate the basic elements of student learning, of curriculum development and of academic staff development and, therefore, of program management.

1. The students targeted approach involved student academic performance, which would entail tracking and monitoring in ways that binding study advice, a learning contract, would have to be enhanced by means of systemic academic advising workshops.

2. Data from evaluation of teaching/courses would have to help in profiling the areas, where academic staff might need further empowerment and capacity building and in a staggered recognition manner (for example, Category A Lecturer, with strong evidence from a teaching portfolio, would receive more support for the teaching excellence awards, Category B would have to enter into developmental program with the heads of department for further areas of support, while the case of Category C would invite more evaluations from peers, students, etc.).

Figure 1.

The critical elements of the institutional strategy on academic monitoring and support for integrated academic development emerge at the level of leadership and management roles, created by the author.

4.2.3 The WSU AMS-IAD strategy at the academic leadership and management systems level

The WSU AMS-IAD Strategy 2015–2019/20 was planned with the sole purpose for the promotion and monitoring of student academic success in various stages of the institutional value chain (from student entry to exit levels), while, in between, the integrated academic development would have to allow for horizontal articulation (breadth, at the point of structural system) (Table 3), and vertical articulation (depth, at the point of cultural system) (Table 2) and over time. At management systems level, the strategy sought to allow for the alternative ways of promoting and monitoring for epistemological access in systemic ways: While the strategy was conceptualized to empower academic leadership on how to engage excellence as part of their portfolios,

1. the required structural systems would have to address the potential disconnect,

2. the potential faculty consciousness thereof would have to allow for elaboration along the cultural system, and

3. in ways that the human system had to be ideally more transformative!

Such were the institutionalized efforts for the equity of access and the quality of success where the key performance areas about integrated academic development constituted the means to an end. The assumption in terms of the agency thereof would be that other colleagues at management level would be able to bring to life these efforts for an approved institutional strategy and toward what should be a “network of outcomes”.

The case of examinations analysis and the G7 Rule/academic exclusions during the academic year 2014/15 meant regular engagements with the office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Affairs and Research (DVC AAR), to whom the senior manager reported per line function. As the result, the following extract from the senate resolution of April 2015 [30] would be quite instructive.

“Each and every current class …to report interim performance in terms of continuous assessment at each senate so that classes that are at risk can receive the attention of senate and the necessary support. All academics that are currently in class therefore should submit their current class performance in terms of tests, term papers, or any other relevant performance indicator.”

The senate resolution would later be elaborated on in the institutional risk register of February 2016 [29], with the following instructive statement.

“HoDs to effectively monitor students at risk, reporting to the deans on quarterly basis.”

Ideally, and as emergent at institutional level, would be the responsibility and functions of both the management systems and governance structures. It would be the elaboration of the Senate Resolution [30] and the risk identification and management, where in the Heads of Departments (HoDs), Deans of Faculties, Campus Rectors, and the Office of DVC AAR in providing the monitoring and oversight roles, functions, and responsibilities as already well documented and outlined in the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy 2015–2019/20 [23].

Therefore, IAD needed to be understood and applied as representing the complexity of the academic project, which is multilayered and where the actual measure is about the notion of quality as not only about emergence, in realist terms (Table 2) but takes place over time (morphogenesis/morphostasis, Table 3). While the programs and services are reflected as discrete and fragmented (Table 4), the actual organizing principle was the equity of student access for the quality of success as the developmental imperative, a social justice and equity project, but in more about the open and complex social ways than the deterministic ways.

However, these activities, while necessary, their adequacy would be a subject of explanatory critique. Some level of caution would be required for these activities not to be just representations of how teaching/courses can be measured in ways that can be better managed. The actual work would have to be beyond the reductionist and technicist ways of doing, as what ought to be teaching/course delivery should be more about the value of what is being measured, than the measurement itself. The principled position about integrated academic development is not for the discrete support systems about students, staff, and curriculum, which would be a deficit model, but about the integrated approach, when the focus is on the quality as knowledge, based on the performance data and information, and how that knowledge can be recontextualized as varieties of a curriculum in ways, which can be context-specific and actor-driven.

At this point of the article, the discussion then takes more of the methodology aspects about critical realist analysis about the three crisis cases as the disjuncture of the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy 2015–2019/20 especially at the points of cultural and human systems. This has to do with the further elaboration of a scholarship project within the Theory-Methodology-Practical Program chain.

5. A critical realist analysis about the three crisis events as misrepresentations of social justice and equity

The crisis events 1, 2, and 3 (Table 4) indicates what can be argued as the intransigence of powerholders, when the academic choices, and the management projects they embark upon, can be incongruous with the ideal of social justice and equity in the idea of university education as the public good. Such choices and projects can inadvertently and unwittingly promote historical and structural disadvantage. This section of the article seeks to illustrate how such choices and projects can play out as emergent in terms of the systemic levels of academic leadership, management system systems, and governance structures over time. In such a critical realist analytical approach, the social scientist/researcher is interested in what might be the synchronous and diachronous structural mechanisms that can generate such events, which reinforce more of the positions of the powerholders than the actual truth and the emancipatory projects for the oppressed. The struggle of senior managers, in such contexts, goes beyond the design and coordination of the strategy, but the ability to describe such events and before they can be explained as a practical program (where the logical point is about both activism and scholarship by ensuring the alignment between theory, methodology and practical program.)

Therefore, the analysis in this section seeks to introduce the critical realist tools of transfactuality as a form of retroductive reasoning and for a transcendental argument. Drawing from the critical realist perspective (Section 3) helps to understand how the synchronous and diachronous structural mechanisms were quite enduring in in 2019/20; 2021/22; 2022/23 despite the earlier recommendations of the national institutional audits of 2011. Having the three crisis cases juxtaposed with each other and against the prescripts of the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy 2015–2019/20 surfaced the dissonances of one fact against the other. “Absenting” in the three crisis cases surfaced the contradictions and inconsistencies of Being and Becoming (Table 1) about the institutional values of excellence, wisdom, and integrity. Such a morphogenetic methodology allows for identifying what could have been the practical alternatives (transformative outcomes in the morphogenetic state) as against the compelling evidence in the form of the reproductive outcomes, the morphostatis state about the cases under review. Absenting tactics in each case would entail what must have been the real cases as inferred from the situation under the critical realist examination (domain of the real, Table 2).

In a nutshell, the reproductive outcomes (the morphostasis state in 2019/20, in 2021/22, and in 2022/23) all stemmed from what can be the blind pursuit of meritocracy when the notions of quality can masquerade as the “Pursuit of Excellence,” as the inadequacies about wisdom, and as the undermining of integrity. Therefore, making inferences, through a comparison of one fact against another, and by means of retroductive reasoning, becomes a powerful way of advancing a transcendental argument about how the struggle of the oppressed against the intransigence of the powerholders is about emergence and over time. But what kind of questions could be driving such a scholarly approach?

5.1 Toward the transcendental argument about the silences and superficialities in “pursuit of excellence”

The main question, according to Table 4 is that the crisis events of 2019/20, 2021/22, and of 2022/23, as mapped out in the last column, is whether such events constituted the unintended consequences about the management of the academic enterprise (the HEQC Recommendations 19 and 20 about WSU as outlined in Column 1). The preliminary finding about the table, at least at face value, is about the contradictions and inconsistencies of the academic project as fractured in systemic levels. In reading the data initially (Tables 2 and 3), I was working at the levels of the empirical (reported in the media as the crisis) as observations and experiences, and then the level of the actual (organizational records) in that I was identifying events and processes about the crisis events as mis/representations of social justice and equity. In critical realist terms, the analysis took the examination of the interplays between the mechanisms of structure, culture, and agency, and whether there seemed to be some constraints and enablers confronted some groups of respondents more than others. Having done this, I was able to move to abstractions at the level of the real to identify the mechanisms, which could constitute the interplays with each other across the entire spectrum of the HEQC Recommendations of 2011 [13] over time resulting in crisis events of Phase III as confirmed in the HEQC Institutional Audit Report of 2023 [14].

Therefore, the following three questions arise, which make for a transcendental argument,

What the reality must have been like for the events/the crisis points, and the processes/phases to take place the way they did? What mechanisms must have been generating the kinds of the events and processes as those that are manifest at the domain of the actual and how the latter is further reflected as the empirical data?

Therefore, the analysis thus far seems to indicate the following two main findings:

1. The state of morphostasis about social justice and equity in the idea of university education as the common and the public good. There seems to be more of the continuities than the discontinuities from the old regimes of power and of truth, where the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy was not adequately engaged, at least for those who were on the negative ends of the three crisis events.

2. Emergence: The social world is open and complex, thus indicating the value of understanding and explaining emergence in the complexity of power relations in the politics of knowledge and of being and of becoming!

The cited cases were quite illustrative about what turned out to be more of the continuities than what ought to have been the discontinuities from the old regimes of power and of truth. This was the case of what I argue about elsewhere [2] as the complexity of power relations in the politics of knowledge and of Being and Becoming! In such cases, the Idea of Being needs to focus on the possible simplification, namely,

• How the pattern of events raises the dissonance and discrepancies about the cases when compared to what ought to have been the AMS-IAD? How of the crisis 1 could be measured against integrated academic development over time?

• How of the case 1 emerges at MS about curriculum development and program management, and further at GS about the institutional strategies in the case of AMS-IAD?

• Drawing from the Fraser model, how of the three crises reflected the deeply embedded socioeconomic inequalities, which can play out in the academic spaces?

The research value for such an exercise, as scholarship, would entail promotion of the transformative outcomes as a cultural system about SJ-E. Specifically, it would be about the value of emergence of, from the discrete functions as academically led, to management systems and as regulated by the governance structures, for the requisite institutional culture of excellence.

5.2 How the incongruity about three crisis cases must have been the result of sociocultural conditioning?

The cases seemed to be indicating in profound ways the inaction of those who should have acted, the indifference of the professorate when it should have known better, and the silence of the voice for social justice and equity when it should have been loud. For WSU, such was the travesty of justice when in consideration of Excellence-Wisdom-Integrity as espoused institutional values.

Table 5 indicated more of the state of morphostasis as more of the reproductive outcomes (Column 1 and 2) than what could have been the ideal of the transformative outcomes, the morphogenetic state. The management of learning, teaching, and assessment systems, as the enabling mechanisms for the idea of university education as the public and common good, seems to be reproductive of the social injustice and iniquities, and at least ameliorative, instead of being transformative. The inadequate roles, functions, and responsibilities of academic managers, as actors in the system, as agency, do not seem to go far enough in enacting both the AMS-IAD strategy, hence the enduring crisis events as indicative of how self-productive the historical and structural disadvantage can be.

Dimension	Social Injustice (Reproductive Outcomes)	Affirmative response: addresses injustices with ameliorative reforms	Transformative response: addresses the root causes of inequality
Political	Misrepresentation; Forms of academic leadership fall short of elaborating on excellence in context-specific and actor-driven ways; This political dimension, of which academic leadership is mutually inclusive, ought to be constitutive of the structural system for social justice and equity	Representation, of social being; The WSU AMS-; IAD Strategy attempts to address this, but the Strategy does not go far enough if not fully enacted by agency (management systems and governance structures as a just, fair, democratic and empathetic positions)	Reframing, of parity and rights; Only when the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy is fully enacted that parity and rights can constitute social justice and equity as a responsive and relevant curriculum by staff and for students
Economic	Maldistribution, of resources; The shortfalls in the academic leadership as the political dimension also have the economic dimensions as dialectically related	Redistribution, of resources,; Integrated academic development is available for engagement in ways that mediation on student learning challenges can be effectively implemented for the idea of university education as the public good	Restructuring, of economic model; The adequate engagement both of the processes (inputs, process, outputs) as professional academic development of staff assure not only program accreditation but also student retention and success
Cultural	Misrecognition: Academic leadership, which ought to promote social justice and equity, is constrained in student-centered learning and in the required decoloniality discourses, based on the required value systems, that is, on social justice and equity discourses.	Recognition, valued, respected, esteemed; Integrated academic development provides what could be the alternative and powerful ways of ensuring epistemological access, but only if such tools can be engaged by agency.	Re-acculturation; plurality of perspectives, but always fallible; Both the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy allows more for universal plurality (human flouring) than what could be the cases of concrete singular (when university education can be limited by the class and power lines)

Table 5.

The WSU AMS-IAD strategy 2015–2019/20 in the lens of Nancy Fraser’s social justice and equity model.

6. The social realist account: from the transformational but back to the reproductive outcomes

In this section, I discuss how the silences about the three crisis cases were incongruous with the institutional values of Excellence-Wisdom-Integrity in open and dynamic ways when the crisis cases evidenced the serious shortfalls as the inaction of those who should have acted, the indifference of the professorate when it should have known better, and the silence of the voice for social justice and equity when it should have been loud. I, therefore, demonstrate how I draw on the critical realist tools of retroductive reasoning in order to explain, as a transcendental argument, for what must have generated the crisis events in the academic project and per the case study where the actors seemed to be struggling to engage the WSU AMS-IAD strategy goals and objectives, and, in the processes, allowing more of the reproductive (the state of morphostasis) than what would have been the transformative (morphogenesis) outcomes in learning, teaching, and assessment as the core functions of university education.

I build my claims on the social realist explanation (retroductive reasoning for a transcendental argument), in four ways (elaboration on Table 3 about the methodology of morphogenesis)

1. How the reproductive outcomes and the state of morphostasis in 2019/20, 2021/22, and 2022/23 constituted the social and sociocultural interactions, the T2-T3 points (Table 3),

2. How the idea state of morphogenesis could have been about drawing from the powerful knowledge about each case in ways that could have been transgressive of the structural and cultural norms, the T4 point, which was quite enduring from the previous Regimes, the T1 point.

3. How it ought to have been so for a university education, which has its institutional values as Excellence-Wisdom-Integrity, the ideal of transformative outcomes at the T4 point

4. How that it was not the case, and per the latest institutional audit report of 2023 when the findings derived from the synchronous and diachronous structural mechanisms, which make for the systems of domination and control, and further as the dominant explanations about quality!

6.1 The social and sociocultural interactions, the T2-T3 points

One of the positions that makes social realism to be a powerful explanatory program (Table 3) is its ability to apply its tools about rationality. One of those, relevant for the discussion, is transfactuality, that is, the ability to engage the assumption that, because the numbers are, or the statement is, it thus serves as a measure of reality. Transfactuality allows for abductive logic as questioning the taken-for-granted views about what appears as empirical because the observations and opinions at the domain of the empirical are the result of other two emergent layers (domain of the actual, and the domain of the real) in nondeterministic and in irreducible ways. Therefore, this description of what the ontological assumptions can be about SJ-E projects seek to foreground the role of agency (human system as choice or non-choices, as actions of no actions), which operate in dynamic relationships with the social and cultural systems, as indicated on the diagram.

According to Archer’s morphogenetic approach [11] (Table 3), the current challenges bout the SJ-E theories and practices, per already cited cases of academic exclusions, program accreditation, and the institutional audit, which was quite scathing about the academic project, would constitute the T 1 point, the inherited context of disadvantage, the previous T 4 point.

1. The structural system about social justice and equity takes the role, duties, and responsibilities in terms of policies and strategies, which might be conditioned in such a context.

2. The cultural system about the policies and strategies thereof refers to the beliefs, values, and propositions as forms of knowledge and about how such knowledge is legitimated.

3. In such systems relationships, the human system, as agency, interacts both with the structure and agency albeit at the micro level.

Such dynamics of the open and complex social world call for the realist understanding of SJ-E as the condition of historical and social relations which, depending on the quality of agency, might result in either reproductive or transformative outcomes or the variations of both. [2] draws on the same theoretical lens to explain the workings (T2-T3) of the idea of university education as the public good as deep ontology, stratification, causally efficaciousness, and emergence. In the case of the three crisis events as analyzed above, the T2-T3 cycles took the following iterative processes, which unfortunately resulted more in the reproductive than the idea of the transformative outcomes,

1. Despite the recommendations, from the institutional audit report of 2011, that the academic exclusion policy must be implemented (with the supportive teaching and learning strategy), by 2023, such the implementation approach had had disastrous consequences with the unintended result of the academic board “abandoning the policy” altogether!

2. Despite the case of five academic programs unaccredited by 2021/22, when they should have been, one out of these five remained unaccredited even after the systemic interventions about such a crisis event.

3. The institutional audit report of 2023 would, thus, constitute the third crisis event, and yet another case of reproductive outcomes.

According to Archer’s methodology of morphogenesis/morphostasis (Table 3) the actors in social systems do not just inherit the social and sociocultural conditions (T1), which are never of their own making. Their social action and human agency take the form of the iterative cycles of T2-T3, through which the nature of social and sociocultural interactions (the interplays of structure and culture as enacted by human action) for either the reproductive/morphostasis or transformative/morphogenesis states to take place, which is thus T4.

6.1.1 The academic leadership and excellence, the inaction of those who should have acted

The irresponsible management of the academic exclusion policy, whose source was the G7 Rule as regulated [5], meant that social disadvantage, exclusion, and marginalization could be enacted by the inaction of those who should have accordingly acted. At least 100 students per the cited cases were unfairly deregistered from the education system, the act which the powers that be from institutional management, had to apologize for much later! For such students, and at least per the cases which call within the radar of this project, the redistribution of the resources which the university ought to provide, could not be realized, and thus defeating the basic principles and foundations of the South African Constitution which is founded on the Basic Human Rights, the access and success principles of the transformation of university education, and let alone undermining the very institutional value on academic excellence as espoused at WSU. It is extremely unfortunate that the culprits in such acts could not engage the resources in their disposal as in the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy and its bouquet of integrated academic development programs and services.

The University Registrar’s Circular of 28 February 2023 [26], about “G7 Rule Suspended-2022 Academic Year Performance Final Results” surfaces very controversial issues about how the resolution of the “special senate” [25], which took place on the same day, must have arrived at the decision. The content analysis of this circular against the senate management report reveals other anomalies about how the case could have been handled against what ought to be good practices of corporate governance and leadership.

Item 5.1: Review the implementation of the G7 Rule:“The meeting took notice of a verbal report from the DVC: AAR emanating from the meeting that was held on 23 February 2023 with student leadership concerning the implementation of Rule G7 for 2022 academic year”([25], page 4 of 4).

The timing of the senate decision about the management of the G7 Rule seemed to be quite questionable. G7 Rule ought to be implemented from the beginning of the academic year, right during student registration. Also, the submission about the case in the form of “a verbal report,” seemingly indicated an absence of a written management report to be submitted at this level of the governance structure. An educated guess from these activities (making inferences for a transcendental argument) is that there seemed to be pressure from students who were intent on registration by forcing the powers that be to bend the institutional rules, of which they ought to be custodians! All these activities seemed to sit against what ought to be good practices for the systems and processes, which need to follow good knowledge management system for audit trails, and for a university context, which is supposed to embrace institutional research as a form of scholarship. Worse still, the activities, as documented both in the circular and the senate report [25] and the registrar’s circular [26], were inconsistent with the prescripts of the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy, which take care of the more developmental way of attending to student academic challenges before such students reach the “academic exclusion points.”

Therefore, the discussion, thus, far, makes up for the case of a structural system when the roles, duties, and responsibilities of the affected heads of departments, deans of faculties, office of the registrar, the office of the campus rector, and the office of DVC. AAR, including all senators present at the meeting [25], is seemingly not the proxy for the actual equity of student access for the quality of academic success. The management of this crisis case reflected the inaction of those who should have acted for a university that is ostensibly in “Pursuit of Excellence” [16].

While university education is naturally designed for the middle- and high-income families, the AMS-IAD Strategy was designed to restructure such a model in ways that education as the public good could be common and be accessible to all [3]. The case about the academic exclusion indicated that it cannot always be the case! The actors in this case apparently drew on their neoclassical approach about student learning, with its deficit model, to perpetrate historical and structural disadvantage advertently and unwittingly instead of embracing the sociocultural approach as advanced and promoted by means of the AMS-IAD Strategy [22]. In the 2019/20 case about the management of the academic exclusion policy, the following statement by the affected student was quite indicative of how the no access to the public and common good that the university has to offer, can have disastrous consequences when in consideration of what should have been the redistributive value,

“Next year NSFAS will need our 2020 academic records, and we will have nothing to show. How will we secure funding to further our studies?” [24].

The strange turn of the events from this case was when the university management had to make a public apology for their mishaps [24].

6.1.2 The management systems and practical wisdom, the indifference of the professoriate when it should have known better

At the cultural systems level, as the apparent misrecognition of the plight of students in the lens of the social justice and equity, the idea of university education as the public good was not a values-free exercise for students who were on the negative ends of such acts of academic exclusion. The case of the unaccredited advanced diploma in internal auditing, for example, indicated how the inactions on academic excellence can emerge at the point of the indifference of the professorate when it should have known better. Not only 100 students were academic excluded unfairly in Crisis Case 1, but under Crisis Case 2, a total of 125 students were affected by such forms of apathy when WSU had to discontinue admitting students when it could have been the case. Such forms of apathy are antithetical to the ideal of (practical) wisdom as an institutional value. More than once, the institution was given an opportunity to correct this, as dating back to the advent of the higher education qualifications sub-framework, and as consequently outlined both in the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy [22].

An academic program ought to be the currency of any university education. The fact that the program could be discontinued due to the accreditation issues talked quite extensively to the challenges of apathy when empathy about students that WSU is able to admit in her programs should have weighed heavily on the part of the professorate, as the powerholders in this case. It was quite a sad turn of events that the case could reflect the case of the professorate who seemed to miss the reality that the concrete singular must be the enabling mechanism for universal plurality. It also defeats the realist-oriented logic that the Data-Information-Knowledge-Practical Wisdom chain could not apply quite adequately in the case of the advanced diploma in internal auditing. Data about academic excellence ought to constitute the well-embedded management information systems, which, when deconstructed from a powerful knowledge perspective, should lead to the practical wisdom in the idea of university education, in “Pursuit of Excellence.” It is by drawing on the powerful knowledge, at least per the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy, that the re-acculturation of plurality of perspectives could have been possible, at least at the point of scholarship of engagement, as I argue elsewhere [2] about such realms of new possibilities. Curriculum development and program management constituted the roles, functions, and responsibilities of the actors [25] who were ostensibly members of the professorate in an ideal university education context! While a university can register students who are underprepared to do well in a typically middle- and top-class university environment, for the South African transformation project, it is also incumbent upon the university to design the readiness systems and processes for such students, hence the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy was designed for that purpose as the battery of programs and services! The case of an advanced diploma in internal auditing meant that these enabling mechanisms for curriculum development and program management could not be adequately engaged, and hence the unaccredited status. If Crisis Case 1 was more about the silences and superficialities of academic leadership when in pursuit of excellence, Crisis Case 2 about the management systems level already pointed to what can be the challenges at governance structure level. That turned out to be the case about the Crisis Event, which would be quite instructive about the notion of emergence and morphostasis at strategy level. That is ideally the case about the governance structures, which must be the “driving force” for a university education as the embodiment of social justice and equity.

6.1.3 The governance structure and integrity, the silence of social justice when it should have been loud

The unintended consequences of both the structural and cultural systems played out in the 3rd dimension, the dimension of human systems as the actors on the roles, functions, and responsibilities and further on the beliefs, norms, and standards in the idea of university education as the public good. Such an idea ought to take the reframing of parity and rights for the indigent, especially in the case of a university institution, which serves most of the community that is still steeped in the historical and structural disadvantage. The intransigence of the powerholders, as emergent at the operations and management levels, becomes more pronounced at strategy level when the systems and processes can be in place both the inaction and the indifference can emerge as the silence of the voice for social justice and equity when it could have been loud. A critique about inaction and apathy at the institutional level is about a university, which might still be locked up in the neoclassical approach about the idea of a university as the ivory tower status secluded from the community the varsity serves! Great pity that the governance structures, as constitutive of the actors in Crisis Cases 1 and 2, could still be displaying the shortfall of what ought to have been the sociocultural approach as provided in the WSU AMS-IAD Strategy [22]. The institutional audit report of 2023 [14] provides compelling evidence for how Crisis Case 3 played out in the form of the silences and superficialities of integrated quality management systems, which could not go far enough in terms of coherence, functionality, responsiveness and meaningfully structured, where the management, leadership and governance systems ought to be the main actors.

6.2 Engaging the dis/continuities from the old regimes of power and of truth

The Crisis Cases 1, 2, and 3, especially as evidenced by the institutional audit report of 2023, paint what seem to be the major constraints in the struggle of a senior manager when in pursuit of social justice and equity as the “agenda for excellence.” Such actors as implied in the report have the temerity to draw on the dominant explanations of quality as if quality is not contested in power relations and in the materialist interests favorable to them. It is not rocketing science that such audacity has its source as the systems of domination and control about student learning, about curriculum development and program management, which, at Institutional level, can lead to the recurring of very negative institutional audit reports [13, 14], and thus defeating the whole logic about the idea of university education as the silences in the idea voice for social justice and equity! It is quite instructive about such cases that the two institutional audit reports took place with a decade in between (2011 to 2023). In such cases, as [31] would raise a rhetorical question, would be whether the “subaltern can speak”? I would, thus, provide a rejoinder: If so, in whose language, anyway? Which rules of engagement would apply in such dialogs and conversations as the requisite forms of scholarship of engagement and in context-specific and actor-driven ways [2]?

Therefore, it is this point about engaging the systems of domination and control, about the dominant explanations about quality, which constituted the struggle of a senior manager at WSU. Such struggles are not unique, they constitute the struggles of the oppressed and their beneficiaries, against the intransigence of the powerholders! They are struggles, which are constitutive of the dynamic and developing relationships between the human nature and the objective materials conditions of life in time and in diversity of spaces! Such struggles make for the ethico-political and moral choices and projects for the advancement of human flourishing. Such are the struggles against brutality, against dehumanizing tendencies, and against how patronizing and condescending the attitudes can be in the social world!

As illustrated in this article, such are the struggles against the inaction of those who should have acted, against the indifference of those who should have known better, and the fight for making loud the voice for social justice when it can be so silent! Such social ills, the forms of social injustice and iniquities as the misrepresentation of the other when reframing of their parity and rights could have worked better, as the maldistribution of resources about the other when the alternative could have been the restructuring of the economic model, and as the misrecognition of the other when the right choices and emancipatory projects for the other could have been the re-acculturation of plurality in advancement of human flourishing, need to be ameliorated and at best be abolished!

Therefore, the discussion in this article has revealed the frivolity of the blind claims about quality when in consideration of how some critical cases of an academic enterprise might be incongruous with the espoused institutional values of Excellence-Wisdom-Integrity. Cumulatively, the findings of the institutional audit report [14] point to the crisis events as the enduring events and processes over time [13], and most significantly as the result of questionable foundations about WSU merger, [3, 4], a university that is still grappling to find her identity. The crisis events of 2019/20, 2021/22, and 2022/23 indicate how the management of the academic project in “Pursuit of Excellence” can get lost at the point of academic leadership as the question of interplays of structural, cultural, and human systems! The case of G7 Rule/Academic Exclusion crisis of 2019/20, which led to the “postponement of the policy” for 2022, albeit in 2023 [25, 26], for example, constitutes not only the T4 point of the reproductive outcomes about excellence but the potential T1 point if such an event is engaged progressively and in socially reconstructive ways. This is the critical point about emergence to the social science scholars who draw on the power of critical realist philosophy (Table 2, Section 3).

The idea about university education as the embodiment of excellence ought to be mutually constitutive with wisdom and integrity, with all the three as important dimensions of power political relations and economic interests as embedded in cultural systems. For a university education system, such a responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of the professorate, which, per the three crisis cases, the assumed actors in the “Pursuit of Excellence,” unfortunately remained indifferent. In contexts of historical and structural disadvantage, exclusion, and marginalization, academic leadership ought to entail a particular focus on the identity as the veracious and expressively consideration, that is, on the right choices and the emancipatory project for the historically and structurally disadvantaged, excluded, and marginalized. The three crisis cases indicate the serious absences in all the three accounts of academic exclusions of program accreditations, and of institutional audits, at least from the point of those who were on the negative ends of such forms of indifference and apathy. However, it is important to note that, in a dynamic and developing relationship between human nature and the objective material conditions, this T4 point is also a T1 point for the next cycle, which therefore presents more of the opportunities than the challenges to the current WSU Regime of 2020–2024 [16] as it embarks on the institutional projects for the iterative elaboration about a university in “Pursuit of Excellence” for Vision 2030.

7. Toward the practical alternatives for transformative agency

The next logical point in the theory-methodology-practical program chain, should entail the potential resolution points about the three Crisis Cases, which punctuated the struggle of a senior manager for SJ-E projects. As it has been the running thread in this article, such cases signified the struggles of the oppressed against the intransigence of the powerholders! According to the discussion thus far, such Crisis Cases call for what could have been the action versus inaction, the empathy of the professorate instead of the indifference, and the voice of social justice and equity when it was so glaringly silent. A cautionary note, though, is not to consider these points as binaries, as disabling dualisms, since the edges within them can always be blurred in open and complex social systems! Therefore, in this Section, I focus on the case of curriculum development and program management to illustrate the value of human system as in interaction with the structural and cultural systems. I argue that the transformative outcomes about the case of the unaccredited program of advanced diploma in internal auditing, while conditioned in its history and social relations about its management, reconstituting it should have called upon social action and human agency. The reflexive dialectical processes thereof, which included even calling upon external consultants, could not go far enough in ensuring that corporate agency can emerge for the idea of transformative outcomes as re-acculturating universal plurality from the concrete singular. In the previous section, I briefly touched on this point as the value of the data-information-knowledge-practical wisdom chain. This could have been the case of how of the re-curriculation of the program at the point of knowledge should have been built on extensive data and on easily accessible information and in ways that could have led to the practical wisdom, and thus emergence at management, leadership, and governance systems levels as morphogenesis. Applying such logical approach in more context-specific and actor-driven ways could have solved both other two cases of academic exclusions and the negative institutional audit report at the three points of action instead of inaction, of empathy instead of indifference, and of making loud the voice for social justice and equity, and thus go a long way in ensuring a flawless institutional audit report as the new WSU Regimen of 2020–2024 is busy rolling for WSU Vision 2030 [16].

7.1 Transformative agency, the dream deferred?

Summarily, transformative Agency in corporate ways ought to entail a broad-based movement of critical minds in university education, and thereby taking a stand together for the sake of the scholarship and its future. This point is very instructive for the current WSU Regime of 2020–2024 whose vision is about “an impactful and technology-infused African university,” a university “In Pursuit of Excellence!” I personally take the view that the current vision is more about the enabling mechanisms, where the outcome remains for the idea of “an engaged university for rural development and urban renewal (2015–2019/20).” Otherwise, what would be the idea of university education for in the context of Walter Sisulu University? For me, the new vision statement does not go far enough in promising radical conceptual shifts about what WSU could have been in 2015–2019, but is a travesty of justice, and indictment on the part of those who ought to have been the actors of the previous regime, as the crisis events of 2019/20, of 2021/22 and of 2022/23 seemed to be so instructive. As it were, the three crisis cases as the subject of inquiry in this article might be the workings of pretense, grand standing, and political posturing so typical of the powerholders. Such is in the nature of the struggles of the oppressed against the intransigence of the powerholders as a dynamic relationship between the human nature and the objective material conditions.

The struggle of a senior manager constituted my personal reflections of managing and leading the dynamics in the case of the center and the approved but inadequately enacted, WSU AMS-IAD Strategy 2015–2019/20 due to the inaction of those who should have acted, the indifference of the professorate when it should have known better and most significantly, the silence of the voice for social justice and equity when such voices could have been much louder. It is about human nature, especially drawing from social reality theories, that people will always inherit the circumstances, which are never of their own making, when the efforts for university education transformation can easily yield more of the reproductive than the ideal of transformative outcomes. However, it is from the conditions of their time and space that they can call for what might be the right choices and emancipatory projects, through human and social action as the reflexive dialectical processes can allow for transformative agency to emerge. The events and process about the pursuit for social justice and equity in such circumstances of inheritance, and their conditions of choices and projects, might have to be self-incriminating and thus defeatist if they cannot be theorized and thus conceptualized by means of contemporary scholarship endeavors. Nevertheless, the struggles of a senior manager in such contexts, and drawing from the statement by Mr. Thabo Mbheki, former President of South Africa [1], a social scientist and researcher in the pursuit of social justice and equity for human flourishing might have to go to “the gallows singing, in order to indicate (the) determination for the other people who may come”.

Therefore, to possible transform the system in such institutions, as the WSU context and their expressively veracious considerations, need to understand the transformation project in context-specific, in concept-dependent, and in actor-driven ways. A university in “Pursuit of Excellence” can not afford to be seen as playing to the gallery, as waxing lyrical when it comes to the forms of injustice, of unfairness, of authoritarianism, and of indifference as experienced by the academically excluded students in the Crisis Case 1 and 2. By contrast, ‘the social struggles of the oppressed and exploited against such structures and their beneficiaries (the systems of domination and control, their cultural systems of dominant exploitations about the social phenomenon) are morally right’; they are ‘objectively, ethico-political ‘right-action.’

8. The reflections, integration, and conclusions

This article reported on the struggles of a senior manager by mapping out social justice and equity (SJ-E) projects in one case of a university education institution over three phases of her transformation project. The advent of the national institutional audit (2021–2024), the second one post-constitutional democracy, allowed for the potential analysis about the value of understanding the role of agency in the theory and practice of SJ-E projects for the idea of university education as the public and the common good. The struggle of a senior manager was about the struggles on behalf of the oppressed against the intransigence of the powerholders, who inadvertently and unwittingly chose and embarked upon projects that could make perpetual the historical and structural disadvantage! It was the struggle/a process whose product would become tested at the point of the crisis events, thus raising a question about what can always be the structural generative mechanisms for the enduring social ills.

The events and processes about the idea of an engaged university for rural development and urban renewal itself could have passed the test in terms of concept. However, and most significantly, such a test could be rendered unworkable at the point of the theory-practice nexus, of the cultural system and how such systems can be enacted, as discussed in this article. Not the least of such a possibility was the value of scholarship of engagement, which constituted the main claims in this article, about the three events which were emergent and quite enduring over time. The events permeated the first institutional audit report of 2011 to the current, per the recently released institutional audit report of April 2023. The institutional plan 2020–2024, while necessary and significant, the inadequacies thereof are likely to be surfaced at the points of the transformation project which is likely to assume a very challenged character against the assumed trajectories and let alone the dynamics thereof! The critical success factor for the plan will be the quality of leadership for the character of the WSU transformation project for what are the assumed trajectories and let alone the dynamics of the open and complex social systems! If the plan does not stem the tide about the cases of social injustice and iniquities as discussed in this article, a prediction can be made, on the strength of, on the balance of probabilities beyond the reasonable doubt, that the major crisis events of 2012–2013 are likely to set in at WSU, and thus subjecting this institution to an unfortunate era of the Administration Regime as it happened in 2011! That is not a far-fetched reality given the fact that WSU still belongs to the category of historically disadvantaged institutions in South Africa who had to undergo the administration for the second time post-constitutional democracy. Such would be the case of a never-ending struggle, given some of the unresolved issues in the three crisis events, namely the postponed implementation of the G7/Academic Exclusion Policy institution wide, the still unaccredited academic program in the case of Advanced Diploma in Internal Auditing, and the still pending improvement plans for the recently released institutional audit report of April 2023. In the light of the latter cases, such struggles of the oppressed remain a forever developing and evolving dynamic relationship between the human nature and the objective conditions in the pursuit of excellence, in the idea of university education as the common and the public good!

Declaration

This chapter is a dedication to all the educational development activists and scholars who are in the coal face of the struggles of the oppressed against the intransigence of powerholders. Such struggles are emergent from personal to institutional spaces, from the national and global spaces and over time!