Reclaiming Intellectual Leadership and the Role of Universities in Transformation

Zamikhaya Maseti

Last week, former President Thabo Mbeki, addressing the launch of the National Dialogue on Higher Education at Nelson Mandela University, challenged the South African intelligentsia to reclaim its rightful place in society, to be thought leaders and to provide thought leadership at all times.

In taking up and claiming that role, I contend that universities must begin at their own doorsteps, behind the dark walls, and confront with the utmost seriousness the unfinished task of transforming institutions of higher learning in their entirety. 

The transformation of thought cannot occur in abstract spaces divorced from institutional practice; it must find expression in the restructuring of universities themselves, in their governance cultures, curricula, and intellectual orientation.

A Thought Leader is a moral and intellectual obligation that must define the essence of the South African university. It requires courage to critique, to innovate, and to locate knowledge production within the lived realities of a society still struggling with the legacies of colonialism and apartheid.

The university cannot remain a passive observer of the nation’s socio-economic ills, nor can it be reduced to a mere training ground for employability. It must stand as a citadel of progressive thought, an incubator of national consciousness, and a defender of the public good. 

To achieve this, its leadership, academics, and students must reimagine their social contract to generate ideas that serve the people, transform the state, and inspire a new developmental ethos grounded in justice and equality.

Transformation in higher education cannot be confined to symbolic gestures or demographic arithmetic. It must constitute a profound reorientation of knowledge systems, institutional cultures, and power relations that continue to mirror the colonial and apartheid order.

The intellectual mandate of the post-apartheid university is to dismantle epistemic hierarchies that privilege Eurocentric thought while marginalising African perspectives, languages, and ways of knowing. The university must therefore become the site of epistemic freedom, a space where African scholarship defines itself not as a derivative of Western traditions but as a generator of universal ideas from its own soil. 

This transformation demands leadership that is both visionary and disruptive, leadership that recognises that curriculum reform is inseparable from social justice, and that research excellence must speak to the material conditions of our people.

It is equally important that transformation must deal decisively with the question of access, teaching, and education, ensuring that universities remain open, equitable, and responsive to the intellectual and developmental needs of the poor and working class. 

Universities must assume developmental postures and demolish collectively and individually the ivory tower tendencies that isolate them from the communities they are meant to serve. In this sense, transformation is not merely an institutional project; it is a national imperative that places the university at the centre of South Africa’s quest for renewal, development, and moral regeneration.

The South African universities ought to review their collective and individual Admission Point Score systems. They are regressive and have narrow access to higher education. Often, these systems close out from the university those students who ought to have been given a second chance by a caring and inclusive selection and admission system. Such rigid criteria ignore the economic, psychological, and emotional contexts that may have shaped a learner’s academic performance.

 A truly transformative university must go beyond numeric thresholds and develop holistic models that recognise potential, nurture resilience, and restore the dignity of access. The restoration of the dignity of access must be extended to the Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges whose certificates are not credited by universities. This clearly shows that there is a disjuncture within the higher education sector. 

Is it not an anomaly for the university not to credit students with the TVET qualifications? What makes things worse is the total rejection of the Life Sciences subject by universities. The Life Sciences subject does not count in the Grade 11 point system. Why does the Department of Basic Education not seek advice from the Department of Higher Education to discontinue teaching Life Sciences if it is credit-worthless? The universities must deal with these historical sins of injustice, including denied and narrowed access to higher education. 

The intelligentsia cannot talk bravely and confidently about changing the country or making an impact on the country's development trajectory, unless and until the higher education sector addresses the dead bodies and skeletons in its own backyard.

It is only when the higher education sector has confronted and resolved these entrenched problems that it can begin, with integrity, to address the backyard injustices and inequities that have long defined its existence. Only then can it speak confidently and authoritatively about national transformation and the renewal of society. In doing so, the sector would not only fulfil the constitutional promise of equality but also restore the moral and developmental fabric of the nation.

In the final analysis, Mbeki’s challenge is not merely a call to reclaim intellectual prestige, but an invitation to a national awakening, a summons to restore the moral and developmental purpose of knowledge. The South African university must become the conscience of the nation, the site where new ideas are born to confront inequality and underdevelopment. It must shape a new generation of thinkers who are unafraid to question, to lead, and to act in defence of humanity. 

Only when our universities begin to embody this vision, when they rise beyond bureaucratic comfort, beyond institutional self-preservation, and embrace the nation’s unfinished project of liberation, will they recover their historic mission as engines of moral and intellectual renewal.

For too long, the academy has spoken from the balconies of privilege, detached from the material realities of hunger, poverty, and despair. The time has come for universities to descend from their towers, to walk again among the people, and to rediscover the ethical essence of knowledge, that learning must serve humanity, not isolate itself from it.

When universities become living instruments of transformation, they cease to be mere repositories of information and become catalysts of national consciousness. They will inspire a generation of thinkers who not only question but create, who not only critique but build, and who understand that the purpose of thought is to liberate, not to dominate.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a political economy analyst and holds a Magister Philosophae (M.Phil) in South African Politics and Political Economy from the erstwhile University of Port Elizabeth, now Nelson Mandela University.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.