Traveling ideas: Equality and Power Play around “Diversity” at North-West University (NWU), South Africa

Abstract

In an effort to embed diversity management in South African higher education, all Higher Education institutions are presently going through a transitional phase of transformation in which institutional cultures and identities are strongly contested. The ambiguity that comes along with such a process is illustrated through two rival “narratives of change” at North West University, presented in a number of reports and institutional publications that deal with the present state of transformation of the merged institution in this period of great institutional turmoil. In South Africa, the idea of diversity, widely spread and increasingly popular in the age of globalization, is linked to both societal redress and transformation, in a negative as well as a positive way. In the aftermath of apartheid the concept is sufficiently ambiguous to be used in these two rivaling narratives of transformation that are striving for hegemony.