Page 7 - Professorial Lecture - Professor P van Rooyen

3. Finally, the ‘service-directed enterprise’ describes a university, which
operates in an international free market, where the “valuable goods” are
education and research. Knowledge is not a common good, but a commodity
traded, based on supply and demand. The idea of a service enterprise
university entails professionalized internal management, which allows the
organization to change rapidly in order to accommodate the changing needs
of the market. (Olsen, 2005).

Social transformation lies at the radical end of conceptions of social change.
It implies at very least some fundamental changes in society’s core
institutions, the polity and the economy, with major implications for
relationships between social groups or classes, and for the means of the
creation and distribution of wealth, power and status. We can equate this
with the concepts of the State versus the “state of nature”- civilised and
contracted norms versus felicity for all.

The role of universities in political change appears to be both complex and
contradictory. It here plays a role in ‘removing the old’ and ‘building the
new’ in political change. In connection with the ‘Old’, universities could both
be important supporters of old regimes as well as providers of ‘protected
space’ in which critique and opposition could ferment. It is evident that
there has to be tension between science and critical scholarship, on the one
hand, and politics on the other. This tension can take different forms, for
example when research findings strongly question or contradict the political
project of the State, say for example, in the realms of governance, energy
security, sustainable development more generally, social policy, and the
extractive economy (Du Pisani,2015).

The idea of free development of individuality is essential to personal well-
being. This is the core reason why liberty matters. It is though, precisely for
this very reason – the free development of individuality – that states and
governments as their agencies, with their state-liberal politics, also much in
evidence in this Republic, cannot enable the thinking of emancipatory
politics simply because it is founded on a notion of trusteeship of ‘helpless

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