Transformation and Restructuring: A New Institutional Landscape for Higher Education

The origins of the current institutional structure of the higher education system can be traced to the geopolitical imagination of apartheid’s master planner, Hendrik Verwoerd, and his reactionary ideological vision of “separate but equal development”. This was given effect through the enactment in 1959 of the Universities Extension Act, which far from extending access to higher education on the basis of the universal values intrinsic to higher education restricted access on race and ethnic lines. It main purpose was to twofold. First to ensure that the historically white institutions served the educational, ideological, political, cultural, social and economic needs of white South Africa. Second, to establish institutions that would produce a pliant and subservient class of educated black people to service the fictional homelands of apartheid’s imagination. In this aim it failed miserably. The institutions became hotbeds of student resistance, which ultimately contributed to apartheid’s demise.