The politics of excellence: University education in the South African context

The state and the liberal universities in South Africa: 1948?1990

“…the relative intellectual isolation (Kotz~ 1990) and the consequent danger of ossification of the Afrikaans universities, or the divisions of interest and outlook within the university world) is that, in the open universities, the problem of their relations with the state diverted so much energy away from almost every other major social concern. What has suffered, particularly, has been any concerted effort to think of their future missions and roles, of how to adapt to something more like a system of mass post-secondary education for all, of how to redefine the pursuit of excellence, and of how to shed (or at least radically modify) their Eurocentrism (File 1986 andMoulder 1991) without at the same time jeopardising their membership in world-wide disciplinebased communities of scholars. South Africa's open universities have emerged from forty years of apartheid and political oppression in remarkably good, if not uniform, condition.…”

English Language Proficiency As An Indicator Of Academic Performance At A Tertiary Institution

“…and obtain better academic scores (Huysamen, 1996;Zaaiman, van der Flier & Thuys, 1998). File (1986) found that matric results were highly stratified along class lines and socio-economic background. The school attended reflects the degree of 'westernisation' to which the student is exposed: access to first-world culture, print-rich environments (Von Gruenewald, 1999), television (Smit, 1991;Lyons, 1992), are all existing in a favourable learning environment.…”