What Is the University For?

Abstract

After apartheid, that is, after what some call racism’s last word, how does the university institutionalized by the operation of apartheid reason imagine itself as being in and of the world? This is a question that lies at the heart of asking “What is the university for?” It is a question intensified in relation to thinking from the institutional space of a historically Black university. Apartheid’s university is the last stand of what the article calls the Kantian university. Race accretes there, reminding us of that condition of university discourse that compels us to think ahead. After apartheid, the South answers to a desire that reaches beyond race as symptom toward a practice of post-apartheid freedom. Race, the article suggests, is perhaps better apprehended as supplement where the inventiveness of the modern university has hitherto resided. Apartheid in this reckoning is a university discourse. This is perhaps where we might set about remaking the university. To this end, the work of freedom threaded through the question of the South may lend itself as an indispensable resource.