[7] Restructuring of the higher education sector, resulted in the establishment of new institutional types and a need for a robust and unified body of leadership was identified.
[10] The organisation frequently used the rhetoric of transformation [11] to describe the changes they envisage for the South African Higher Education sector.
[10] Through a mixture of lobbying, advocacy and activism,[13] USAf attempts to facilitate an optimal environment, conducive for universities to function effectually[10] and maximally contribute to the social, cultural, and economic advancement of South Africa and its people.
[14] USAf are only accountable to their members, who play a large role in "governance structures, strategy determination, and operational planning".
[15] Since good governance in public Higher Education has also been flagged as a widespread HE challenge,[16] there may be a need for USAf to go beyond thought and voice and take measures to protect all staff and students in universities against power imbalances.
[17] This has begun, and USAf has taken some steps to make whistleblowing a part of the "ethical infrastructure"[18] but the ongoing lack of external accountability has also resulted in accusations of "privilege gatekeeping",[17] and possibility of elite capture.
It is used to "identify their capacitation needs within their specific contexts and align individual leadership development pathways with their organisational objectives".
[19] Additional USAf Programme Transformation of higher education is a complex matter, and university leaders have inherited many of Apartheid's unequal legacies.
VCs are also facing competing agendas, such as the need to address research productivity, the imperative to widen access and success to more and the pressure to remain globally competitive[26] Policy and legislation has enabled change in South African higher education.
When the national educational shutdown was announced, due to COVID-19 in March 2020, the “digital transformation” that accompanied the pandemic,[34] and the countrywide instruction to “pivot” to emergency remote teaching, had a disproportionate negative effect on disadvantaged students and "exacerbated historic inequalities" among those who did have adequate access to computing resources or bandwidth / data to connect to their institutions while learning off campus.
[39] A review by the Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation Institutional Landscape (HESTILL), chaired by Ihron Rensburg, also found that the NSI had avoided coordination and greater planning and coherence was necessary.
[40] Policy changes within the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) have created risks and challenges for universities.
Despite knowing that university rankings are biased and methodologically flawed,[48] have short-term publicity gains[citation needed] and are acknowledged as an unscientific "game",[49] this practice continues.
While there has been progress made on a commitment to addressing graft, reports have also indicated that "anti-corruption procedures and tools deployed across the system varied widely; were not consistently applied; and were not always that effective.
[66] In the CHE-led probe[67] entitled an "Inquiry into the Remuneration of University Vice-Chancellors and Senior Executive Managers in South Africa", many serious issues about governance were highlighted.
It appears that institutional autonomy and academic freedom has led to 57% of staff in public universities employed either on a short term or temporary contract.
[75] Higher Education can serve the public good, contribute to the commons, re-imagine a new society and level the playing field and reduce and differential graduation rates based on race, gender, class and other critical variables.
This two year national and collaborative programme is intended to build leadership and governance capacity among researchers in a shorter space of time than would have been the case without this intervention.
The scourge of corruption in many university chambers is an established problem, and USAf members need to also be accountable to the general public about their activities and not cover up "leadership failures".
In the context of “disruption, complexity, change, and in the global pursuit of the Engaged University”, VCs with integrity have to be proactive, transparent, reach out and listen [87] instead of silencing its critical voices[88] If USAf members can return to scrutinizing their own practices as drivers of privilege gaps and address factors that they can control, then the change that higher education seeks to enable, might be possible.