Transformation in higher education has tended to focus on race and sex, at the expense of other forms of discrimination. This article addresses the silencing of "queer" issues in higher education. Using queer theory as a framework, and drawing on current literature, popular media reports, two personal critical incidents and a project…

Since 1994 South African further education and training (FET) has undergone significant and fundamental changes. These changes include the transfer of colleges between state departments, curriculum revision, forced mergers and a shift in the student population. As a result of the growing interest in, and funding of, vocationally aligned education,…

Increasing opportunities and access of historically underrepresented populations to higher education in both the United States and South Africa have proved challenging due to institutional climates that are perceived as unwelcoming and unsupportive. The purpose of this study was to investigate factors relating to institutional climates to uncover…

There is a considerable lack of literature on international student athletes despite the extent to which colleges and universities are increasingly relying on them to heighten the winning reputation of their sports programs. This research focuses on international student athletes from Africa. Based on interviews of 16 student athletes from seven…

Globally, research has become a key driver for the achievement of status and the procurement of funding for higher education institutions. Although there is mounting pressure on institutions to become research active, many institutions are rooted in a strong tradition of teaching. These institutions find it challenging to develop research capacity…

Some historically black schools manage to do quite well despite their circumstances, such as dire poverty. We aim at explicating some of the causal factors regarding the effectiveness of three schools in deep rural Mpumalanga, South Africa by tapping the perceptions of their learners. Data were collected from learner samples (four girls and four…

This paper reports on a qualitative study that explored the challenges experienced by nine emerging scholars of teaching at a research-intensive university in South Africa. It details three problem areas encountered during the process of becoming scholars of teaching: (1) negative perceptions about the work and related reward concerns, (2)…

Transformation, social cohesion and discrimination in public higher education institutions in South Africa still continue to preoccupy politicians and academics. Evidence suggests a lack of progress on transformation and a pervasive racial discrimination on university campuses. The latter, especially in its overt form by some students in one of…

Higher education in post-apartheid South Africa has experienced a relatively rapid changing landscape (Cloete, Maassen, Fehnel, & Moja, 2006). As such, the organizational environment in which university administrators operate is an increasingly important area of study. This study is grounded in organizational theory and adopts an open systems…

Social networking sites (SNS) affordances for persistent interaction, collective generation of knowledge, and formation of peer-based clusters for knowledge sharing render them useful for developing constructivist knowledge environments. However, notwithstanding their academic value, these environments are not necessarily insulated from the…

The article explores student responses to institutional changes to accommodate increasingly diverse students into a cohesive community. It deals with student perceptions of current campus practices, social interaction, their interpretations of these, and how these relate to their experiences. It argues that, while the university has excelled in…

This article uses "close-up" ethnographic research to provide an account of students' engagement with learning in a South African university. Broadly based on Halliday's [Halliday, M. A. K. (1973). "Explorations in the functions of language". London: Edward Arnold; Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). "Language as social…

Higher education systems, globally, are being called upon to effect changes in terms of widening student access and diversifying a previously homogenous academic staff profile. In South Africa, one of the main forces driving the diversification of academic staff is state policy in the form of employment equity legislation, with racial redress…

Cognitive capitalism--sometimes referred to as "third capitalism," after mercantilism and industrial capitalism--is an increasingly significant theory, given its focus on the socio-economic changes caused by Internet and Web 2.0 technologies that have transformed the mode of production and the nature of labor. The theory of cognitive…

The racial desegregation of the student bodies of historically white universities in South Africa has had significant political implications for student politics and university governance. I discuss two key moments in the governance history of the University of Cape Town (UCT) critically. The first involves the experience of racial parallelism in…