Community engagement, globalisation, and restorative action: Approaching systems and research in the universities

Abstract

It is clear that there is a wide range of arguments that reflect varying degrees of disaffection with the university worldwide. A great deal of understandable effort is directed at the impact of globalisation, especially the way it is making universities engage in academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). The alternative arguments emphasise democratic internal governance and external community service driven by the goals of social equity, democratic values, and concern for the public good. Currie and Subotsky (2000) referring to the South African situation, caution that without exploring the basis upon which reconstructive community development can be institutionally operationalised, the twin goals of global and redistributive development will remain unsolved. They point out the overinvestment in accounting for the new organisational and epistemological features of the ‘market’ university, policy and academic debates that are silent on the corresponding features of the reconstructive development function of higher education, especially in light of the widening disparity between conventional academic practices and societal needs. This paper argues that the depth of that chasm between universities and society reveals stories of death, humiliation, denigration, racism, and epistemological disenfranchisement. The new social contract to be contemplated should take into account the factor of amnesia and the concomitant factor of the relevance of historical memory. Community engagement, reconstituted in the twenty-first century, should be capable of leading the countries of the Third World into new conceptual and methodological beginnings.