Racial desegregation and the institutionalisation of ‘race’ in university governance: The case of the University of Cape Town
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Date
2009-12
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Education, University of the Free State
Abstract
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 student governance in the late 1980s and early
1990s, making specific reference to the re-conceptualisation of the UCT Students’ Representative
Council (SRC) as a ‘NUSAS-SRC’, along with the recognition of the political salience of race in
the student body. The second traces the origins of the demographic representivity rule in the university’s
statute to student demands for the dissolution of the UCT Council, and its replacement by
a Transformation Forum in the early 1990s. I thus show that the recognition of race as politically
significant in university governance is the outcome of a deliberate struggle, by students in general,
and black students in particular, to de-privatise and politicise any sense of racial/racist marginalisation,
and therefore to open up race as a topic for deliberation in the political realm of the
post-apartheid university. Thus, the institutionalisation of race has come to serve the interests of
the struggle for non-racialism.
Description
Research article
Keywords
Black student politics, Demographic representivity, Desegregation, Historically white universities, Non-racialism, Race relations politics, Student politics, University governance
Citation
Luescher, T.M. (2009). Racial desegregation and the institutionalisation of ‘race’ in university governance: The case of the University of Cape Town. Perspectives in Education, 27(4): 415-425