The changing management ethos of higher education institutions
By Nithaya Chetty
School of Physics, University of KwaZulu-Natal

ABSTRACT
South African universities are under enormous strain today with stringent controls placed by government, ostensibly for greater academic and financial accountability, but also to pursue the transformational and developmental agenda of the country. This has undermined institutional autonomy and academic freedom, and has had a knock-on effect in creating a new managerialist ethos, with a concomitant and often brutal legalistic interpretation of what a university should be. Autonomous universities pride themselves on tradition, collegiality and academic excellence - qualities that appear to be at variance with new managerialism. South African universities today are environments of enormous conflict that are counterproductive for the core academic functioning of the university.