Life-in-relation knowledge domains and the re-organisation of universities

How do universities organise themselves? In the last few weeks I've spent some time thinking about what started with a relatively straightforward question about research centres, institutes, departments and faculties, or more generally, the organisational architecture of a research-intensive university. A question of organisational structures, really. 

But why do we organise the university the way we do in the first place?

All universities have faculties or schools and departments, do they not? There are the Sciences, Humanities, Engineering, Health Sciences, Commerce and Law at UCT, for example, each with their own histories, disciplinary territories, institutional cultures and, of course, budgets. Some universities might have some other faculty arrangements; maybe a faculty of Theology, Education, Arts or Agriculture, or the like. We are so accustomed to this arrangement that it seems natural. 

Yet there is nothing particularly natural about it. The contemporary university's organisational structures are products of particular intellectual histories, political economies and institutional politics. They are not necessarily the most sensible way to organise knowledge. Disciplines can change faculties; faculties can merge. Some universities have 'schools' rather than faculties. Some have schools inside faculties. Life, certainly, is not organised into faculties, even if we think they are somehow natural.

Immanuel Kant wrote about the organisation of, and struggle between faculties in Der Streit der Fakultäten (all the way back in 1798). In there, he talks about why the state has an interest in supporting universities and why, in particular, historically the first three faculties, that is theology, medicine and law, are very much in the interest of the state (and therefore the "higher faculties") as against the fourth historical faculty, that is the faculty of philosophy (or "lower faculty") which is concerned with the freedom to examine truth claims; with reason. He explains how these faculties respectively relate to different interests of the state with regard to the organisation of its subjects, the people. 

What if life was the reference point for organising knowledge and the organisation of knowledge would be logically the organisation of the university? Illness does not respect the boundaries between medicine, sociology, economics and psychology. Climate change is simultaneously a matter of natural science, technology, politics, culture and justice. What does it mean to study education without studying the society in which people learn, the economies in which they hope to work, and the political relations through which their futures are shaped?

What if Life, rather than the interest of the state, was the alternative starting point? What if not the relationship between knowledge, authority and power, but the relationships that enable Life were central? 

What if the university accommodated the Life-in-relation imperative as its superlative knowledge interest? What if we began not with the relationship between knowledge, authority and power, but with the relationships that constitute and sustain Life? This need not imply that knowledge must always be immediately useful to Life. Nor that Life can somehow dictate what is true. Rather, could we imagine a university in which knowledge remains answerable to Reason, while its institutional organisation takes Life-in-relation as its fundamental reference point?

Kant was concerned with the university's existence within a political order, serving the public (or rather the state's) interests, and the importance of freedom of enquiry, freedom of reason, the freedom to examine, question, contradict, etc. (philosophy in its wider sense). 

Thus, I don't disagree with Kant about the importance of the university as an institutional home that protects free rational enquiry. Quite the contrary. But what if we challenged the historical starting point from which he develops his argument: the university as an institution organised in relation to the interests of the state? What if we began instead with the fundamental relations that constitute Life itself as an organising principle for the university?

I therefore propose we begin with the fundamental relations that constitute Life itself as organising principle for a university. Human life in relation to other humans, to society, to technology, to the natural world, to history, to knowledge, and to the conditions of our collective flourishing, to the cosmos, indeed, within and beyond, deeper and wider.

I've been experimenting with what I tentatively call African life-in-relation knowledge domains. The idea draws on a relational understanding of knowledge and existence, including African humanist traditions, without suggesting that either African intellectual thought or relationality can be reduced to a single philosophy.

In my current sketch, seven broad domains emerge, respectively concerned with life and health; planetary relations; material life and livelihoods; technology and innovation; meaning and expression; social relations, justice and belonging; and learning, knowledge and human formation. They are not new faculties in disguise, nor are they intended as another set of administrative silos. They are ways of bringing scholarship into relation to fundamental dimensions of existence.

Let us be clear: disciplines matter. They are canonical repositories of accumulated knowledge, methods, value orientations, standards of argument and, most of all, scholarly communities. The point is not to dissolve them. It is to ask whether they should determine the fundamental organisational architecture of a university.

Similarly, we can easily reinvent the faculty system with more fashionable names. Or we could subordinate all scholarship to immediate social usefulness, leaving little room for curiosity-driven inquiry, fundamental science, critical scholarship and the intellectual freedom to pursue questions whose significance is not yet apparent. All this is worse and just leads to less knowledge.

Working in the African context, and ex Africa semper aliquid novi, there is also a distinctly African question here. Let's for now appreciate the European institutional inheritance - its transplantation onto African soil, but move on from that. Let's reconsider not only what knowledge the African university de facto produces, and those 'decolonial' question of whose knowledge counts; and then, revisit the question, how knowledge is institutionally organised.

What began as an organisational question has become an epistemological one. And, increasingly, a political one. Are you interested in what an African research university organised around life-in-relation looks like in practice. There are difficult questions about governance, resources, academic identities, disciplinary depth and institutional power. I am busy with them. But I am becoming rather convinced that the faculty structure should be an answer to a question, not an unquestioned starting point.

And perhaps that is where reimagining the African university may need to begin. A question to continue this argument and refine it may well be: If Life-in-relation becomes the organising principle of the university, should Reason be conceived as one of the relations constituting Life, or as the independent critical principle through which every proposed understanding of Life must be examined?

Thinking about Lis

 

It is a year since my longstanding colleague, comrade, mentor and friend, Prof. Lis Lange, passed on. Today I  heard her name spoken in a university meeting at UCT; her legacy in an institution where some members really treated her quite badly, lives on. Lis came to South Africa - having grown up in Argentina, done her undergraduate studies at the University of Buenos Aires and a master's at the Collegio de Mexico - to study History at Wits University. I met her ten years later at the Council on Higher Education, where I arrived still being a master's student at UCT. For almost a quarter of a century, our scholarly paths and our personal paths would intersect henceforth.

In the last 12 months, Jonathan Jansen and Andre Keet took up the challenge to bring together an impressive group of scholars to compile a Festschrift - a celebratory book - on the life and work of Lis Lange. It has just been published by African Minds. In a series of chapters, Lis life and work is portrayed, giving an idea of her thinking opus, her friendships and family life, her politics and her scholarly and policy activism. 

The full book Festschrift: Tribute in Honour of Maria Lis Lange: Scholar, Administrator, Activist, Leader (2026) is open access available here and my chapter in particular is here. 

Artificial Intelligence in Student Affairs and Services: A Global Study

How are student affairs practitioners using different types of AI tools in their professional lives?  

What are their attitudes towards the adoption of AI - whether by university staff or students - and how do they see the ethical implications of AI use, and how do they view the future use of AI? 

Different types of AI tools - whether chatbots, learning management platforms, or large language models - have been in use globally in universities and their SAS for a while. This study is a first ever - the baseline - published in one of student affairs top ranked journals. 

Proudly collaborating with Drs Brett Perozzi, Lisa Bardill-Moscaritolo and Birgit Schreiber. Indeed, this is our third global study as SAS research consortium after the Covid-19 student affairs survey, our SDG and student affairs study, and now AI and student affairs. 
The online first is available here. 

What is postgraduate student affairs?*

It is not that postgraduate student affairs has been absent from higher education in Africa. It is also not entirely under-researched. However, it is true that postgraduate student affairs seems rather "marginal" in student affairs and services overall, and there are several reasons for that. 

Why does postgraduate student affairs seem to be a somewhat marginal practice and research topic? Some of the reasons may include:

1. The undergraduate-centred history of student affairs and the dominant focus on matters of undergraduate access and success, the undergraduate student experience, undergraduate student concerns (like the first-year experience, students-at-risk, first-generation students, equity, diversity and inclusion, on-campus experience, etc.), and the ubiquitous issue of student funding and resource pressures in African higher education. 
2. Conversely, in postgraduate studies there is much more an academic focus related to postgraduate education around research, supervision and "the thesis" which is reinforced by the relative institutional invisibility of postgraduate students, who are often older, employed and in some cases straddling the student/staff experience in higher education, being often part-time, commuting or off campus, working in labs or being on field research.
3. Finally there is typically quite an organisational fragmentation and unclear institutional ownership of the postgraduate experience, e.g., between the traditional (and undergraduate-centred) department of student affairs and offices of postgraduate studies. Academic staff involved in postgraduate studies (such as supervisors) often still play a more 'pastoral' role, while the relative maturity and seniority of postgraduate students also shifts their 'support needs'.

The result is that postgraduate student affairs as a field is both conceptually fragmented and institutionally dispersed, and thus there is need for bringing some coherence to questions of postgraduate access and completion, wellbeing, belonging, funding, peer support, careers, international student experience, diversity, equity and inclusion, including a special focus on matters of student-supervisior relations, supervision practice and supervision experience, research education and training and researcher identity. How to then make out of a surprisingly marginal field a recognisable field of practice and scholarship.

The start can be defining the field. In my view, postgraduate student affairs could be understood as the field of practice and scholarship concerned with the access, holistic experience, development, support, belonging, wellbeing and success of postgraduate students, alongside and in support of postgraduate academic affairs, research education and supervision. It overlaps with postgraduate administration, research education and researcher development, but keeps the postgraduate student in view as a whole person and emerging researcher or professional.

To move forward, I want to propose a potentially important African research agenda—and hence I believe the time has come for the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa (JSAA) to devote a special issue to “Postgraduate Student Affairs in Africa”. 

Such an issue could bring together work that is currently scattered across different fields and ask whether postgraduate student affairs should become a more explicit area "Call for Papers" (see post on LinkedIn).

*Postgraduate (in British English) and Graduate (in American English) are treated here as synonyms. 

NASDEV at 30 - three decades of developing student professionals

 

Learning from itself and learning from others; the NASDEV National Association for Student Development Professionals. 

It is important to celebrate the milestones and celebrate the associations growth, which is also a community of practice, a community of shared learning, social experience and situated knowledge. We learn by sharing experiences, reflecting on practice, challenging our biases and blindspots, affirming our shared purposes and transform individual knowledges into a collective knowledge. 

The importance is to reflect on our humanness and what we bring to the table as humans with human intelligence. These were some of the words of the presentation by SAASSAP President, Dr Jerome September. My presentation was about 30 years of history. 

The ask

Topic: Lessons learned from formative practices: This sub-theme creates space for critical reflection on earlier models, flagship programmes, and formative approaches that shaped the sector, including what succeeded, what failed and why. It aims to extract transferable lessons that can guide future design, resource decisions and practitioner development. 

My lens of policy, research and practice.

The historical trajectory of higher education policy and student affairs

Viewed through my trajectory — from a newly arrived South African matriculant in 1996, to UCT undergraduate and residence house-comm member in 1999 and SRC Vice-President in 2000, to Council on Higher Education researcher, to postdoctoral fellow and senior lecturer, to institutional researcher, to HSRC research leader, and, from April 2025, Director of Postgraduate Studies and Researcher Development at UCT — the history of student affairs since the mid-1990s reads as a movement across four overlapping eras which map against : 

• democratisation and system design; 

• merger, monitoring and student-success institutionalisation; 

• decolonial protest and funding crisis; and, most recently, 

• wellbeing, digitality, AI, and postgraduate researcher development. 

In South Africa, the foundational higher education policy arc over the last 30 years ran from the NEPI and National Commission on Higher Education of 1996 to the  Green/White Paper process and the Higher Education Act of 1997, the National Plan for Higher Education in 2001, the merger era, and system consolidation to the new post-2008 transformation agenda, the White Paper for Post-School Education and Training, the massification leading to the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall years of 2015/16 and following, the shift to grant-based support for poor and working-class undergraduates, the COVID-19 digital pivot, the 2023 National Plan for PSET, and the current 2024–2026 concerns with transformation implementation, funding governance, accommodation, wellbeing (gambling) and system reset. 

Across that same arc – the policy arc -  now student affairs moved from a relatively fragmented “student services” orientation toward a more integrated field; from a practice to a profession; from borrowing and peddling to a reflective, data, research and theory reformed, reflective praxis; one concerned with access and belonging, residence life and learning, health and wellness, disability inclusion and universal access, gender and gender identity, revolving doors and notions of students-at-risk to first-year transition interventions, student politics to student partnerships, crisis response and technology and hybrid provision, the full student lifecycle, life-stage models and postgraduate student affairs. 

Of course, this is a very generalized perspective on a changing field and practice that lived itself out at different paces and with different emphases across our diverse higher education landscape. The student body and the campus and learning conditions prevalent in different context is, what determines some of these emphases, as much as institutional champions, student affairs leaders in different contexts, bring, support or impede various changes.

It is also a deeply personal take on this change.

I am also one of Mandela’s children – or a post-apartheid baby – for I came to South Africa as international student in 1995. Through the years, particularly from my late Master’s and doctoral research between 2000 and 2008, my own work started to map unusually closely onto several field-wide shifts. 

Early on, my practice and research centred student governance, representation and higher education policy; then broadened into institutional research and realizing the importance of data, data analytics and ‘institutional intelligence’ to understand the increasingly complex institutional terrain and how this is experienced by and impacts students; 

African comparative higher education, student engagement and citizenship; then into the professionalisation of student affairs in Africa, new developments like public-private partnerships, and the emergence of ‘entrepreneurial student politics’; then, mirroring the massification of higher education in South Africa so came new analyses of the politics of protest, and the different violences involved in being black on campus, eventually leading to the wellbeing studies after 2015–2016; and now, in my new role, my research focuses on postgraduate support ecosystems, the transition from undergraduate into postgraduate studies, and from postgraduate studies into academic and professional life. 

Anticipating this have been work on international comparative student affairs, doctoral education, community engagement, and the importance of data and data analytics in student affairs decision-making, policy and practice; including experimentation with innovative qualitative methods such as photovoice, world café, poetic inquiry and research-as-intervention studies.  

International parallels

Internationally, the strongest parallels to developments in South African student affairs were, perhaps, the rise of student engagement and related surveys as a quality indicator through NSSE (or as it is in South Africa – SASSE) in the early to mid 2000s, the persistence/retention turn associated with Vincent Tinto (and ‘discrediting’ of the deficit model), the global codification of student affairs and services through IASAS and the work on the Global Handbook in the 2010s – along with it a gradual move away from the American dominance of the field and practice  -  including moving beyond the professional competency movement of ACPA/NASPA towards a South African and African engagement with questions of what constitutes the profession. In many ways, South African debates have informed and reflected a global spread of anti-racist and decolonial campus protest especially from 2015 - #RhodesMustFall, #OpenStellenbosch, the Black Student Movement at Rhodes, and #FeesMustFall taking these concerns nationwide and into the national policy realm. 

We hardly had come to terms with the implications of the student activism and the shifting concerns on how to deal with the mounts of endebbedness of students and poverty on campus, when Covid hit and required in the early 2020s a pandemic-induced reorganisation of student support. In its wake came the recent reframing of student affairs around wellbeing and digital transformation. 

The ‘southernisation’ of student affairs 

The parallels between these shifting emphasis in student affairs research, policy and practice matter much because it shows how over the last 30 years the scholarship of student affairs has consistently become “southernised” – we now have a Global South international student-affairs discourse. This is not that African and Global South student affairs is rejecting the Schuh’s, Kuh’s, Tinto’s, Pascarelli and Terrenzini’s and so forth of America, but rather the African higher education context and our scholarly and professional engagement with it in a reflective way is forcing a reckoning with the contextual applicability of these theories in the context of African higher education massification, South African democratic and party politics, the decolonization discourse, resource constraints and related innovations in student affairs to address unmet financial needs of students and uneven institutional capacity.

The long arc of change is not linear. It is better understood as a continuing argument over what the university is for, who belongs here, who pays, who governs, and what student affairs should do in anticipation and in response. 

My personal advice

In my case, the deepest continuity has been that the field never really split into separate domains of politics, policy, services and research. In my biography suggests that you experienced student representation first as practice, then theorised it as governance and democratisation, 

When, as a postdoc, I was able to start attending conferences across Africa and do research in our neighbouring countries and in East Africa, I became interested in understanding comparatively across Africa what happens.

FeesMustFall forced me to revisit the student politics research and now, inspired and traumatized, through the lenses of violence that students experienced, recounted and recalled, as well as through the new, post-trauma lens of wellbeing, discourse and memory

Now approach it from the institutional interface between postgraduate support, student affairs, research administration and researcher development. That is why the “from your perspective” view is so analytically useful: your career effectively stitches together the major methodological and substantive shifts of the field. 

That is my very personal advice to all young, early and mid-career student affairs professionals – work reflectively between practice and theory, document your curiosity, and never stop being being amazed and fresh.

Towards an integrated postgraduate support ecosystem

 

Postgraduate studies encompasses all qualification-related studies following a first degree, i.e. a Bachelor, in university education. In some countries like the US, it is called 'graduate' studies. Among postgraduate students in South Africa there are those that are involved in research degrees (or degrees with a significant research component), which are the Bachelor Honours, Master and Doctoral (e.g., PhD) degrees, and those who are involved in more professionally focused qualifications like a Postgraduate Diploma. All postgraduate students are adults and degree holders. 

Unlike many undergraduate, certificate or diploma students, postgraduates often have significant family and are-giving responsibilities; in many cases they are de facto part-time because they also work (whether full or part-time) whether inside the university as lab assistants, library assistants, research assistants, tutors and teaching assistants, or the like, or outside the university. The design and offering of postgraduate support must take all these variables into account. 

In my first year at UCT, a lot of focus has been on understanding the varied support services availed to postgraduates from different sectors and levels in the university organisation, whether at programme, department, faculty, campus or institutional level, and by academic staff (such as programme convenors and supervisors), academic managers (like HODs, Deans) or administrative staff and managers (like student affairs or the research office). 

The "rainbow iris" of UCT's postgraduate support ecosystem is there to look out for postgraduate students and support them. It was originally developed under my predecessor, Prof Peter Meissner, and the postgraduate communication specialist in the Research Office, Jess Oosthuizen. In the course of 2025 we have revised and expanded the listing of services and created links and brochures, available online and offline, to the different support hubs. 

On 11 December 2025, I was proud to read the citation for and graduate my friend, research buddy, and former colleague, Taabo Mugume, who graduated with his PhD in Higher Education Studies at the University of the Free State, proudly having been supervised by me. 

Dr Taabo Mugume

Taabo Mugume was born on 23 February 1982 in Mbale, Uganda, where he completed his schooling at Kira Secondary School in 2000. After moving to South Africa, he attained a B.Admin (cum laude) in 2012, B.Admin Honours in 2013 and M.Admin (Political Studies; cum laude) in 2015 from the University of the Western Cape. I proudly was his supervisor for the M.Admin at UWC.

In 2017, he completed a PGDip in Higher Education (with distinction) at the University of the Free State (UFS) together with me. Both of us graduated with distinction having worked together at DIRAP while doing the PGDip at the same time. 

His career started as Assistant Lecturer at UWC in 2014. He joined the UFS in 2015 as researcher in DIRAP, working for me while I was Assistant Director there, and by December 2025 he had become the Director: Monitoring and Institutional Research - which means, he had taken the post of the person who was my line manager when I was at the UFS. What achievement for Taabo; what pride for me.

Taabo, or rather: Dr Mugume, was awarded his PhD with his thesis titled: 

Creative Governance and University Response to Student Protest Demands to Decolonise the Curriculum: A South African Case Study

In that study, Taabo investigates how a South African university’s governance structures responded to #MustFall student demands to decolonise the curriculum between 2015 and 2020. Using qualitative case study methods, including interviews with university leaders, academics, and student representatives, Mugume analyses three intra-institutional cases: the institution-wide language policy review and curriculum change processes in two faculties. 

The study introduces and applies an adapted “Creative Governance for Curriculum Decolonisation” framework, showing how creative practices, such as a university assembly for consensus-building and inter-departmental decolonisation forums, enhanced responsiveness to student demands. It highlights governance self-assessment tools like the Council Score Card as mechanisms for improvement and proposes the creative governance framework as an analytical and practical tool to strengthen inclusive and responsive university governance in South Africa.
 

Almost there! A glimps behind the scenes of the forthcoming book...

Anye and I drafted a preface for the forthcoming book:

#FeesMustFall ten years on

which is co-edited by Anye Nyamnjoh, Thierry Luescher, Josh Platzky-Miller, Keamo Morwe and Simamkele Dlakavu, to be published in 2026 by Mandela University Press. The final version of the Preface, which still needs to be reviewed, amended and approved by the other three editors, will eventually become the Preface of the book. Here is a glimpse behind the scenes of the forthcoming book.

PS. I love the picture from 2015 of the school kids urging the university students to "keep fighting". I wonder where they are now. Ten years on... they have hopefully long joined higher education or gained some other way a vocational qualification, and started their own businesses or found great jobs. (PPS. If you know who took this picture or who is in it, please let me know.)

Draft Preface

This book began, as many books about social movements do, not with quiet scholarly contemplation or an accumulation of data and ideas, but with questions and commitments that refused to settle.

Ten years after the South African student spring of 2015–16, questions lingered like: What has been the impact of this student generation’s sacrifices? What has changed? And perhaps most pressingly: what has not? How do we keep the memory alive? How do we introduce a new generation of students and activists— and remind scholars, academic leaders, policy makers and the public— to the ideas and politics of that time? 

Between 2015 and 2017, South African higher education was engulfed by a wave of student protests that travelled across campuses and beyond them, carrying hashtags as names that became both slogans and archives: #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, #EndOutsourcing, #PatriarchyMustFall. These were not only movements and campaigns about fees, statues and policies. They were moments in which the university itself — its histories, cultures, promises, and manifestations— were profoundly contested and reframed as violences, exclusions, and trauma. Students gave language to what many had long felt but struggled to name: that the post-apartheid university remained tethered to coloniality, racial capitalism, patriarchy, and epistemic hierarchy. Studying in the post-apartheid university was experienced as ‘black pain’. And this crisis was neither abstract nor episodic; it was personal and structural.

As the tenth anniversary approached, organising a commemorative event felt insufficient.. We were not interested in toasting to the student struggles or nostalgically domesticating what had been deeply disruptive and immensely generative. We wanted to contribute to a critical reckoning: a collective effort to critically think through the movement and its various manifestations— its histories, meanings; its impact, legacy and significance. 

The first seeds for this book were planted in conversation and collaboration across institutions and networks of scholars, practitioners, and former activists who had lived through the protests in different roles. A colloquium convened under the broad rubric of rupture and decolonisation created a space to revisit the moment not as a closed chapter but as an unfinished process. From these exchanges of ideas and research came the call for contributions that anchored this book. 

We invited scholars, higher education practitioners, former student leaders and activists to reflect on the 2015–16 moment and its aftermath. We deliberately opened up the space for different genres and methods. Research articles sit alongside personal narratives, visual essays, and reflective accounts. In this way, the book mirrors the movement itself: polyphonic, contested, networked, and internally differentiated. The knowledge produced in and about the movement both reflects and challenges the confines of conventional academic form.

Some contributors write with analytic distance, producing rigorous empirical and policy analyses. Others draw on the immediacy of lived experience.. Some trace policy trajectories and institutional reforms while others recall solidarity, care and trauma. Together, these contributions render the student movement as a complex social formation: uneven, contradictory, generative and creative.

Historically, this volume reflects on a moment when the language of “transformation,” dominant in post-1994 higher education policy, had lost much of its critical purchase. . The students’ insistence on  “decolonisation” signalled deep dissatisfaction with compromise, incremental reform and managerial rationale. Decolonisation named new and deeper questions: Who belongs in the university? Who does the university belong to? Who and what is missing from the canons and corridors of the university? Who pays and who benefits? Decolonisation brought new concepts into the South African academic discourse and linked old and new demands: like epistemic justice and material redress. In unsettling the post-apartheid moral grammar of the public university, the movement exposed tensions at the heart of the post-apartheid elite compact.

Intellectually, the movement drew on a wide repertoire, including most prominently its “official” three ideological pillars, i.e., Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism, and Black Radical Feminism, alongside South African Charterism, queer theory, decolonial thought, Marxism, labour struggles, and longstanding traditions of student and worker solidarity.  These traditions did not always cohere comfortably. Campus-based movements and the broad national campaigns were at once local and translocal, digitally networked and physically embodied, rooted in specific positionalities and yet resonant far beyond them. The #MustFall ideas thus travelled across sectors, borders, and domains with the university as the nuclear site where broader social conflicts crystallised.

If the 2015-16 student movement opened possibilities, it also exposed its limits: gains were uneven and incomplete; institutions adapted; securitisation intensified; dissent was suppressed; debate was polarised; internal fissures emerged; fatigue and trauma setting in. 

The question of legacy, impact, and significance is therefore not simple. Yet answers may lie in looking back afresh, in critically interrogating the present, and in asking what political and intellectual imaginaries the movement made possible over the past decade — and what they might still make possible.  This book is the space we created for questions to be asked, probed, and perhaps answered. If it achieves anything, we hope it does so in refusing both celebration and condemnation, and in continuing the work of understanding as part of the work of social change.

How do to start, operate, and sustain a high-quality diamond open access journal in Africa: Lessons from JSAA

The landscape of academic publishing in Africa remains dominated by problematic models; high subscription fees, limited visibility and reach, and highly limited access, on the one side; and in some cases, predatory platforms that mis-use the “open access” label and charge high article processing fees (APCs) for (often) low-quality, irrelevant and unscientific outputs As researchers and scholars committed to the academic project and the public good, we must ask: How can we build platforms that are openly accessible to all — free to publish in, free to read — and yet uphold high scholarly standards? The experience of the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa (JSAA) offers a compelling, pragmatic answer.

For the question, how to start, operate, and sustain a high-quality diamond open access journal in Africa, the Journal of Student Affaires in Africa (JSAA) can offer some humble lessons. For the JSAA Executive, Editorial Board, reviewers and supporters, JSAA has put together a "Operational Manual" that includes a broad range of lessons including a financial plan. 

Why we need Diamond Open Access (DOA) in Africa

JSAA was founded with the mission to professionalise and support student affairs across African higher-education institutions, to give voice to research on the student experience, the theory and practice of student affairs, and topical matters like student development support, student advising, leadership development, student politics and institutional governance, residence life, diversity, equity and inclusivity programmes, and support for universal access, among other things; these are areas rarely prioritized in mainstream journals. As such, its founding purpose was rooted in social relevance and academic justice.

Launch with Purpose, Collaboration and Institutional Anchoring

A DOA journal must begin with clarity of mission and purpose. JSAA was anchored within supportive academic institutions, which provided legitimacy, infrastructural support, and institutional buy-in. Equally important was the forging of partnerships beyond a single institution — reaching into other universities across Africa, and drawing on a network of scholars, practitioners, and funders. This collaborative foundation helps diversify authorship, editorial oversight, and readership, and guards against dominance by a narrow group of institutions or scholars.

For a new journal: start small but ambitiously. Define a mission that reflects real needs in African higher education (e.g. student affairs, language policy, access, equity). Seek institutional hosts willing to commit minimal resources (web hosting, institutional support, endorsement), and begin building a network of interested scholars, reviewers, and potential funders.

Operate with Rigour, Transparency, and Inclusion

Sustainability of scholarly quality depends on robust editorial governance. JSAA’s editorial and operational guidelines — including transparent peer review mechanisms, ethical standards, conflict-of-interest policies — ensure integrity and credibility. Double-blind peer review and the inclusion of diverse reviewers from across Africa (and beyond) uphold scholarly standards while preventing regional or institutional bias.

In addition, JSAA embodies an inclusive and decolonial ethos: promoting multilingualism (e.g. abstracts in English + African languages where possible), encouraging authorship from underrepresented regions and groups, and ensuring that institutional affiliation (of editors, reviewers and authors) does not skew representation. Such practices help democratize knowledge in African higher education.

For a new journal, it is critical to draft a launch plan, a business plan and operational manual from the onset: define roles (editorial board, reviewers, copy-editing, production), peer-review policy, ethical guidelines, a financial sustainability plan and commitment to open access without charges to authors or readers.

Sustain the Diamond Model: Mixed Funding, Institutional Support, and Community Orientation

One of the biggest challenges for DOA journals is sustainability. Charging author fees (APCs) or reader fees undermines the “diamond” commitment; but how then to cover costs — hosting, production, editorial time? JSAA overcomes this through mixed funding strategies: institutional support, small grants, sponsorships of themed issues, and voluntary/pro bono editorial contribution.

Importantly, the journal treats its editorial and review community as a Community of Practice — not just anonymous gate-keepers, but active, recognized contributors to student-affairs scholarship. Regular communication, recognition (e.g. editorial board roles, certificates, acknowledgments), and a shared sense of mission help build loyalty and long-term commitment.

For any aspiring DOA journal: develop a sustainability plan that draws on multiple, modest income streams rather than relying on a single source. Build a community ethos: treat contributors as collaborators, not as unpaid labour.

Extend Impact: From Journal to Ecosystem

JSAA does not stop at publishing articles. Over time, it has grown into a broader intellectual and professional network — a space for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in student affairs to collaborate, exchange ideas, and influence institutional and national policy. This bridging between research, practice, and policy magnifies impact.

A journal that remains narrowly academic risks marginalization. But one that nurtures a living network, translates research into practice — through workshops, community-of-practice events, training modules — becomes a catalyst for change.

Conclusion: What it Takes — and What Is Possible

Starting a high-quality, diamond open access journal in Africa is not easy. It requires courage, vision, disciplined governance, collaborative networks, modest but steady resources, and a deep commitment to scholarly quality, academic equity and academic and societal relevance.

But as JSAA’s experience shows, it is possible, even sustainable — and deeply impactful. By anchoring a journal in purpose, dedicating resources to rigorous but fair editorial processes, and building community rather than profit, we can create spaces where African knowledge circulates freely — enriching our universities, informing policy, and building capacity across the continent.

If you are thinking of starting such a journal — do it! With commitment, solidarity, and careful planning, you could help shape the future of African scholarly publishing — one open access article at a time.

JSAA Community of Practice - Research on Student Affairs in Africa - Editors Workshop

With the financial support of EIFL, the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa (JSAA) has been able to bolster its fledgling community of practice and hold a workshop with the 'core' COP members, i.e. the JSAA editorial board.

Especially encouraging is that several new editors have been on-boarded through this workshop. 

Transformation remains on the top agenda of SA public universities - but what is transformation?

It was my great honour to be invited, by the fabulous Dr Bernadette Johnson, to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Transformation Community of Practice (COP) retreat on Friday, 7 November. At the meeting I became Fidel Castro... in the way he was (amongst many other things) famous for speaking for hours and hours. Well, in my case it was just one hour, but it went by in a flash. My dear friend and former colleague, Dr Bongiwe Mncwango was meant to join me but she became inundated with too much work and so I presented on my own, insights from and reflections on the 2023 "State of Transformation in South Africa's Public Universities" report. Assembled on the call of Dr Bernie Johnson were the chairs of transformation committees across Wits faculties and divisions, as well as champions of equity and inclusion from a number of Wits offices. The COP retreat was opened by Wits DVC Prof. Garth Stevensen, who set the tone by putting the present transformation moment into the history of transformation of the (European) university type and its parallels in South Africa, and many aspects of the uniqueness of SA public universities, particularly their colonial and apartheid origins, and the need for transforming the system and its institutions with the dawn of a new democratic era in 1994. It was closes by the brilliant intellectual (and very engaging and funny) Prof Mlamuli Hlatshwayo from the University of Johannesburg. The TOC Report I presented is freely available. Executive Summary and Full Report are available here.

Another milestone for the forthcoming book: #FeesMustFall - Ten Years On

In 2025-26 we commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the South African student movement of 2015-16, known by campaigns, campus movements and formations like #FeesMustFall, #EndOutsourcing, #RhodesMustFall, #OpenStellenbosch, #PatriarchyMustFall, #RUReferenceList. 

Starting from the end of 2015, a project started to create a number of archives on the movement, and in 2022 Dr Anye Nyamnjoh and I initiated a project specifically to provide a platform for a critical reflection on the history, significance, and legacy of the South African student movement. This started in 2023 with a national colloquium on the movement (see blog entry here). After this, a proposal and call for papers was developed for a book with an editorial team that included a broad spectrum of scholar-activists from different backgrounds. 

Now this process is gradually coming to a close. The Mandela University Press received the full manuscript of the book a month ago - and the book is now under review. Of course, the editors and the many authors and co-author teams are excitedly waiting for the outcome of the review and the process of publishing this important book to continue. 

If all goes well, the first book launches will be held before the end of the year and continue throughout 2026 - across South Africa and possibly also in major African, Global South and Global North centres of activism, higher education, and engaged scholarship. We are excited!

Rethinking higher education: Public and private synergies for student success in Africa

The July 2025 issue of the Journal of Student Affairs in Africa arrives at a pivotal time in the discussions around higher education and student success in South Africa and on the continent. It comes also in the context of almost seismic global disruptions (and we are thinking here of AI, geo-political madness and climate change-related conflicts, combined with the ongoing structural challenges within African post-school education systems. This compels us to ask hard but essential questions: What kind of higher education systems do we need to serve our students and our societies better? And critically, can we afford to ignore the growing role of private higher education in that future?

The JSAA feature article is feathered by Ahmed Bawa and Linda Meyer, ‘Becoming more private: Broadening the base of South African higher education’. It courageously interrogates the long-standing public-private divide in the South African higher education sector and explores how declining government funding, siloed and ill-articulated institutions, and systemic socio-political inequality make the emboldened participation of private higher education not only viable but inevitable. A truly functional and future-oriented system must enable coordination, collaboration, and shared responsibility between all HE actors, public and private alike, toward a unified national learning agenda (and extending this into all Africa).

The rest of the issue builds on this theme of rethinking structures and support for student success across African higher education. There are articles on a health and wellness intervention programme; peer mentoring; the role of residence advisors in student academic success; on first-year student belonging; on counselling; on student activism, climate action and other student extracurricular activities and on managing an extended orientation programme in the context of COVID-19. The book review by Dr Sibeso Lisulo, reflects on Widening university access and participation in the Global South: Using the Zambian context to inform other developing countries by Edward Mboyonga. According to Lisulo, the book offers both case-based insights and transferable strategies for inclusion and equity that higher education leaders across the continent would do well to consider. 

As this issue illustrates, student success is not merely a matter of programme design, it is a systemic concern. This invites us to examine the assumptions, architectures, and power dynamics that shape our institutions. Whether we are talking about health, belonging, leadership, activism, or orientation, we must look not just at what we do within universities, but how our systems are organised, and how public and private actors can align for the broader public good. This alignment will necessarily raise questions about purpose, equity, access, and what kind of higher education architecture we need for a just and thriving Africa.

Rethinking higher education in Africa thus requires us to think across several levels or units of analysis – from the micro, individual level of student experience and student success, to support for different groups of students and rethinking the roles of residences, for example, in the academic and social engagement of students. It includes the meso level of institutional diversity and complementarity, and at the macro level, the purpose of higher education in Africa. We started this editorial with reference to the growing polarisation we see in the world – from “geopolitical madness” to conflicts around migration and increasing climate-change-related conflicts. Universities in Africa have to create transformative leaders (with the values, knowledges, attitudes, skills and networks) to respond to the fast-changing context and create peaceful, prosperous and equitable societies. Contributing to this as student affairs professionals, scholars and researchers, gives meaning to our work. And if our institutions fail to deliver on the promise of freedom, peace and prosperity, then they might as well be trade schools.

Birgit, Thierry and Teboho

This is a shortened version of the latest editorial in JSAA. The full editorial can be found at:

Schreiber, B., Luescher, T. M., & Moja, T. (2025). Rethinking higher education: Public and private synergies for student success in Africa. Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 13(1), v–vii. DOI: 10.24085/jsaa.v13i1.6227