Being at ‘Home’ stimulates careful conversation about some of the most pressing issues facing higher education institutions in South Africa today – race, transformation and institutional culture.
While there are many reasons to be despondent about the current state of affairs in the South African tertiary sector, this collection is intended as an invitation for the reader to see these problems as opportunities for rethinking the very idea of what it is to be a university in contemporary South Africa. It is also, more generally, an invitation for us to think about what it is that the intellectual project should ultimately be about, and to question certain prevalent trends that affect – or, perhaps, infect – the current global academic system. This book will be of interest to all those who are concerned about the state of the contemporary university, both in South Africa and beyond.
Pedro Tabensky is the founding director of the Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at Rhodes University. He is the author of Happiness: Personhood, Community, Purpose and several articles and book chapters. Tabensky is a regular commentator in the national and international media.
Sally Matthews teaches in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. In addition to her interest in higher education transformation in South Africa, she teaches and writes about the politics of development and more generally about rethinking African Studies.
Contributors: Minesh Dass, Natalie Donaldson, Bruce Janz, Nigel C. Gibson, Lewis R. Gordon, Amanda Hlengwa, Sally Matthews, Thaddeus Metz, Thando Njovane, Pedro Tabensky, Paul C. Taylor, Samantha Vice, Louise Vincent.