Howard Thomas explores Professor Rajani Naidoo’s inspiring journey in higher education, marked by advocacy, leadership, and a commitment to social justice. Born in apartheid South Africa, Rajani’s formative experiences with inequality shaped her lifelong dedication to equity in education. Her academic path took her to the University of Bath, where she directed the International Centre for Higher Education Management, emphasising interdisciplinary research and ethical leadership. Now Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Exeter, she drives cultural change and inclusivity. Rajani’s work challenges competitive norms, advocates global collaboration, and envisions universities as agents of societal good. Her story exemplifies purpose-driven academic leadership.

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Introduction

During my deanship at Warwick Business School some two decades ago I was introduced to Rajani’s work as Director of the International Centre for Higher Education Management (ICHEM) at the University of Bath by two former colleagues at Warwick, namely, Mike Shattock (Registrar) and Andrew Pettigrew (a Dean and Professor of strategic management). They were both legendary figures in the growth of management and higher education in the UK. They pointed out the uniqueness of the well-designed ICHEM model for teaching and research about leadership in higher education. For me, it served as a benchmark and a guideline for my own research on leadership and futures in management education. Subsequently, I met Rajani soon after I became Dean of the Business School at Singapore Management University. The meeting took place at a conference on the future of management education at the Lorange Institute in Zurich (now CEIBS Europe) in which I gave a keynote address on research and scholarship in management education (see). Rajani was also giving a paper at the same conference and subsequently we have shared papers, meetings, conferences and ‘zooms’ about the future of higher education as well as management education. This has become a valuable, academic friendship and a long-standing collaborative partnership on issues of liberal management education, inclusive growth and leadership in higher education.

The article that follows catalogues, through a life history interview, Rajani’s remarkable background, scholarship, and institutional leadership in higher education as she scaled the peaks and troughs in her life and found purpose in her life’s work. It is a study of catching ‘reality in flight’ in her outstanding career.

Building Dreams, Aspirations and Goals (1960s – 1980s)

As a child, I was very tall, skinny, and extremely argumentative – at a time and in a South African society that did not value such characteristics in a girl. As a result, I became fiercely independent at an early age. I spent a lot of my time trying to escape adult scrutiny so that I could read, draw and dream. Many of my childhood memories relate to how unfair the world is. My family was wealthy, and I noticed that while I had a whole playroom brimming with toys and access to helicopter rides from our grounds, the children of our housekeeper and gardeners had no shoes. I remember feeling how wrong that was and constantly questioned why this was so. I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and another one of my earliest memories is again of injustice – my father driving past a children’s amusement park at night, which looked magical with the lights on, and being told I was not allowed in because it was for ‘white’ children only.

Early in my teens, my father left and the family situation changed dramatically from being very rich to being poor. All the doors of opportunity that were open suddenly closed, and the social connections, which were based largely on status and money, evaporated. I learnt early on about the importance of authentic relationships; and how the opportunities and resources people have to enter university and succeed is often simply an accident of birth. This belief has propelled much of my research and teaching.

I attended Waterford-Kamhlaba United World College in Swaziland, a progressive school in a neighbouring country that brought children of different nationalities and ethnicities together to learn across a breadth of disciplines; and which instilled in students a sense of global responsibility, rather than privilege. The children of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu attended the same school and the empathy of the teachers to them, to me and to all of the students saved us.

I returned from Waterford in Swaziland to do my final year at a racially segregated school in South Africa. I was part of the group that organised the student’s walk-out against apartheid, and I was suspended. A barrister worked pro-bono to reinstate us, just in time for me to write the final year examination and fulfil the goal of entering a challenging university. 

Building Foundations and University Education

I studied for a BA(Hons) Law degree with Literature at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal as I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. It was a ‘whites-only’ university where racism was rife. I had to apply for a permit to attend lectures and was not allowed to live on campus. When I requested that we include African fiction in the literature course, I was told that that was anthropology. Dr David Maughan-Brown overheard my conversation and developed an alternative course, which included African fiction and conceptual framings to understand literature in its socio-political context. This was a lifeline: it helped me assert my identity in a hostile and violent environment, it connected my scholarship to my anti-apartheid work, and it was intellectually challenging and exciting. Above all else, it sparked my strong intellectual curiosity and suggested intellectual pathways for future scholarly growth.

Deepening Academic Foundations (1985-1990)

When I completed my degree, I realised I did not find law very interesting. David Maughan Brown introduced me to a new institution, Khanya, which was funded by international aid and aimed to develop a model of post-apartheid university education. Students were anti-apartheid activists who had been compelled to attend poorly resourced, racially segregated schools. Khanya used alternative selection criteria based on tests for potential and personal interviews. The educational aims of Khanya were twofold: first, to empower students by inserting their culture and history into the curriculum while simultaneously connecting them to global knowledge. At the same time, they were encouraged to critique their own cultural understandings. Second, students were guided in identifying the implicit rules for success within a ‘white’ elite university (an environment that white, middle-class students negotiated with ease because of the close correspondence between their own cultural capital and that of the elite universities.). Khanya students were supported to challenge such rules while not jeopardising their academic success. Khanya was highly successful. Students in the Arts and Humanities went on to succeed at the most elite universities in South Africa and acted as change agents for the sector and in society at large (Naidoo, Adriansen and Madsen, 2015).

However, building a new model of higher education within a draconian police state took its toll. The armed apartheid police regularly raided the campus, harassed staff, and arrested students. Feeling the injustices of apartheid so keenly, I pushed myself harder with increasing momentum in both formal work and political work. And because I was young, and life is short, I also partied the whole night through! Like so many of my generation, we strove to change the unjust nature of the world but did not take time to care for ourselves. I eventually suffered burn-out and was encouraged to take a break and continue my studies in the UK. But looking back, it was still one of the most fulfilling and rewarding periods of my life. It gave me a lifelong foundation in how to recognise the strengths that students bring, engage them in controlled uncertainty and expand their horizons.

Strengthening Academic Foundations in the UK Academic Culture (1991- 2000)

I simultaneously won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Harvard and Stanford and a British Council scholarship to study at UCL Institute of Education. I chose the latter and joined the MA in Education, International Development and Management. After the isolation of South Africa as a result of the academic and cultural boycott, being in London and meeting so many people from all over the world, especially on my course, was magical. I completed my MA with distinction and was then elected Student Union President. I fought for a better deal for postgraduate and research students and engaged in political campaigns.

I then won a scholarship to study towards a PhD at the University of Cambridge. It was a difficult time as I felt guilty about existing in what I saw as an elite bastion of privilege, rather than contributing to the rebuilding of post-apartheid South Africa. My PhD drew on the work of the social theorist Pierre Bourdieu to investigate why universities in South Africa developed diverse responses to demands for social justice in a period of social upheaval. My findings suggested that the English-speaking, white elite universities resisted change, not because they were racist, but because they held on to a decontextualised idea of academic merit represented by final year school leaving examinations, which placed them at the apex of the university system. On the other hand, another university of mid-range status designated under apartheid for people classified as ‘coloured’ challenged the idea of academic merit in an unequal society and moved to a system of mass higher education and alternative selection criteria; in this way also challenging the criteria on which the hierarchy of South African universities was based (Naidoo, 2004). My PhD supervisor Professor Madeleine Arnot, who is renowned for her scholarship, convinced me that my research would be beneficial to policy-makers in post-apartheid South Africa. It was her guidance and her faith in me, which was tested to the extreme, that enabled me to complete my PhD.

My examiners were two towering figures in education: Hugh Lauder and Gerald Grace and I passed my thesis with no corrections. Hugh alerted me to an advertised position at the University of Bath, and supported me as a new academic in so many fundamental ways. He remains, together with Ian Jamieson and David Maughan Brown, an inspirational mentor.

Beginnings of a Foundational Career at an English University: An Institutional Perspective

Therefore, straight after my PhD, I became a Lecturer, and then Senior Lecturer in the Education Department at the University of Bath in the UK. I then moved to the School of Management to become Director of the International Centre for Higher Education Management (ICHEM). In 2004, I steered a distinctive and innovative professional doctorate programme from a highly vulnerable situation to a market-leader position. Attracting higher education leaders from more than 60 countries. The curriculum was designed to be interdisciplinary, to combine research with advanced leadership skills and to be global beyond Anglo-Saxon perspectives. Criticality, reflexivity and ethical awareness for higher education leaders was also integrated into the curriculum.

The global reputation of the programme led to my becoming the academic lead for the Future Leaders Initiative, a unique doctoral programme in partnership with the South African government, the British Council and Nelson Mandela University to build leadership capacity in higher education in South Africa.

ICHEM was developed to support critical research, leadership and practice to strengthen innovations in higher education to contribute to the global good. Multi-level research focused on how contemporary global forces, transformations in national higher education systems, and organisational change and innovation in universities interact; and how these impact on research, education, and the contribution of higher education for the global good. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research described ICHEM as ‘one of the internationally most visible and recognised British research centres on Higher Education… generating innovative and alternative strategies for higher education systems [with] an emphasis on interdisciplinary research and international integration. While at Bath, I was appointed to a Professorship, to a UNESCO Chair in Higher Education Management and to a leadership position as Vice-President for Community and Inclusion.

In general, my research has explored how universities can operate differently to create a better and fairer world. I have asked the question ‘What are universities really for? (Brennan and Naidoo 2008)’ and ‘how can universities contribute to the global good’. This has many angles and my concept piece on Spectres, Promises and Collective Action for the UNESCO Futures of Higher Education programme illustrates this (Naidoo, 2021).

Working at Khanya as a young person gave me first-hand experience in how universities can disrupt social reproduction (note that Howard agrees as his work on inclusive growth testifies (Thomas and Wong, 2019). I have studied how the current university setup excludes certain people and how we can find solutions to enhance access, belonging and success (see Naidoo, 2002; Masutha et al., 2023).

I have also looked at the culture of hyper-competition in the higher education sector. I have referred to as the competition fetish by which I mean a quasi-magical belief that competition will solve all of the problems in higher education. My research shows how different types of competition including rankings, market competition and the various government-sponsored excellence contents interact. I show how competition – carelessly applied – can have negative effects on teaching and research and the contribution of higher education to the global good (Naidoo, 2018; Jamieson, Naidoo and Enders, 2022).

Around two decades ago, I had the good fortune to meet Howard Thomas who is both a much-respected management scholar as well as a former dean of three prestigious business schools: University of Illinois, Singapore Management School and the University of Warwick Business School. His work inspired me to turn my competition fetish lens to business schools (Naidoo and Enders, 2022). My research highlighted the negative effects of treating students simply as consumers which resulted in students becoming highly entitled and transactional and abdicating their responsibility for learning; all of which has negative ramifications for autonomous, lifelong learning. I argued instead for business schools to move beyond the ‘student as disciple’ or student as consumer’ models to recognise students as co-producers. From this perspective, students could be configured as uniquely skilled participants, who, for the production of value-in-use to occur, must be given the opportunity to share their knowledge and make significant inputs to the learning and teaching process. In this way the notion of a passive and instrumental student consumer is replaced by the idea of an engaged and co-creative learner (Naidoo, Shankar and Veer, 2011).

Much of my work has reflected on the ways universities fit into the bigger picture and my research explores the role of higher education within an international context and its responsibilities to a wider society (Naidoo, 2018). I have argued that universities need to come together to develop collective responses to global problems. When we talk about the good that universities do, we talk about that in a specific country context, but we now have problems in the world—the climate crisis, escalating violence, geopolitical rivalry—which cannot be solved by a country on its own. They have to be solved by countries and universities working together.

The development of COVID-19 vaccines is a recent example of this responsibility. It shows how universities succeeded and failed in their response to a major global threat. The speed at which researchers developed vaccines was built on a foundation of discoveries that came about because of publicly funded, long-standing, international, cross-disciplinary partnerships and investments. However, in the case of COVID-19, scientists had to partner with pharmaceutical companies to produce the vaccine quickly.

This led to a situation where profit was sometimes prioritised over the public good, as pharmaceutical companies refused to share intellectual property rights. Vaccines thus became widely available in rich countries but not in poor countries, and the patenting laws blocked these poor countries from developing their own vaccines. Universities could have done so much more to push back against this.

While research is an obvious way through which universities can contribute to the global good, education is also important as we have a responsibility for the development of the world’s future citizens. The skill of critique is so important right now as we face fake news, misinformation and the polarisation of society. We need young people who are critical and who believe in local and global citizenship to protect democratic societies. And this is being lost because there is so much pressure and focus on certain types of competition which value employability and high salaries above other important societal impacts. We need to balance the need for immediate employability with skills for life-long learning and global citizenship.

While acknowledging that rankings and the ‘world-class university’ label have had positive impacts, the focus and resources expanded on external perception and reputational positioning must be balanced with a university commitment to the national and global good (see Naidoo and Pringle, 2014). The narrow view of what constitutes a ‘top’ university means that elite, research-intensive institutions get more resources. These universities tend to recruit the most socially advantaged students. This not only reproduces social inequalities on campuses but threatens progress too, as it assumes that only those at a handful of universities can change the world. I have argued that when resources are hyper-concentrated to a smaller and smaller minority, you actually take resources away from other parts of the ecosystem, and that is very dangerous for our future scientific and educational endeavours. I am not arguing that we remove funding from our elite research-intensive universities, rather I am arguing that we need policy and funding instruments that are genuinely differentiated to steer and reward higher education institutions with diverse missions (Naidoo and Ramchod, 2018). The development of higher education sectors comprising a diversity of institutions offering high-quality academic and vocational choices with inter-connected progression routes is an important step towards both greater equity, as well as holding out great potential for the contribution of higher education to wider social and economic development.

Envisioning the Future: Institutional and Personal Development

I am presently Vice-President and Deputy Vice Chancellor for People and Culture at the University of Exeter in the UK. I truly enjoy being part of a university with strong departments in the Arts and Humanities, Science, Medicine, Business, Engineering, and Health. The breadth of my role which encompasses unleashing high performance, breaking down barriers that colleagues and students face; facilitating cultural change and interdisciplinary, multi-divisional working is hugely exciting. We have an inspirational Vice-Chancellor in Professor Lisa Roberts and I have learnt so much from her in the time I have been at Exeter. The People and Culture teams across the University have such incredible expertise, empathy and commitment and it is genuinely one of the best environments I have worked in.

While there is a strong link between my research and leadership roles; being on the leadership team of an institution is also a sobering experience, as it is not straightforward to respond to the critiques or implement the solutions that I have advanced in my scholarly work. There are so many external global, national and institutional tensions to navigate and it is always difficult to maintain a delicate balance where there is so much externally generated change impacting on the university. Important examples include how we enable freedom of speech and peaceful and legal protest while keeping everyone safe; and how do we maintain community cohesion in the heat of geographic conflict? At the same time, it is exciting and energising to do this work with students and colleagues, all of whom have different views enabling me to learn all the time.

So, What Do I Aspire to Do Now?

Genuine cultural shifts take time and I know that for the next five years I want to achieve significant cultural shifts in relation to the broader People and Culture agenda at the University of Exeter. I want this work to become more collaborative across borders and I would like the work to be nationally and globally significant. Working with the Humboldt and Fulbright Foundations in Berlin and with universities in South Africa points to steps in this direction. After that, who knows? I may want to build a new type of experimental university; or develop a global education initiative for displaced young people; or lead a think tank on sustainable futures or even work in partnership with African and Latin American agencies to reinvigorate collective, collaborative investments and initiatives to support universities in eradicating poverty and contributing to democracy. At this point I simply don’t know. I have never had a career blue-print but I have always tried to find a pathway between the peaks and troughs of life to engage in work that I find creative, exciting and meaningful. I do have an ambition though, and that is to finally achieve some semblance of a work-life balance so that I can be more present for my partner Professor Jurgen Enders.

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References

Brennan, J. and Naidoo, R. (2008) Higher education and the achievement (and/or prevention) of equity and social justice. Higher Education 56(3) pp.287-302

Hommel, U. and Thomas, H. (2014) Research and scholarship in business schools in Pettigrew, A., E. Cornuel and U. Hommel (eds) The Institutional Development of Business Schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Jamieson, I., Naidoo, R. and Enders, J. (2022) Academics, Neo-liberalism and English Higher Education: Decline and Fall Higher Education Dynamics. Springer Science and Business Media B.V., pp.285-297

Masutha, M., Naidoo, R. and Enders, J. (2023) Challenging university complicity and majoritarian narratives: counter-storytelling from black working-class students. Critical Studies in Education (forthcoming)

Naidoo, R. (2003) Repositioning higher education as a global community: opportunities and challenges for future sociology of education work. British Journal of Sociology of Education 24(2) pp.249-259

Naidoo, R. (2004) Fields and institutional strategy: Bourdieu on the relationship between higher education, inequality and society. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4) pp.457-471

Naidoo, R. (2007) Higher education as a global commodity: the perils and promises for developing countries in the observatory on borderless education, 1st February

Naidoo, R. (2017) Leading Collaboration to Solve Global Challenges. Leadership Insights Series. Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/leading-collaboration-solve-global-challenges

Naidoo, R. (2018) The Competition Fetish in Higher Education: Shamans, Mindsnares and Consequence. European Education Research Journal, 17(5) pp.605-620

Naidoo, R. (2021) Higher Education for the Global Good: Visions, Spectres and Collective Action Concept note prepared for UNESCO’s IESALC’s project on the Futures of Higher Education project.

Naidoo, R., Adriansen, H.K. and Madsen, L.M. (2015) Dynamic African Universities: Struggling for a transformational curriculum in apartheid South Africa in Adriansen, H.K; Jensen, H., Madsenin, L.M. Higher Education and Capacity Building in Africa: The Geography and Power of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge

Naidoo, R. and Enders, J. (2022) The competition fetish in business schools: challenges and responses. Global Focus, Research Volume 1 (eds Cornuel, Thomas, Wood) pp.57-61

Naidoo, R. and Pringle, J. (2014) Branding in business schools: academic struggles with the management of reputation in Pettigrew, A., E. Cornuel and U. Hommel (eds) The Institutional Development of Business Schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Naidoo, R. and Ranchod, R. (2018) Transformation, the State and Higher Education: Towards a Developmental System of Higher Education in South Africa in, Ashwin, P and Case, J.M. (Eds) Pathways to the Public Good: Access, Experiences and Outcomes of South African Undergraduate Education. Cape Town. African Minds

Naidoo, R., Shankar, A. and Akant, V. (2011) The consumerist turn in higher education, policy aspirations and outcomes. Journal of Marketing Management 11-12, pp.1142-1162

Thomas, H. and Hedrick-Wong, Y. (2019) Inclusive Growth. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing