摘要：Globalisation has had an enormous impact on all who work or study in higher education today. Discourses constructing the role of universities as providers of the ‘knowledge workers’ needed to fuel the global economy have impacted on the expectations of students, on the curricula with which they engage, on the work of academic staff as well as on the ‘management teams’ that now make key decisions. Other discourses, associated with what is widely termed ‘New Public Management’, focus our attention on efficiency and accountability. Of course, state-funded universities need to be accountable and efficient, especially in a country like South Africa where the demands on the public purse are many and, often, desperate. Problems arise, however, when efficiency and accountability discourses lose sight of the fact that higher education involves human beings. When this happens, we focus on the ‘production of outputs’, where the term ‘output’ refers not only to artefacts such as publications in the form of journal articles and books but to the young people passing through our universities.
