24/08/2026
African and South African universities are facing a growing crisis of legitimacy. Across the continent, inequality is increasing, public institutions are under strain and confidence in democratic institutions is weakening. Universities operate within a complex environment shaped by unemployment, social fragmentation, ecological disruption, technological change, and growing doubts about whether higher education adequately serves the societies that sustain it.
At the same time, many universities have become increasingly focused on competition, performance indicators, rankings, and market value. Research productivity, graduate numbers, and international visibility often dominate institutional priorities. Although these objectives are important, an excessive focus on them can narrow the university’s broader purpose.
The question facing African higher education is therefore not simply how universities can improve their performance. More fundamentally, it is about what kinds of institutions universities are becoming and what forms of public life they are helping to create. Within this context, community engagement can no longer be treated as a peripheral activity. It needs to become an integral part of university life.
Community engagement is commonly described as the university’s “third mission”, alongside teaching and research. Although this terminology appears to recognise its significance, it can also reinforce the idea that engagement exists at the margins of academic life. It is frequently reduced to outreach, voluntary service, impact reporting, or short-term projects conducted outside the university.
This approach leaves the university’s internal structures of knowledge largely unchanged. Academic expertise continues to occupy the centre, while communities are positioned primarily as beneficiaries, recipients, or sites of intervention.
African universities need a more ambitious conception of engagement. Community engagement should be understood as part of the university’s core epistemic work: a space in which knowledge is produced, tested, challenged, and transformed. It brings academic disciplines into conversation with lived experience, local histories, cultural memory, and practical forms of intelligence.
The central question, therefore, is not simply how universities can do more for communities. It is how universities can build relationships in which knowledge, authority, and responsibility are shared more equitably between academic institutions and the communities with which they interact.
The conventional understanding of the university portrays it as a bounded institution in which knowledge is produced internally and then transferred outward to society. This model is increasingly inadequate. Universities are shaped by their relationships with students, communities, public institutions, social movements, professional fields, cultural traditions, and broader political forces. Their identities are continuously produced through these interactions.
The university should therefore be understood as a relational institution. This perspective changes how institutional transformation is understood. Meaningful change does not result from policy declarations or managerial strategies alone. It emerges through relationships, practices, and spaces in which people begin to work together in different ways.
Transformation often begins in small and dispersed settings: when a curriculum incorporates community knowledge, when a research agenda develops from a public concern, when students learn through collaborative inquiry, or when historical exclusion is confronted through sustained engagement. Collectively, these practices can help reorient the university towards a stronger democratic and public purpose.
At the centre of this argument is the question of epistemic authority. Who has the authority to define a problem? Whose knowledge is regarded as credible? Who participates in determining research questions, curricula, and institutional priorities?
African universities continue to bear the influence of colonial histories that privileged particular languages, disciplines, methodologies, and knowledge traditions. These legacies still shape understandings of what constitutes legitimate knowledge and who is recognised as capable of producing it.
Community engagement can help challenge these hierarchies. This does not require universities to abandon disciplinary knowledge. Universities must continue to develop conceptual depth, rigorous inquiry, and specialised expertise. Instead, academic knowledge should be placed in meaningful dialogue with local knowledge, lived experience, and community-based understandings.
Such dialogue can strengthen scholarship. It can broaden the questions researchers ask, deepen interpretations of social problems, and make academic knowledge more responsive to specific contexts.
It can also advance epistemic justice. Communities become contributors to knowledge production rather than merely objects of research. Their histories, interpretations, experiences, and practical intelligence become part of the processes through which knowledge is generated.
African universities operate within societies confronting urgent and interconnected challenges, including poverty, unemployment, unequal access to education, fragile health systems, displacement, environmental degradation, food insecurity, and the uneven consequences of digital transformation.
Universities cannot resolve these problems independently. They can, however, participate more actively in the social processes through which responses are developed. This requires moving beyond a one-way model in which experts produce knowledge and communities receive it. Instead, universities should support collaborative inquiry, shared problem definition, and experimentation grounded in local contexts.
Understood in this way, community engagement is both democratic and developmental. It is democratic because it expands participation in the production of knowledge. It is developmental because it connects academic work to the material and social realities that shape people’s lives.
This perspective is particularly important in the Global South, where imported definitions of university excellence may fail to account adequately for local realities. African universities should resist evaluating their worth exclusively according to standards developed elsewhere. Their public value should also be assessed by the quality of their relationships with the societies in which they are embedded.
Making community engagement central to university life also has significant implications for teaching. Students require more than disciplinary knowledge and preparation for employment. They also need opportunities to develop ethical awareness, civic judgment, collaborative skills, and the capacity to work constructively across differences.
Community-engaged learning can connect abstract academic knowledge with complex social realities. It encourages students to listen carefully, question their assumptions, navigate uncertainty, and recognise the limits of their own expertise.
These are not merely social skills; they are important intellectual capacities. Community-based learning can also strengthen disciplinary understanding because knowledge becomes more demanding when students must apply and interpret it in real-world contexts. Concepts are tested against material conditions, competing perspectives, and practical consequences.
Community engagement should therefore become part of the university’s educational architecture rather than remaining confined to extracurricular volunteering or occasional fieldwork. Curriculum design, assessment, and professional education should provide structured opportunities for students to work with communities as partners in shared knowledge production.
Community engagement can easily be weakened by the institutional systems intended to support it. Universities frequently translate engagement into targets, metrics, and annual reports. Projects are expected to deliver rapid, visible, and measurable results. Short funding cycles encourage temporary interventions, while workload systems often fail to recognise the time required to establish trust and maintain meaningful relationships.
This managerial approach can remove much of the democratic substance from engagement. Relationships take time to develop. Public trust cannot be generated within the boundaries of a reporting cycle. Co-production requires negotiation, continuity, and a willingness to accept outcomes that cannot always be predicted in advance.
Universities therefore need institutional arrangements that protect these qualities. This includes sustained funding, recognition of engagement within academic workloads, dedicated curriculum space, and evaluation systems that value relationship-building, public learning, and social repair.
Institutional leaders should ask whether community engagement is genuinely influencing teaching, research, and decision-making. They should also consider whether community partners have a meaningful role in setting agendas and whether universities are willing to change as a result of these relationships. Engagement has limited transformative value if the university itself remains unchanged.
African universities need to develop a renewed understanding of their public-good role. This should extend beyond the idea that universities serve society primarily by producing graduates, generating research outputs, and contributing to economic innovation.
These functions remain important. However, the public university also carries a democratic responsibility. It should promote critical inquiry, broaden public understanding, confront inherited forms of injustice, and contribute to more inclusive forms of social life.
Community engagement is central to this purpose because it brings universities into sustained relationships with the societies they claim to serve. It requires institutions to listen, share authority, and recognise that knowledge is produced across multiple sites. It also demands institutional humility. Universities possess powerful forms of expertise, but they do not have a monopoly on insight, memory, or intelligence.
The future of the African university will depend partly on its ability to develop reciprocal relationships with communities and wider publics. Through these relationships, universities can become more responsive, more democratic, and more deserving of public trust.
The future of African higher education will not be secured through expansion, branding, or rankings alone. It will be shaped within the relational spaces where universities engage public problems, confront historical exclusion, and bring different forms of knowledge into sustained dialogue.
Community engagement must therefore be placed at the centre of this project. It is not an additional mission attached to the university; it is one of the principal ways universities produce knowledge, educate students, strengthen democratic life, and fulfil their public purpose. African universities should consequently move beyond treating engagement as activity carried out at the institutional margins.
The edges are precisely where the university’s democratic future is being assembled.
SAT-Style Reading Test
1. Main Idea
Which choice best states the main idea of the passage?
A. African universities should focus primarily on improving their international rankings and research productivity.
B. African universities should reduce their academic activities and devote more resources to community service.
C. African universities should place community engagement at the centre of their academic and public mission in order to become more democratic, responsive and socially relevant.
D. African universities should replace disciplinary expertise with community-based knowledge.
2. Vocabulary in Context
As used in paragraph 8, the word “peripheral” most nearly means
A. controversial.
B. secondary.
C. academic.
D. permanent.
3. Inference
The author suggests that describing community engagement as the university's “third mission” can have what unintended consequence?
A. It can make universities focus too heavily on community needs.
B. It can encourage universities to abandon teaching and research.
C. It can cause community engagement to remain separate from the university's central academic activities.
D. It can prevent universities from receiving government funding.
4. Evidence
Which choice best supports the answer to Question 3?
A. “Research productivity, graduate output and international visibility dominate institutional agendas.”
B. “In practice, however, it often keeps engagement at the margins.”
C. “Universities cannot solve these problems on their own.”
D. “These functions remain important.”
5. Inference
What does the author mean by describing the university as a “relational institution”?
A. Universities should establish more formal relationships with other universities.
B. Universities are shaped by their ongoing interactions with communities and other social institutions.
C. Universities should give students more opportunities to build professional networks.
D. Universities should become financially dependent on their surrounding communities.
6. Function of a Detail
The author asks, “Who has the right to define a problem? Whose knowledge is treated as credible?” primarily to
A. demonstrate that universities face difficulties in defining research priorities.
B. introduce the issue of who controls and determines what counts as legitimate knowledge.
C. argue that academic researchers lack sufficient expertise.
D. suggest that communities should determine all university research agendas.
7. Vocabulary in Context
As used in paragraph 28, “unsettle” most nearly means
A. eliminate completely.
B. reinforce permanently.
C. challenge or disrupt.
D. measure accurately.
8. Author's Purpose
Why does the author discuss the use of targets, metrics and annual reports in paragraph 55?
A. To show that universities should eliminate all forms of institutional evaluation.
B. To explain how administrative systems can weaken the long-term, relationship-based nature of community engagement.
C. To demonstrate that community engagement is more expensive than traditional academic research.
D. To argue that universities should replace academic assessments with community assessments.
9. Synthesis
Which statement best describes the relationship between community engagement and student education according to the passage?
A. Community engagement is mainly an extracurricular activity that gives students a break from academic study.
B. Community engagement can strengthen students' academic understanding by requiring them to apply knowledge to complex real-world situations.
C. Community engagement should replace classroom-based disciplinary education.
D. Community engagement is primarily useful for students preparing for careers in public service.
10. Overall Argument
Which choice best describes the author's argument in the final two sections of the passage?
A. African universities should imitate successful universities in other parts of the world.
B. African universities should concentrate on economic growth because democratic responsibilities are outside their institutional role.
C. African universities should redefine their public purpose by building reciprocal relationships with communities and recognising multiple forms of knowledge.
D. African universities should prioritise expansion, branding and international rankings to gain public trust.
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