The universtiy in a developing free society : challenges to autonomy and academic freedom

The real point of democratic reform, what I have been calling institutional reform, is not just to change the complexion of researchers, teachers and students, nor just to change the location of research and teaching, to be truly meaning- fill, reform has to lead to a change in the orientation of these activities. Let me take a hypothetical example, one where you succeed in adding more black and female faces to the research and leaching establishment and even to shifting the location of that establishment mainly to historically black universities - say your most advanced medical research facilities come to be located at the University of Fort Hare, with researchers mainly black and female, but the facility is still oriented to proton beam research for special types of cancer, away from the public health needs of the people - what will you have achieved? I dare say you would then have joined the ranks of independent Africa. The key issue will still remain not addressed: who should centres of research and learning serve and how? This is why I think the real challenge for all of us, whether south or north of the Limpopo, whether black or brown, yellow or white, is to begin thinking of how to root African universities in African soil