University Leadership at the Edge of Chaos: A South African Perspective

Today's higher education landscape in South Africa is facing challenges in relation to free education. Leaders in the higher education sector in South Africa are operating in the zone of complexity or in the zone between order and chaos. The struggle of students for free education has gained currency and the funding of same continues to be a critical challenge. Can the stakeholders find accommodation? The Ralph Stacey Model is used to highlight and analyse areas of contestation between stakeholders. The model comprises of a vertical axis representing levels of agreement, and a horizontal axis representing degree of certainty. There is a level of understanding of free education, which can be translated into some sort of agreement, but there is a high level of uncertainty in terms of a funding model for free education for all. The higher education environment is characterised by imminent change, unpredictability, complexity, diversity, uncertainty and divergent views of different stakeholders. This conceptual paper touches on chaos theory, as it posits that order emerges from disorder, and disorder emerges from order. The higher education environment in South Africa has been characterised by 'normalcy' for a long time, which stifled creativity and innovation in terms of developing a framework to provide either free or affordable higher education. Today's turbulence and unrest have forced leadership to view universities as complex adaptive systems that need to traverse to a higher fitness landscape in order to cope with and adapt to change, complexity and diversity, as well as to operate or push universities to operate at the edge of chaos. Leadership needs to nudge this situation towards order, though the property of self-organisation is inevitable.