190 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
preferences. With burgeoning demands and a raft of new tasks, this kind
of proactive planning has all but dissipated completely. As institutions
and their leaders are forced increasingly into a reactive mode, proactive
planning becomes futile, and demand is piled upon demand, often
indiscriminately, and invariably without due regard to impact and
practicability as the screws of accountability, transparency, and
performance management have tightened inexorably.
In a developing context such as South Africa, added pressures are to
promote transformation (even while the concept is not clearly defined or
commonly understood). As student demographics have diversified, new
challenges are to address the demands of stakeholders with different
needs in a highly unequal society stratified by race, class, gender and
other divides, the most challenging of which is that of access to
technology and the internet. Contemporary politics are still heavily
influenced by the dogged legacies of apartheid, while arduous progress
is made towards national developmental imperatives. Ideologies and
competing aspirations clash within our universities, which have long
been the theatre for their articulation and expression. Managing
competing demands while fostering the independence of a healthy
higher education sector focused on quality in teaching and increasing
knowledge production requires extensive skill in negotiation and
prioritisation and careful leadership towards a clear vision of the future
for the system (CHE, 2015; Kulati & Moja, 2002).
The higher education sector more broadly is in the throes of
perpetual change as institutions re-examine their roles in society to be
more in tune with the knowledge and human capital needs of their
societies, adjust their modes of operation, and respond to or are led by
changes in society, economy and technology to remain relevant and
sustainable.