When Change Isn’t Change: Rethinking Transformation in African Higher Education

African higher education systems are undergoing profound transformation shaped by historical legacies, global pressures, and local demands for relevance and justice. Yet prevailing frameworks of institutional change often fail to capture the complexity, contradictions, and unevenness of these processes. Drawing on insights from Higher Education Institutional Change: Perspectives from South Africa, this talk reconceptualises institutional change as a continuous, contested, and deeply contextual process rather than a linear or measurable outcome.

Using the South African higher education landscape as a critical lens, the talk explores how universities operate as both organisations and socially embedded institutions, simultaneously navigating internal logics and broader socio-political forces. It highlights how change is mediated through cultural embeddedness, power interplays, and temporal layering, producing transformations that are often partial, negotiated, and paradoxical.

The presentation advances four key propositions: that context is central to institutional change; that history should be understood as a resource for reimagining futures; that change is layered across policy, structure, culture, and practice; and that institutional equilibrium is continuously negotiated rather than achieved. By foregrounding these insights, the talk argues for a more nuanced, context-sensitive approach to transformation in African higher education that recognises both the limits and possibilities of change in historically uneven systems.