BOOK: Higher Education Institutional Change - Perspectives from South Africa

In this reflective piece, Dr Joseph Besigye Bazirake traces the intellectual, institutional, and personal journey that culminated in the book Higher Education Institutional Change: Perspectives from South Africa (2025), published by Palgrave MacMillan. Drawing on his experiences as a student, researcher, and scholar working within South African higher education, Dr Bazirake offers an insider’s account of how questions of history, inequality, and institutional change came to shape the book.

How This Book Came to Be

By Joseph Besigye Bazirake

Higher Education Institutional Change: Perspectives from South Africa is the outcome of a long intellectual journey that began in 2012 when I first arrived in South Africa as part of a pluralism and development programme hosted at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State. At the time, I was completing a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies at Makerere University in Kampala.

What struck me then was not only South Africa’s history, but the way its institutions were actively negotiating difference, inequality, and reconciliation in the present. The country appeared to be pursuing an unfamiliar and instructive path toward managing deep social divisions. That first encounter left me certain that I would return to better understand the institutional spaces where these struggles were being lived out.

Higher Education Institutional Change: Perspectives from South Africa

I returned through a fully funded PhD opportunity at the University of the Free State. While grateful, I quickly encountered uncertainty. The dominant theoretical frameworks shaping the programme were unfamiliar and peacebuilding, as I had previously understood it, did not neatly fit. Several moments of impostor syndrome later, one thing remained constant: my sustained interest in the South African higher education context. There was something unfinished about it, something still unfolding in real time.

The turning point came gradually. While remaining at the university as a research assistant, facilitating peacebuilding workshops and mentoring students, a critical insight emerged. The university itself was a site of reconciliation. It was a space where South Africa’s broader tensions around history, identity, inequality, and belonging were being negotiated daily.

Transformation, as it was formally articulated, sought to institute institutional change. Yet it was often unstable and contested. There were actors and interests, unresolved histories, and persistent tensions between continuity and disruption. It was here that my doctoral work took shape, as an effort to understand institutional journeys across time, pasts inherited, presents contested, and futures imagined.

Dr Joseph Besigye Bazirake at the ACUSAfrica 2022 Colloquium

Immersion in archives, policy documents, and organisational histories led me into sustained engagement with organisational theory and the theorisation of institutional change. This intellectual trajectory continued during my postdoctoral fellowship at Nelson Mandela University, where I was able to juxtapose institutional experiences across contexts.

While my PhD focused specifically on the University of the Free State, this book extends those insights to offer broader South African perspectives on institutional change. It explores layered institutional change, paths of departure as alternatives to path dependence, and institutional equilibrium as a premise for either stability or instability, depending on the configurations of internal and external actors’ interests.

This work would not have been possible without the intellectual environments that shaped it. I am deeply grateful to colleagues at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, now the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice, where I completed my PhD in 2020, and to colleagues at the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), where I served as a postdoctoral fellow until 2025 and continue as a Research Associate. I am especially thankful to Professor André Keet, whose presence across these two sites of inquiry has profoundly shaped my thinking. This book reflects more than a decade of proximity to critical scholarly environments committed to transformation.

The book is an invitation to ongoing dialogue about how institutions change, why they struggle, and what it might mean to imagine their futures differently.

You can buy the book here.

Connect with Dr Bazirake here.