Change in Higher Education 157 1 South Africa’s first fully-fledged university, the University of Cape Town, was only established in 1918, although it had existed as the South African College since 1829. 2 The methodology for this study was based on extensive analyses of higher education reports and analyses, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, practitioners and thinkers in higher education, and a critical synthesis and application of the major theories of change in the more recent higher education literature. TRACING AND EXPLAINING CHANGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: THE SOUTH AFRICAN CASE Jonathan Jansen with Chaya Herman, Tshepiso Matentjie, Rachel Morake, Venitha Pillay, Chika Sehoole and Everard Weber 1. INTRODUCTION In South Africa’s brief century of higher education, nothing matches the wide-ranging changes encountered by post-secondary institutions since the middle 1990s. 1 These changes range from the fundamental reorganization of the distribution and character of higher education institutions (Jansen, 2002), the comprehensive redesign of higher education curricula governed by a national qualifications authority (Ensor, 2002), and the profound reconstitution of the academic workplace (Webster & Mosoetsa, 2001). Despite such far-reaching changes in the higher education landscape, there remain disconcerting continuities, including the racially skewed profile of especially senior academic appointments, racial and gender inequalities in research productivity, and the stable “institutional cultures” of universities that still bear their distinctive racial birthmarks expressed in dominant traditions, symbols and patterns of behaviour (Department of Education 2001; Mouton 2003; Thaver, 2005). Yet, except for bold and official pronouncements of change, it is not clear exactly what the reach and impact of these changes have been on higher education practice; nor is it clear what these changes mean to higher education practitioners; and it certainly is not clear how these changes in one national context relate to, or derive from, global changes in higher education. Against this backdrop, this chapter has three objectives. The first is to briefly survey the major changes and continuities in South African higher education over the past decade. The second is to examine and evaluate these surveyed changes more deeply through the medium of two illustrative case studies: the case of private higher education and the case of the national qualifications framework. And the third is to explain these changes in the context of higher education reform across the globe; that is, rather than treat South Africa as peculiar or exceptional, this chapter attempts to explain the national response to changes facing higher education systems throughout the world. The findings and arguments presented in this chapter draw on a more extensive research report on higher education change in South Africa. 2 And these findings are conceptualized within the growing theoretical work on educational change, as briefly described in the next section. 1.1. THE STUDY OF CHANGE IN (HIGHER) EDUCATION In recent years, the study of educational change has established itself as a respectable field of inquiry. Since the landmark study by Michael Fullan (1982) on The Meaning of Educational Change, a growing community of scholars has assembled under the banner of educational