The Higher Education Landscape Under Apartheid

Abstract

Under apartheid, higher education in South Africa was skewed in ways designed to entrench the power and privilege of the ruling white minority. Higher education institutions established in the early part of the century (Fort Hare, UCT, Wits) were incorporated into a system which was subsequently shaped, enlarged and fragmented with a view to serving the goals and strategies of successive apartheid governments. By 1994, the landscape of 36 higher education institutions included ten historically disadvantaged universities and seven historically disadvantaged technikons designated for the use of black (African, coloured and Indian) South Africans, while ten historically advantaged universities and seven historically advantaged technikons were designated for the exclusive development of white South Africans. Two distance institutions catered for all races. By 1994 there had been considerable resistance to the apartheid regime in the historically black and in some of the historically white institutions and, as was demonstrated in this chapter, the racial profile of student enrolments in some of the institutions had departed considerably from apartheid’s intentions. It was in this context that the new higher education policies of South Africa’s first and second democratic governments sought to reshape the system into one that met the goals of equity, democratisation, responsiveness and efficiency. Working off the landscape described in this chapter, the chapters in Section 2 capture the developments since 1990 in respect of funding, students, staff, leadership, curriculum and research.