Institutionalizing Free Inquiry in Universities during Regime Transitions: The South African Case

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2009

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Social Research

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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University of Cape Town

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Abstract
For South African higher education and institutionalized research, the transition to a democratic "new South Africa" in the 1990s opened the way to different kinds of fundamental change. The transition also brought new risks and more insidious threats to free inquiry. Taken together these make for a complex and confusing overall picture that can be read in opposite ways. Some changes, especially those that signal the achievement of long social and political struggles, take center stage as dramatic manifestations of a new order of free inquiry. Other changes, especially those brought about by the unanticipated impact of global trends on the restructuring of South African higher education, were only remarked in retrospect. Perhaps the most difficult to assess are those the transition made conceivable, but in the event did not take place. Thus South Africa's democratic transition suggested that beyond the deracialization of the elite sector, inclusive access to higher education would enable free inquiry to draw on the intellectual resources of society as a whole. Regime change from apartheid to democracy promised the institutionaliza- tion of a more robust and flourishing culture of free inquiry fit for a democratic society. (And if this was not realized, how should that lack be identified and assessed?)
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