By Prof Klaus Beiter

Universities have undergone a paradigmatic change in the past thirty or forty years. In the age of neoliberalism, higher education and research have been commercialised, universities corporatised – globally, and also in South Africa. Neoliberalism is antithetical to human rights. Yet, its prevalence in universities is never queried in the light of accepted human rights protected by international law (or equivalent constitutional rights). This lecture seeks, on the one hand, to speak truth to power – to blurt out that the emperor is naked (that universities have left the path of virtue), and, on the other, to outline the demands of the human rights approach. Especially in South Africa, where the decolonisation of universities is high on the agenda – neoliberal ideology epitomising colonial thinking – the human rights approach to universities needs to be installed.