Achieving Nelson Mandela University?

Book excerpt: South Africa’s higher education sector is rooted in the country’s divided past. A significant State-driven restructuring from around 1997 to 2005 resulted in what is largely the current configuration of public universities. But just over two decades later, for a variety of reasons, the higher education sector in South Africa appears beset with numerous challenges. Nelson Mandela University is one of the public universities that emerged from the restructuring process. The university is in an ongoing state of evolution, of becoming. It developed out of the amalgamation of the University of Port Elizabeth, Port Elizabeth Technikon and incorporation of the Port Elizabeth campus of Vista University as Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 2005. In 2017, it was renamed Nelson Mandela University, after the world-renowned statesman, rather than the metropolitan area in which the university is primarily located. The renaming was conceptualised as more than a marketing opportunity to rebrand the university, but as an opportunity to reorientate the university, to reposition Nelson Mandela University as an engaged and socially-embedded university in the service of society, striving to be the academic expression of the values and ethos of its iconic namesake. Endeavouring to be something greater and different from the norm imbues its strategy, public statements and practices. The determination to ‘achieve Mandela University’ serves, or is intended to serve, as both an organising principle and a lodestar. A cross-section of writers from different backgrounds situates Nelson Mandela University within the contemporary historical moment from which it emerged and examines its subsequent evolution. While Nelson Mandela University has performed the usual work expected of any university, it has also sought to turn the university outwards, to achieve a higher purpose, framing itself as a values-based university on a journey to become something else. In Achieving Nelson Mandela University? the university attempts to give an account of itself. The book is an intellectual and scholarly reflection on where the university has come from and where it is seeking to go.