The State of the Academy Address: Perspectives from Two Emerging Scholars Re-Membering the University Through Re-Imagination

Abstract

South African universities remain shaped by unresolved colonial inheritances and a deepening neoliberal turn that privileges measurable outputs, competition, and narrow definitions of merit. Within this landscape, Black academics and students often encounter institutional cultures that regulate belonging and constrain transformation. While accounts of the neoliberal university have been richly documented, less attention has been given to mentorship as an everyday institutional practice through which such regimes are reproduced and contested, particularly within professional training contexts. This paper offers a State of the Academy Address through the perspectives of two Black early-career clinical psychologists in academia. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography, a qualitative approach in which researchers use their own lived experiences as data to examine broader cultural patterns, and reflexive thematic analysis (a method of identifying and interpreting patterns of meaning across qualitative data) of structured reflective dialogues, we examine how emerging scholars attempt to re-make academic life through refusal and care. Two themes are presented: promoting mentorship while rejecting gatekeeping, and the tension between knowledge production and scholarly development under metric-driven performativity. The paper appreciates the notions of relationality and relational ethics, which are central to Ubuntu philosophy. Additionally, by centering a Freirean commitment to critical consciousness and empowerment, we argue that mentorship can function as an everyday agency that challenges exclusionary traditions, even as output pressures narrow scholarly formation and deepen the vulnerability of early-career academics. We conclude with implications for policy and practice across departmental, institutional, and sector levels, including the formal recognition of mentorship in workload models, protections for early-career academics against exploitative workload practices, and broader promotion and performance criteria that recognise relational labour, collaborative scholarship, and community-engaged knowledge production.

1. Rethinking the South African University

The Landscape of Higher Education in South Africa

Higher education in South Africa has faced significant challenges with Black students and academics calling for a transformed academy, decolonial research, and teaching and learning practices with a social justice agenda (Keet et al., 2017; Govender & Naidoo, 2023). Pattman and Carolissen (2018) highlight how transformation is one of the most widely used terms in the post-apartheid context. They further unpack it to suggest that central to the term are concepts of justice, recognition, redistribution, and equitable participation (Pattman & Carolissen, 2018). During the thirty years of democracy, higher education institutions in South Africa have struggled to transform radically and, where transformation has happened, it has happened at a relatively slow pace (Keet, 2014; Naidu, 2024; Ratele, 2018). Blackness and Black academic voices are still often marginalised with their experiences pathologised (Hlatshwayo & Majozi, 2024; Khunou, 2023; Kiguwa, 2019; Mapaling & Shabalala, 2025; Shabalala, 2018, 2019, 2022). Scholars have also reflected on the individualistic and deeply market-driven (a concept we will return to) nature of the academy (Parker, 2020). These reflections include the reality of the epistemic marginality of Black traditions in creating the curriculum and knowledge production (Heleta, 2016).

Eurocentric knowledge is what is largely recognised and legitimised in South African higher education institutions, resulting in curricula that Black students do not recognise themselves in and limits what is regarded as impactful research. To understand what students mean when they call for decolonisation, it is necessary to situate this demand within the historical foundations of the academy. The university has its foundations in European settlement, where its purpose was to promote the interests of the settlers and their wish to remain intimately connected to the “source” of civilisation, as Dladla (2020) puts it. The approach to the curriculum then was set to, as closely as possible, mirror the cultures and practices of the original home of the European settlers. Dladla (2020) argues that the objective was to ensure that the university graduate in the colony received an education that embodies the character of the European. Phillips (2003, as cited in Dladla, 2020) highlights that this mirroring was evident in the architecture of universities too. From here, we see how the unnatural foundations of the university and by extension the university itself were built to veil and erase the space that existed deliberately and the experience of its inhabitants (Dladla, 2020). The colonial enterprise drained indigenous resources, thrusting the conquered into “structural, systematic and systemic poverty” (p. 16). Coloniality and modernity forced indigenous people to abandon working for their own sustenance and development and enter employment established by the settlers (Dladla, 2020). As it is now, those who had Western education were paid better and lived better, forcing indigenous people to appreciate the benefit of the education imposed on them (Dladla, 2020).

Orr (2004) draws on Wiesel’s thesis on what is wrong with education, arguing that education as currently conceived:

It emphasises theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology, and efficiency rather than conscience.

(Wiesel, 1990, as cited in Orr, 2004, p. 8)

Orr (2004) highlights that the assumption that all education is inherently good may be dangerous because education, when engaged with uncritically, merely equips people to “be more effective vandals on earth” (p. 5). Turning back to the colonial enterprise, for the coloniser, encouraging the education of Africans played a dual role in creating a labour force and simultaneously creating a population of consumers of Europeanness and products of the West that are locally made or produced. The other goal of colonialism was to “promote” Africans to “human” status, creating a condition where Black subjectivity is located within the tension between the “desire” to be White (i.e., regarded as human) and complete resignation because “the hell of coloniality is that of self-erasure: Blackness must disappear or at least be covered-over by whiteness” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 14). The problem with this education of Black people or the conquered is that it erases their language, indigenous constructions and historical knowledge, rendering their perspective absent (Dladla, 2020). Today, universities work with colonised knowledge, and the epistemologies of groupings of people are excluded based on race, location, gender, and ability (Hall & Tandon, 2017). It would be a mistake not to critically engage with the knowledge taught and reproduced in our institutions and how (and where) that knowledge was gathered (Hall & Tandon, 2017). The racist ideology embedded in the bones of universities today demonstrates a long history of the inextricable relationship between the academy and political power (Dladla, 2020).

Returning to the concept of the market-driven academy, there has also been a neoliberal turn in the South African academy, where the system is characterised by commodification and commercialisation. The current landscape of the academy has seen an increase in casual workers, increased student enrolments, a competitive and individualistic ethos made worse by Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) processes incentivising individual work more greatly, and a feeling of being under constant surveillance (Gourlay, 2024; McKenna, 2024; Skene et al., 2020). This results in a greater sense of precarity within higher education, with staff and students feeling less at home in South African universities (Luvalo, 2019; Maseti, 2018).

Questions of rethinking the importance of higher education and reimagining what the academy can look like are questions of how the academy positions itself in terms of its mission and the role it plays in perpetuating issues of coloniality and, more recently, neoliberal ideals (Keet, 2019; Steynberg et al., 2024). We foreground this historical and political context because our experiences of the academy did not emerge in a vacuum. The norms we describe, what counts as ‘merit’, who is heard, who is overburdened, and how belonging is allocated, are shaped by longer histories of coloniality as well as the contemporary neoliberal governance of higher education. At the same time, context alone cannot show how these forces are lived, negotiated, and resisted in the everyday textures of academic work. For this reason, we turn to collaborative autoethnography to examine how these structures surface in our scholarly formation and supervision practices, and how we attempt to re-make academic life through mentorship, refusal, and re-imagination.

This paper explores the lived experiences of two clinical psychologists working in academia, as we navigate the complexities of our roles within a system characterised by traditional gatekeeping, rigid knowledge production demands, and an urgent need for change. It discusses and critiques these aspects to start a conversation where emerging academics can see a future in the academy, believe in the work they produce, and are less inclined to leave. Through collaborative autoethnography and reflexive dialogue, we aim to contribute to the ongoing conversation on decolonising higher education and reimagining the university as a space that fosters genuine intellectual growth and societal advancement (Ratele, 2018). We also draw attention to Waghid’s (2020) proposal of using Ubuntu philosophy as a guiding force in higher education. He argues that interdependence and collective social responsibility ought to be the cornerstone of African universities, and that Ubuntu challenges particular Western paradigms of learning, where competition and individualism are promoted, by encouraging sharing, belonging and participation. Waghid acknowledges that some Western paradigms have led to the praxis of community, but stresses that African moral theory, like Ubuntu, presents us with an opportunity to dismantle the Western practices that seem to be counterintuitive in our quest to clarify and fulfil the mission of the African university—social justice and communal action.

2. (Re)conceiving Higher Education in South Africa

In his report, Soudien (2012) posed a challenge to the South African academy, asking it to reassess its role in society and how it may be complicit in perpetuating discriminatory practices. Issues of access that become structural barriers to participation parity remain a persistent problem—a ten-year-old (at the time of writing this paper) historical event, #FeesMustFall, demonstrated this very issue. Student movements like the call for the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town (#RhodesMustFall), and the call for free education (#FeesMustFall); collectively a call for decolonisation in South African universities, came to be known as the Fallist movement or Fallism. Freire’s (2005) ideas about critical consciousness and the role of youth in questioning oppressive systems can be applied to understanding movements like Fallism in South Africa, which represented a moment of interrogation of people’s being in the world (Shabalala, 2019). Freire (2005, p. 43) highlights that youth, during rebellion:

…place consumer civilisation in judgment, denounce bureaucracies of all types, demand the transformation of the universities (changing the rigid nature of the teacher-student relationship and placing that relationship within the context of reality), propose the transformation of reality itself so that universities can be renewed, attack old orders and established institutions in the attempt to affirm human beings as the Subjects of decision, all these movements reflect the style of our age, which is more anthropological than anthropocentric.

Rustin (2016), in discussing the neoliberal turn in the university space globally, not only speaks about the problematic introduction to high student fees but also highlights how ideologically worrisome neoliberalism is within higher education and how that positions the student. Rustin (2016) argues that when a student takes up a university space, they are in essence purchasing a service provided by the educational corporation—thus redefining the student as a “consumer”.

When thinking about the nature of higher education and calling for change, a few questions come to mind. One such question is, can higher education and its institutions create an equitable environment? This is especially because the education system, tainted by the legacy of apartheid, has inadequately prepared the majority of Black students for university (Soudien, 2012). Soudien (2016) argues that the academic sector often straddles the line of ambivalence when confronting the consequences of apartheid educational policies. On the one hand, the academy attempts to disassociate from its apartheid-linked past, while on the other, it struggles to develop and implement strategies to move beyond it (Luvalo, 2019; Ratele, 2015, 2018; Soudien, 2012). Through policy measures, higher education has begun to distance itself from its racist history but has not yet succeeded in fully redesigning a higher education framework that harmonises the need for both access and quality education (Luvalo, 2019; Ratele, 2015; Soudien, 2012). Soudien (2012) maintains that, except for a minority of academic leaders, scholars, and students, the broader academic community has not adequately addressed issues of race and racism. Mangcu (2015) observes that the leadership within most higher education institutions is predominantly composed of White professors. These White academics are the ones formulating and implementing policies aimed at racial redress in higher education. He argues that it may be neither prudent nor ethical for individuals who have benefited from racial divisions to lead the discussions and execution of redress initiatives.

3. Ubuntu Philosophy as a Guiding Force in Higher Education

Let us consider Waghid’s (2020) argument of Ubuntu for higher education in Africa by starting with the definition of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a process of affirming one’s own humanity through the recognition of humanity in others, humanness (Ramose, 2015). Humanness, as Ramose (2015) puts it, is a condition of being and becoming, and one of openness. Similarly, Tutu (1999, as cited in Waghid, 2020) describes Ubuntu as an openness and willingness to share and participate in order to foster belonging. Waghid (2020) highlights that sharing also constitutes autonomy; one ought to be open and willing to share for sharing to occur. Therefore, sharing becomes the space where action, co-belonging and radical change can take place; something that seems to be in direct conflict with the nature of higher education today where there is a culture of competition and gatekeeping (Maistry, 2017). Ubuntu as a guiding philosophy of higher education suggests that people ought to come together to embody and enact their social responsibility, and through co-belonging, respond to critical issues in society (Waghid, 2020). While sharing and co-belonging are emphasised in Ubuntu philosophy, this does not assume that people are not independent and autonomous actors. After all, when we choose to share openly and in communion with others, it is an autonomous act.

In this paper, we mobilise Ubuntu in three related ways, in order to avoid treating it only as a moral horizon. First, Ubuntu provides philosophical grounding for thinking about scholarly formation as relational becoming rather than individual achievement. Second, it operates as an ethical stance, orienting us towards relational accountability in how we narrate institutional harm, complicity, and care, including the responsibilities we hold towards one another, colleagues, students and the communities we invoke. Third, Ubuntu is treated as a practical orientation for re-imagining academic life through practices of sharing, co-belonging and social responsibility (Waghid, 2020). The implication here, for higher education, is that individuals, through feeling safe, seen and understood (processes that result from co-belonging) are freer to think and speak against oppressive structures that halt radical change. In practice, this opens opportunities for embedding community-led programmes that harness the expertise of both local communities and the university, and for emphasising the co-creation of knowledge through collaborative research and curriculum design. It also means that in pedagogical encounters, academics and students alike are given the opportunity to decide and make up their own minds, while identifying the problems to be solved and solutions thereof (Waghid, 2020).

At the same time, an Ubuntu-informed approach cannot be romanticised, particularly within neoliberal institutions shaped by performativity, surveillance and competition. The language of ‘community’, ‘collegiality’ and ‘care’ can be invoked to demand compliance, discourage critique, or intensify invisible labour, often falling unevenly on those already positioned as institutional carers or “natural mentors”. Ubuntu can therefore be both enabling and fraught, a framework for humanising relations, but also one that may be co-opted when the institution celebrates co-belonging rhetorically while withholding structural support in practice. For this reason, we use Ubuntu not only to articulate what the university ought to be, but also to sharpen analysis of what is happening in everyday academic life, guiding how we read our dialogues by tracing where mentoring becomes humanising or dehumanising, where sharing is enabled or punished, how belonging is allocated, and how responsibilities for care and development are distributed and recognised. As we explore how Ubuntu can be practically harnessed in African higher education, it becomes clear that mere quantitative indicators of success fall short, prompting a necessary shift toward holistic, community-engaged models of scholarly recognition or evaluation frameworks that fully embody Ubuntu’s transformative potential.

4. Beyond Mere Quantitative Metrics

In her chapter, Transformation as Freedom: Confronting ‘unfreedoms’ in students’ lives, Wilson-Strydom (2018) argues that “although contested, it has been widely accepted that at least a component of transformation is the changing demographics of the student body” (p. 33). She further highlights how increasing access for students who would have been denied access at some historically advantaged institutions has been an integral part of the transformation agenda in higher education. However, she also pointedly argues that universities’ attempt to transform and address historical injustice by widening access alone without mindfully creating spaces and opportunities to support students, in turn, gives birth to other issues of inequity (Wilson-Strydom, 2018). It is notable that institutions increase access (Pattman & Carolissen, 2018; Wilson-Strydom, 2018), but this change alone does not signify deep transformation, and academia then runs the risk of superficially committing to redress without real investment in what that can look like. Ratele (2015, p. 2) also warns about this superficial form of transformation:

Instead of aiming to shift the ruling symbolic, structural and intergroup traditions within universities, certain notions of integration, whether on the basis of race, gender, class, sexuality or ability, assume transformation to be the assimilation of Blacks into an already established set of White patriarchal capitalist regime within universities.

He further argues against assimilation, highlighting the need to reimagine the university (Ratele, 2018). Similarly, Soudien (2012, p. 42) argues for a fundamental redefinition of the university, “The discourse [the university] needs is a brand new one that re-imagines the university on terms that are self-critical and courageous”. Both scholars seem to speak out against the university taking an ambivalent stance, emphasising the need to courageously recreate something unique and relevant (Latecka, 2022). Without such imaginative efforts, initiatives related to policy development and implementation for transformation would be ineffective.

Ratele (2015, p. 9) builds upon this foundation by critiquing the notion of transformation as only achieving racial or other forms of diversity. He notes that:

Transformation as racial diversity or other forms of diversity is bad for the majority of those historically outside the gates of the university because, one comes to recognise, that the image of a minority of Black students in a largely white class taught by a white teacher in a white language is a poignant reminder of the failure of our struggles for the radical overhaul of education and society at large.

Biko (1978, p. 24) cautioned about the assimilation of Black individuals into White-dominated spaces, arguing that such assimilation reinforces existing power structures. Ratele (2015) echoes this sentiment, contending that these approaches perpetuate the marginalisation of Black voices and experiences within academia, a point we reiterate later in this paper. While Ratele (2015), like others (Pattman & Carolissen, 2018; Wilson-Strydom, 2018), acknowledges that representation is a significant step, he maintains that it is inadequate for achieving true transformation. Ratele (2015, p. 4) further adds that without dismantling these longstanding structures to enable what he describes as “deep transformation”, institutional cultures and racial discourses will persist (Thackwell, 2014). Ratele (2015) criticises the current educational paradigm for concentrating on integrating marginalised groups into the existing system rather than re-engineering the system to be intrinsically equitable and inclusive. This critique echoes Biko’s (1978, p. 24) assertion that educational systems under apartheid rendered Black individuals—and perhaps here we might add Black academics in particular—as “perpetual pupils”, perpetuating systemic inequities.

5. Fostering Community Engagement and Participatory Citizenship

The DHET has emphasised the necessity for higher education institutions to cultivate a sense of community among students while preparing them to contribute effectively to transformative processes (Sithaldeen et al., 2022). This brings us back to the concepts of imagination and hope, as suggested by Nicholls and Rohleder (2012). They argue that for participatory parity to flourish and for critically aware individuals to emerge through higher education, a sense of hope is essential. They propose that we must believe in the possibility of change and that history does not have to repeat itself (Nicholls & Rohleder, 2012). Approaching the question from a different vantage point, Latecka (2022, p. 634) asks a very interesting question—one that might push our thinking closer to action. The question is:

…is colonialism the real oppressive force still keeping South African education in its grips? Or are we now dealing with another kind of oppression which, while historically aligned to South Africa’s colonial past, has nevertheless taken hold in a way independent of the historical conditions and related to worldwide economic developments?

It is important to understand and honour the history that has influenced the experience of higher education. Still, perhaps for us to foster humanity and social responsiveness in future generations, we may need to answer Latecka’s question. We may even start to calm some of the burdens of the past or the “inconsolable mourning” (as in the transformation agenda being stuck in a loop of describing the past to be redressed), as described by Nicholls and Rohleder (2012). There exists an opportunity to move beyond outdated narratives by embracing change through imagination. One way we believe we can propel ourselves forward in this quest is to remind the academy of its purpose and role in addressing social ills and advocating for radical humaning (Ramose, 1999), a concept rooted in Africanness that may offer us a unique opportunity to radically transform curricula and the academy at large (Latecka, 2022). Gobodo-Madikizela (2015), reflecting on President Nelson Mandela’s vision, suggests that fostering a sense of community is crucial for South Africans. She emphasises that understanding oneself as interconnected with others through a sense of community is fundamental.

6. Towards Epistemic Freedom and a Humanising Pedagogy: From and To

6.1. Education as Humanising Practice: A Freirean Approach

Critical and humanising pedagogies view education as a political project (Ngoasheng et al., 2019), recognising its transformative potential to empower oppressed groups when all political actors participate. This perspective aligns seamlessly with humanising pedagogy’s core tenet of creating learning environments that nurture students’ full humanity and potential.

By advocating for epistemic freedom, we are essentially calling for a critical re-evaluation of the existing knowledge production frameworks within the African university. This involves questioning and dismantling the hegemonic structures that have historically marginalised African epistemologies. Embracing a critical canon means recognising and validating diverse ways of knowing, thereby enhancing the intellectual richness and societal relevance of higher education in Africa. This shift not only challenges the status quo but also empowers African scholars to contribute original and contextually grounded knowledge to the global academic community (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020). Such an approach fosters critical thought and innovation, enabling the African university to become a leader in transformative knowledge production that addresses both local and global challenges.

Political actors in this instance would be people (managers, academics, community stakeholders and people from industry) who pull together to recreate a space of learning that extends beyond the institution (Ngoasheng et al., 2019). Ignoring the political and blindly accepting power structures and how they manifest on several levels within systems is problematic. Failing to recognise ourselves as political characters is unethical (Lebakeng et al., 2006) and threatens efforts toward reimagining the academy and developing a decolonial curriculum. Humanising pedagogy’s principle of reflexivity, which calls for educators to critically examine their own practices and biases, is crucial in addressing this issue.

The current university structure fails to develop and nurture student voices, as though they are not living participants with a host of experiences that constitute knowledge (Ngoasheng et al., 2019). Students are often consumers of the knowledge deposited into them and are pushed to the margins in terms of contributing to that knowledge. This marginalisation of student voices and experiences within the academy, which relegates students to mere consumers of deposited knowledge, stands in stark contrast to humanising pedagogy’s emphasis on valuing students’ whole selves and diverse experiences. The Fallist movements in South Africa, such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, can be seen as a response to this marginalisation of student voices and experiences within the academy. These movements called for a fundamental transformation of higher education, challenging the persistent legacies of colonialism and apartheid in the curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional culture (Mqolomba & Pillay, 2022). The #FeesMustFall movement exemplifies a collective demand not only for freedom from the systemic inequalities and colonial legacies within higher education but also for freedom to re-envision the academy as a more inclusive, equitable, and responsive space where diverse knowledge systems can flourish.

6.2. Freedom from Colonial Epistemologies and Freedom to Become…

Tembo (2022) highlights that there is a difference between the production of African knowledge from the position of Western epistemological orders and knowledge production from African Indigenous epistemic orders. He reflects that there is a disconnect between the latter and the former, but that assimilated (westernised) African intellectuals try to bridge the connection by filling Western epistemologies with African content. Biko (1978, p. 20) likens this type of epistemic veiling to “expecting the slave to work together with the slave-master’s son to remove all the conditions leading to the former’s enslavement”. This veiling perpetuates the marginalisation of indigenous African knowledge systems and ways of knowing, as African scholars are often expected to conform to Western academic norms and standards, even when studying African contexts and experiences (Musariri et al., 2023). Humanising pedagogy challenges this marginalisation by advocating for the integration of decolonial theoretical perspectives and a social justice approach in educational research.

Dladla (2020) asserts that it is this very un-freedom that persists that warrants an immediate call to action by Ramose (1999). This call to action is two-fold. The first imperative is a destructive task—a practice of resistance. This aligns with Ubuntu and humanising pedagogy’s emphasis on developing critical consciousness and challenging the status quo. Dladla (2020) qualifies this by saying that we ought to read “destructive” as de-struction or the unpacking of texts to uncover the hidden foundations rather than conceiving it as elimination or annihilation (p. 43). This unpacking involves the critiquing of Eurocentrism, as it necessarily stands in the way of true liberation (Dladla, 2020). Liberation, at this level, Dladla (2020) describes as Africanness or African philosophy being free from and the next step—the second task—would be one of imagination. What would we do with this freedom? What kind of academy do we envisage? What curriculums do we design? What does the university look like? He describes this as us being free to become—in the ethical sense—human (Dladla, 2020), echoing humanising pedagogy’s ultimate goal of nurturing students’ full humanity and potential.

To fully realise the transformative potential which we hinted at earlier, it is imperative to delineate what this “something new” entails within the context of the African university. This “something new” can be conceptualised as a redefined canon of knowledge production that is intrinsically African, drawing upon indigenous epistemologies and philosophies. Such a canon challenges the dominance of Eurocentric frameworks by valuing local knowledge systems and methodologies that resonate with African contexts and experiences. This involves not only integrating African philosophies like Ubuntu and Afrocentric epistemologies into curricula but also fostering research paradigms that prioritise community engagement and participatory methods. By doing so, the African university can become a hub for generating knowledge that is both locally relevant and globally contributive, thus bridging the gap between traditional African wisdom and contemporary academic discourse (Chilisa, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012). This reconceptualisation aligns with the decolonial agenda, promoting epistemic diversity and fostering a more inclusive and equitable academic environment.

Moreover, this “something new” signifies the creation of alternative academic spaces where African scholars can collaboratively develop and disseminate knowledge that reflects the continent’s unique socio-cultural dynamics. This entails reimagining the university as a place where traditional African knowledge systems are not only preserved but also innovatively integrated with contemporary academic disciplines. By fostering interdisciplinary research and encouraging cross-cultural dialogues, the African university can cultivate a dynamic and responsive intellectual environment (Mbembe, 2017). This reimagined academy prioritises critical canons that are rooted in African realities, thereby enhancing the production of knowledge that is both critically engaged and socially impactful.

This paper speaks directly to questions of how social identities are constructed and contested within educational institutions. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography, we examine how institutional power operates through everyday academic norms, including gatekeeping, performativity, and metric-driven definitions of merit. We show how these norms shape emerging scholars’ academic subjectivities and possibilities for belonging, particularly within a historically uneven South African university landscape. At the same time, we trace forms of resistance and agency that emerge through mentorship, relational accountability, and Ubuntu-inflected commitments to co-belonging. In doing so, we contribute an empirically grounded account of how power, norms, and resistance circulate through the lived experience of academic work, and what this means for re-imagining a more just university.

The preceding sections have outlined the structural conditions of the neoliberal university in South Africa: its colonial inheritances, its market-driven governance, and the ways in which belonging, merit, and knowledge production are regulated. This context establishes the institutional terrain within which our experiences as emerging scholars unfold. However, structural accounts alone cannot capture how these forces are lived, negotiated, and resisted in the texture of everyday academic work. For this reason, we turn to collaborative autoethnography as a method that allows us to examine how broader institutional mechanisms surface in our own scholarly formation, supervision practices, and mentoring relationships. The two themes that emerged from our analysis, (i) mentorship as a site of both gatekeeping and generative refusal, and (ii) the tension between knowledge production and scholarly development under performativity, are grounded in this intersection of structure and experience.

7. Unveiling Our Methodological Journey

Autoethnography is a form of qualitative inquiry within the social sciences; used across disciplines like (but not limited to) sociology and psychology. The method invites the researcher to reflect and recount a story about a personal experience or experiences (Lapadat, 2017). However, autoethnography involves more than telling a story, it includes a cultural analysis—using theory—of a particular context, and explores the implications of experience (Lapadat, 2017). Lapadat (2017) argues that autoethnography is useful in addressing certain issues inherent in some qualitative approaches, for example ethnography, issues such as the politics of voice, representation of people’s stories, and the question of which narratives are privileged. Autoethnography is a reflexive alternative that positions the researcher within the study, and through personal narratives, others are invited to witness the researcher’s vulnerabilities and epiphanies. The challenging of the issues of voice, the researcher’s insider status, vulnerability and epiphanies makes ethics central to autoethnography (Lapadat, 2017). Relational ethics (which has its connections with Ubuntu as a philosophy) are concerned with human dignity, they seek understanding and reciprocity. Autoethnography can be enlisted as a relational ethics approach that supports the praxis of care by hearing stories of individuals and including what matters to their day-to-day lives in research (Lapadat, 2017).

This paper forms part of a series of papers (Mapaling & Shabalala, 2025; Shabalala & Mapaling, 2024), where we use collaborative autoethnography as an approach. It may be important to note that this paper foregrounds more of the critical cultural analysis of the context of the South African university, with only some of the data from our initial conversations presented. As the name suggests, the collaborative in collaborative autoethnography suggests that we reflect on and write about our experiences with one another. In part to feel less isolated about some of the complex issues we grapple with in higher education, but also to ensure that our thoughts and stories are reflexively and collaboratively engaged with. For this process, we endeavoured to balance our individual stories and positionalities with the shared narrative we hoped to construct and re-construct (Mapaling & Shabalala, 2025; Shabalala & Mapaling, 2024). We had a series of conversations that were recorded, and we then used those recordings to generate themes for analysis through reflexive thematic analysis (Joy et al., 2023). This reflexive process allowed us to critically examine the intersecting dynamics of identity, power, and resistance within the academic environment. By collaboratively analysing our lived experiences, we aimed to uncover the underlying structures that perpetuate inequalities and to envision transformative possibilities for the university. This process not only highlights the systemic challenges faced by emerging scholars but also underscores our commitment to fostering a more equitable and inclusive academic landscape.

In autoethnography, the task of the researcher is to locate the ethical axis within themselves by use of reflexive ethical deliberations—thinking about one’s thoughts. While autoethnography has its foundations in postmodern thinking and is said to be ethically motivated (Lapadat, 2017; Richards, 2012), it is not without its ethical challenges. Relationality assumes that people do not operate in a vacuum. Therefore, we need to think carefully about how we tell our stories and the people included in our stories. We include our names as the researchers, as well as the institutions we work or have worked in. In the findings that follow, we refer to ourselves by first name — Curwyn and Nokulunga — to maintain the personal and reflexive register consistent with autoethnographic practice. We, thus, have an obligation to obtain consent from individuals we include (this was done for one of the other papers; Mapaling & Shabalala, 2025) and to examine and interrogate the assumptions about our location, including institutions, based on our positionality. Self-writing in this way can also come across as self-indulgent and sensationalist (Lapadat, 2017). However, using collaborative autoethnography, for us, was also a way of maintaining a reflexive stance. The construction of a shared narrative also meant that we had to interrogate what we regarded as important to include and why.

We acknowledge several limitations of this study. Our account draws on the experiences of two scholars from one disciplinary context (clinical psychology) within South African higher education, and is therefore not intended to be generalisable in the conventional sense. Autoethnographic inquiry privileges depth over breadth; its contribution lies in resonance, verisimilitude, and the capacity to illuminate broader socio-cultural patterns through particular lived experience (Adams et al., 2022). There is also a risk that institutional critique rooted in personal narrative may be read as individual grievance rather than structural analysis. We have attempted to mitigate this by grounding our reflections in established literature and by using our collaborative process as a built-in check on interpretation (Chang et al., 2016; Lapadat, 2017). Additionally, the dual role of researcher-participant in autoethnography is an intentional methodological feature, not an oversight. The aim is not to separate the researcher from the subject but to examine how knowledge is produced through that very entanglement (Ellis et al., 2011). Finally, our focus on mentorship as an everyday practice of refusal means that other forms of resistance and other institutional mechanisms remain outside the scope of this paper and warrant further investigation.

In summary, our approach integrates the principles of collaborative autoethnography, wherein both authors engage in reflective dialogue to co-construct and share narratives that illuminate our positionalities and experiences as Black clinical psychologists navigating South African higher education. Through a series of structured conversations, recorded and transcribed verbatim, we employed reflexive thematic analysis to identify and interpret salient themes emerging from our discussions.

8. Navigating the Neoliberal Labyrinth: Our Reflections on Academia’s Present and Future

In the contemporary higher education landscape (here understood as the contemporary system of South African universities shaped by colonial legacies, neoliberal governance, and the institutional conditions outlined above), emerging scholars find themselves at the nexus of entrenched academic norms and pressing demands for systemic transformation. Our inquiry illuminates two pivotal themes that characterise the experiences of emerging scholars in the neoliberal university: the tension between mentorship and gatekeeping, and the complex interplay of knowledge production and scholarly development.

In presenting these themes, we attend to three analytic registers: the institutional mechanisms through which academic norms are enforced (e.g., promotion criteria, workload models, audit practices); the hegemonic assumptions that underpin those mechanisms (e.g., that merit is individual, that productivity is measurable, that early-career scholars must ‘carry on’); and the practices of resistance and care through which we and our interlocutors attempt to re-make academic life on different terms.

Central to our reflections is the imperative to establish critical canons of knowledge production that are decolonial. Such canons challenge the prevailing neoliberal and Eurocentric paradigms by prioritising African epistemologies and methodologies. This shift is essential for cultivating a more inclusive and socially responsive academic environment that not only critiques existing power structures but also actively contributes to their transformation (Smith, 2012). By redefining what constitutes legitimate knowledge, the African university can better serve its diverse student body and contribute meaningfully to societal advancement.

By engaging in reflexive dialogue and critical analysis, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discourse on reshaping academia into a more inclusive and dynamic environment through the establishment of critical canons of knowledge production. Through our autoethnographic approach, we seek to shed light on the often invisible struggles of emerging scholars and advocate for a more supportive academic environment that values diverse knowledge systems and ways of being. By sharing our lived experiences and critically examining the existing registers of knowledge production, we aim to enhance critical thought surrounding the development and implementation of decolonial canons within the African university (Ratele, 2018; Smith, 2012).

In analysing the dialogues, we attended to how higher education institutions produce and regulate academic subjectivities. We traced (a) institutional mechanisms that shape everyday academic life (for example workload models, performance regimes, DHET-linked output incentives and promotion criteria), (b) hegemonic norms that become naturalised within academic cultures (for example competition, gatekeeping, individualism and performativity), and (c) everyday practices of agency through which emerging scholars attempt to re-make academic life otherwise. Throughout, we remained attentive to intersectional positioning, particularly how race, professional role, career stage and institutional location shaped both constraint and possibility. We also treated moments of ambivalence and contradiction as analytically important, especially where care and discipline were entangled and where our interpretations diverged.

9. Promoting Mentorship, Rejecting Gatekeeping

A prominent theme emerging from our collaborative autoethnographic exploration was our shared commitment to guiding students towards opportunity rather than acting as informal gatekeepers. We did not experience this as a neutral preference or personality trait, but as a deliberate orientation to academic life, one that treats responsibility as relational and insists on seeing students as whole people in contexts that often reward detachment. Nokulunga articulated this sentiment clearly, stating:

I don’t wanna be the guy who doesn’t warn students… if you have a student [who] shows potential, and you don’t say, ‘take full advantage of your whole degree’,… at least… this culture of gatekeeping…

This statement reflects a conscious decision to break away from traditional academic hierarchies that often limit student opportunities. It underscores a commitment to transparency and active support, ensuring that students are fully aware of and can capitalise on the opportunities available to them throughout their academic journey. Curwyn echoed this sentiment, reflecting on how past experiences have shaped his approach to mentorship:

I think some of these experiences also frame the kind of emerging academic but also emerging supervisor that I would like to be and not like to be.

This introspective comment highlights the transformative potential of personal experiences in shaping one’s approach to academic mentorship. It suggests a conscious effort to learn from both positive and negative encounters, using these insights to create a more supportive and inclusive academic environment.

Moreover, this reluctance to gatekeep underscores a commitment to empowering students rather than limiting their opportunities based on subjective judgments. Nokulunga emphasised the importance of guiding students to leverage their strengths across various domains:

You know, if you have strengths in psychometry and the clinical side and research side, hone in on all of it because there’s another layer to doing what we do, you could be an academic and these are the things you need.

This holistic approach to student development recognises the multifaceted nature of academic and professional growth. It encourages students to explore and develop their diverse talents, preparing them for the complexities of both academic and clinical practice.

Psychology education in South Africa is very competitive and often leaves graduate students without options (Padmanabhanunni et al., 2022). Some students, to build experience, work in their respective psychology departments. Working in the department can create a bridging experience where students can access staff more closely and learn about opportunities for future training and research. The example above illustrates a willingness to involve students in meaningful projects, providing them with hands-on experience and opportunities for growth. It reflects a mentorship approach that goes beyond theoretical guidance to include active participation in academic work.

9.1. From Refusal to Practice

Read together, these excerpts suggest that mentorship, in our accounts, is not only guidance but an ethical orientation to academic life. This orientation aligns with humanising pedagogy, which positions education as an ethical practice concerned with dignity, reflexivity, and the cultivation of students’ full humanity, while remaining attentive to decolonial critique and social justice (Mapaling & Hoelson, 2022; Salazar, 2013). It also resonates with Freire’s (2005) insistence that education should cultivate critical consciousness, not only for students but also for educators, including the reflexive work of noticing what we reproduce in the name of excellence. In this sense, our mentoring stance can be read as a remembering practice, where we re-enter academic life with an insistence on student humanity and possibility, rather than treating students as passive consumers of what the educational corporation provides (Rustin, 2016).

Our perspectives highlight the necessity for academics to adopt a supportive mentorship role, encouraging students to explore and develop their diverse talents without imposing restrictive barriers. Khene (2014) argues that practising a humanising pedagogy requires that we, as trainers, humble ourselves to our own humanity to recognise and see our students as human beings. This approach signals an investment in the developing student rather than a preoccupation with the final product (Latecka, 2022). This approach also stands in stark contrast to traditional gatekeeping practices that often limit student opportunities based on narrow criteria or subjective assessments.

9.2. Ambivalence and Contradiction

However, it is important to note that this commitment to mentorship and rejection of gatekeeping occurs within the context of a neoliberal university system that often prioritises metrics and outputs over holistic development (Rustin, 2016). As Latecka (2022) points out, these commitments are largely based on the goodwill of individual lecturers. This means that mentorship can become both meaningful and risky, because it often relies on unrecognised labour, emotional work, and time that is not easily translated into performance metrics. It can also place early-career academics in a double bind, where refusing gatekeeping is ethically compelling, but institutionally unrewarded. Nokulunga reflected on the shift that occurs when one recognises the university as a competitive enterprise:

So then when we come back to the issue of competition, when I started seeing it as a business, then I understood that. Ohh. This is how this thing works, right?

This observation highlights the tension between our own desire to provide supportive mentorship and the competitive, business-like nature of contemporary academia. In this neoliberal system, education is part of the market forces where academics are seen as human capital and educational policies are steered towards increased competition with limited consideration given to the humanising role of education (Latecka, 2022). It suggests that rejecting gatekeeping and promoting inclusive mentorship may require active resistance against institutional pressures that prioritise competition and narrow metrics of success (McKenna, 2024).

At the same time, we did not interpret this moment in exactly the same way. One reading treats “seeing it as a business” as a painful but clarifying recognition that explains why gatekeeping persists. Another reading worries that the business frame can quietly become a justification for adopting the very logics we critique, including the pressure to optimise students and ourselves for survival. Holding both interpretations matters because it shows how easily care, refusal, and performativity can attach to the same mentoring act. This tension between appointment levels, productivity metrics, and scholarly development foreshadows the broader challenges emerging scholars face in balancing knowledge production demands with their own academic growth and development.

9.3. From Mentorship to Metrics

Although we present mentorship and knowledge production as two themes, our analysis suggests they are not independent. Mentorship is one of the everyday sites where metric regimes are transmitted and contested, shaping what counts as legitimate academic work and what forms of labour are recognised or erased. Conversely, output pressures reshape what mentorship can look like, narrowing the time, scope, and institutional value afforded to scholarly formation and relational work. The overlap is therefore not a weakness in the analysis but evidence of how neoliberal governance operates through everyday relational practices.

10. The Tension Between Knowledge Production and Scholarly Development

Another significant theme is the tension between the imperative to produce knowledge and the equally important need to cultivate scholars. This tension reflects a broader systemic issue within higher education institutions, where the relentless pressure to generate research output often overshadows the essential process of nurturing critical thinking and academic skills in emerging scholars. What is striking in our accounts is how quickly this pressure becomes normative, shaping what is recognised as legitimate academic work and, by extension, what kinds of academic selves are rewarded. In such environments, the slower labour of becoming a scholar can be treated as indulgent or secondary, leaving early-career academics caught between institutional demands for outputs and their need to develop voice, craft, and an ethical orientation to knowledge production. Because our professional identities also include clinical work, the demand to be endlessly productive is felt through multiple registers: time, wellbeing, and the narrowing of what counts as valued scholarship. Nokulunga voiced concerns about the disproportionate emphasis on knowledge production at the expense of personal scholarly development:

I think it’s very important because it speaks to, you know, who produces the knowledge that we impart on future generations, but it feels like so much emphasis is put on it and at the detriment of me learning how to be a scholar.

This reflection names a central contradiction. Knowledge production is positioned as essential to academic life and to what we pass on, yet the conditions required to become a scholar are squeezed out by the demand to produce quickly. It also raises questions about what kinds of knowledge get produced when scholarly development is treated as secondary, and whose labour is intensified to keep outputs flowing. The performative nature of academic work further exacerbates this tension. As Curwyn observes:

I don’t think that academia should be as performative as it is.

10.1. From Output to the Targeted Self

Ball’s (2012) description of performativity captures the reorganisation of academic value around measurable productivity, where continuous improvement becomes moralised and where last year’s outputs become the baseline for further escalation (Ball, 2012). In such regimes, the risk is not only exhaustion but a narrowing of scholarly identity, where academics become “targeted selves” and specialists without spirit (Ball, 2013). Read alongside our dialogues, performativity is not merely a cultural annoyance. It is a governance logic that shapes what counts as legitimate work and what forms of becoming are rendered expendable. This also intersects with Canham’s (2020) critique of how young, particularly Black, academics can be rapidly moved into roles heavy with administration, teaching, and institutional service, while being simultaneously judged against output expectations that assume protected time, mentoring, and developmental space. The pressure to constantly produce knowledge can lead to the exploitation of new academics, as Nokulunga noted:

All newbies experienced this, all newbies get exploited.

Curwyn further elaborated on this dynamic from his first lecturing position:

So I was being bullied or exploited to a point where my seeing my line manager, my HoD, was giving me like a physiological response [to anxiety].

These experiences underscore the detrimental impact such pressures can have on early-career academics, highlighting the need for systemic change to support their development and well-being. They also show how institutional dynamics are lived in the body, through anxiety, fear, and the sense that survival requires compliance.

10.2. Ambivalence and Contradiction

While we are critical of metric-driven productivity regimes, our dialogues also surfaced ambivalence about what it means to resist them in practice. Output pressures are experienced as coercive and exploitative, yet knowledge production also carries ethical and political weight, particularly in relation to whose knowledge is legitimised and transmitted to future generations. In this sense, critique of performativity cannot be reduced to rejecting publishing or productivity per se. The tension is rather about the conditions under which knowledge is produced, who bears the costs of that production, and what forms of scholarly becoming are crowded out by accelerated demands.

We also did not interpret the pressures of productivity in exactly the same way. One reading treats the imperative to “produce” as a narrowing force that risks hollowing out scholarship, reducing it to measurable performance and threatening the space required for thinking, craft, and ethical orientation. Another reading holds that producing knowledge can function as a form of agency, including a way of refusing epistemic marginality, contributing to decolonial agendas, and making legible what is otherwise rendered invisible within the institution. Holding both readings matters because it complicates an easy opposition between “outputs” and “humanisation”, and it helps explain why early-career academics may find themselves moving between critique and compliance, refusal and participation, often within the same week and sometimes within the same project.

The tension between knowledge production and scholarly development also reflects broader issues of power and agency within academia. Ngoasheng et al. (2019) argue that critical and humanising pedagogies approach education as a political endeavour, challenging existing power structures and advocating for transformative learning experiences. This perspective underscores the need for a fundamental shift in how we conceptualise academic work and success, pointing towards the pressing need for systemic change in higher education. Furthermore, the pressure to produce knowledge at the expense of scholarly development can be seen as a form of what Freire (2005) termed the banking model of education, where knowledge is simply deposited into passive recipients. In contrast, a humanising pedagogy approach would emphasise the co-creation of knowledge and the development of critical consciousness among both students and educators.

To address this tension, there is a need for a more balanced approach that values both the production of knowledge and the holistic development of scholars. As Canham (2020) suggests, emerging scholars should be given room to engage in thinking, research, and teaching without being overwhelmed by heavy teaching loads or excessive pressure to publish. This approach further aligns with Tembo’s (2022) call for knowledge production from African Indigenous epistemic orders, rather than simply filling Western epistemologies with African content. It also resonates with Dladla’s (2020) concept of being free to become in the ethical sense of being human.

11. Implications for Policy and Practice

Our reflections suggest that meaningful change requires action at several levels of the university system. Individual commitment to mentorship matters, but when support depends on goodwill alone it becomes uneven, easily withdrawn under pressure, and disproportionately carried by those already navigating precarity. What is needed, instead, are conditions that make humanising, decolonial academic practice structurally possible. At the same time, we recognise that such conditions are not instituted in a vacuum. They are shaped by budget constraints, DHET-linked performance regimes, entrenched workload allocations, contract insecurity, and the managerial risk aversion that often accompanies institutional audits, throughput pressures, and reputational concerns. For this reason, the recommendations below are framed not only as what should change, but as what can be implemented within existing governance arrangements, and where resistance is likely to emerge.

At department level, mentorship should be treated as core academic labour rather than discretionary service. This means building supervision and developmental mentoring into workload models so that it does not compete silently with publication expectations. Departments can also reduce informal gatekeeping by making pathways to opportunity more transparent and predictable, for example by standardising how information about assistantships, authorship processes, bursaries, internships, and postgraduate routes is shared with students. Alongside this, emerging academics need structured peer support that does not rely on chance collegiality. Regular communities of practice can offer spaces for scholarly development, supervision dilemmas, writing support, and honest engagement with the institutional pressures that shape early-career academic life. A foreseeable constraint is that departments may argue that mentoring is too difficult to quantify and that workload models are already stretched. One way of navigating this is to start with a bounded, auditable set of mentoring activities (for example, formal supervision, structured developmental mentoring, and trainee support work) and to pilot workload credits over a defined period, with agreed evidence sources that do not become surveillance tools.

At faculty and institutional level, protections against exploitation and bullying require more than policy statements. Clear reporting pathways, access to independent mediation, timely response processes, and safeguards for staff on short-term contracts are essential if early-career academics are to develop without fear of retaliation or reputational harm. We anticipate resistance here because management structures may prioritise institutional risk management, avoid acknowledging harm publicly, or fear that robust reporting mechanisms will increase formal grievances. A practical response is to frame these mechanisms as part of institutional duty of care and governance, including clear timelines for response, confidentiality safeguards, and independent points of contact (for example an ombud function or external mediation panels) that reduce conflicts of interest. Institutions also need to broaden what is recognised and rewarded as academic excellence. Promotion and performance frameworks that value only measurable outputs will continue to narrow scholarship and incentivise extractive practices. A more credible approach is one that recognises relational labour, student development work, decolonial curriculum efforts, collaborative scholarship, and community-engaged knowledge production as legitimate and valued contributions. Finally, institutions should create developmental space for emerging scholars by protecting time for reading, methodological learning, and writing craft through reduced teaching loads for defined periods, structured sabbatical pathways, or targeted early-career development schemes. The constraint here is that teaching loads are often treated as fixed and non-negotiable, especially in resource-pressured faculties. Where that is the case, the minimum commitment can be to ringfence developmental time within the academic calendar and to formalise it as an institutional obligation rather than a personal choice.

Ubuntu-informed commitments can strengthen these recommendations when they are translated into policy mechanisms rather than invoked only as moral language. In practice, this means embedding co-belonging and relational accountability into the rules through which academic life is organised, including workload allocation for mentorship, mentoring charters that define reciprocal obligations and boundaries, promotion criteria that reward collaborative and socially responsive scholarship, and grievance procedures that protect the dignity of vulnerable staff. Ubuntu can also inform how departments conduct supervision and evaluation by shifting emphasis from individualised competition towards collective development, while remaining attentive to how the language of care can be co-opted. Ubuntu-informed policy therefore requires both affirmation and guardrails, so that “community” does not become a justification for extracting invisible labour.

At sector level, the incentive environment matters. Where DHET-linked output logics intensify individualism and competition, universities and professional bodies can advocate for evaluation approaches that recognise collaboration and socially responsive scholarship rather than privileging individual publication counts alone. In parallel, sustained national conversations about academic culture are needed, not as symbolic exercises but as mechanisms for building shared norms. Sector-wide forums, guidelines, and leadership development initiatives can foreground belonging, epistemic justice, and staff wellbeing as core conditions for transformation, instead of treating them as secondary to rankings and throughput pressures. Resistance is likely because evaluation systems tend to privilege what is easy to count. A pragmatic route is to propose hybrid evaluation approaches that retain accountability while widening what counts as evidence of impact, including collective outputs, mentoring outcomes, and community-engaged knowledge production.

Taken together, these implications underscore that transformation is not only a matter of personal ethics or institutional rhetoric, but of the incentive structures and governance practices through which academic life is organised and made legible, and through which discomfort becomes a diagnostic of what requires reform.

12. Concluding Reflections and Questions for Further Inquiry

This paper contributes to scholarship on the neoliberal university by centring mentorship as a contested institutional practice through which belonging, credibility, and scholarly formation are produced and regulated. By drawing on collaborative autoethnography, we show how mentorship can function as everyday refusal, not as an abstract stance but as a set of ordinary decisions made under conditions of scarcity, competition, and performance management. At the same time, we highlight the costs of refusal when mentoring and care rely on goodwill and remain structurally unrewarded, particularly for Black early-career academics navigating precarity and institutional scrutiny.

If discomfort is to be productive, it must be anchored in the mundane practices through which the university governs academic life. Discomfort becomes diagnostic when it points us to the mechanisms that require reform, including workload models that erase mentoring labour, promotion criteria that reward output at the expense of development, performance regimes that intensify surveillance, and reporting systems that fail to protect vulnerable staff. The challenge is not only to imagine a humanising university, but to make it administratively and institutionally possible, so that practices of care and refusal are not exceptional, risky, or individually borne. To extend the conversation beyond this State of the Academy Address, we invite readers, and future research, to consider the following three questions:

• How can institutions balance the need for academic rigour with more inclusive and supportive environments for emerging scholars?
• What role can established academics play in dismantling gatekeeping practices while maintaining high standards of scholarship?
• How might we re-imagine knowledge production to better align with the holistic development of students and scholars and the broader public good?

In this sense, Ubuntu remains useful not only as aspiration but as an ethical compass for policy and practice, insisting that interdependence and humaneness must be materially supported through the rules that organise workload allocation and evaluation criteria, including what is recognised as legitimate academic labour and what forms of scholarship are made possible.