The Second-Order University

This article first appeared on University World News

Massification has a triumphant sound. It suggests inclusion, a democratic widening of gates that were, for too long, kept narrow. Photographs cooperate: oceans of students moving through campus corridors, lecture halls filled to the mezzanine, a visible proof that access has been won.

But the camera is a kind liar. It records bodies, not learning. What we are living through in many African universities is a quieter phenomenon that does not photograph well. I call it the ‘great unlearning’.

It unfolds when the expansion of access is not followed by an expansion of capacity, when the timetable is printed on hopes, and when ‘contact hours’ describes contact with the back of another student’s head.

The logistics are visible – overbooked lecture theatres, laboratories using improvised safety protocols, libraries functioning as contested real estate, and WiFi that oscillates between connected and connected-ish.

Less visible is the pedagogy of scarcity that such conditions produce. Teaching designed for dialogue becomes a monologue delivered to a crowd. Assessment drifts toward what can be marked quickly. Feedback, which is a form of care, evaporates. Faculty learn to survive rather than to teach; students learn to pass rather than to think. The institution becomes a credentialling mill that works precisely because it has stopped working.

This is not the consequence of malice. It is the outcome of a system solving for the wrong variable. We built our expansion around seats instead of time.

Time turns enrolment into education

A chair is easy to count; attention is not. Yet time – teacher time, feedback time, lab time – is the capacity that turns enrolment into education. When one lecturer faces 300 students, pedagogy is not merely strained; it is redefined.

Exams migrate from synthesis to recall because recall scales; rubrics become thinner because thin is fast; group projects are graded on the visible effort of a few because the invisible is unmanageable. Quality assurance, with its tidy checklists of contact hours and learning outcomes, provides a reassuring simulation: the file looks excellent while the class grows illiterate in slow motion.

The hidden curriculum teaches other lessons. Students learn to queue, to pre-register for a seat in the library as if education were a concert, to normalise the shrug of a lab without reagents, to treat blackouts as an epistemology.

Infrastructure is not neutral

Infrastructure is not neutral; it is a teacher. Broken bathrooms offer a daily seminar on dignity. A server that loses work teaches distrust of institutions. An admissions office that enrols beyond capacity teaches cynicism, which is a rational response to broken promises.

Employers, confronted with the outputs, adjust by raising their own barriers, screening on institutional brand or on expensive external certifications. A market for lemons emerges: the average degree says less even as it costs more.

We blame the usual suspects – underfunding, yes, and its companion, political interference. But, if we observe more closely, the problem has a more precise contour.

The promise of access collided with three features of university life. First, the university is an institution built to slow time so that knowledge can be taught safely. It resists turbulence by design.

Second, incentives reward what is countable – the paper, not the course, the enrolment, not the learning. Third, the calendar has become a sacred artefact. Reform is squeezed into the margins of semesters that arrive with the regularity of seasons and the stubbornness of tradition. The result is a temporal mismatch: we try to educate at scale with practices engineered for intimacy, then declare the mismatch a moral failure of teachers or students.

Redesign massification

How, then, to proceed without abandoning the moral imperative of access? The answer is not to reverse massification, but to redesign for it. The first move is conceptual: treat capacity as time, not as furniture.

This means reconfiguring the academic year into rhythms that protect attention. Block scheduling, where students focus on fewer courses at a time, makes intense feedback feasible and reduces cognitive switching costs for both students and faculty. Trimester or quarter systems can distribute load across the calendar without extending total time to degree.

Evening and weekend rotations can extend the day without extending exhaustion, provided they are designed rather than improvised.

Next, build the middle layer that mass systems require – the layer between the professor and the crowd. Teaching assistants, peer leaders, studio coaches, and writing fellows are not luxuries; they are the difference between noise and learning.

Employing advanced students as paid learning assistants has a double effect: it creates work that is developmental rather than merely financial, and it turns the classroom into a community with multiple points of contact. Faculty regain the possibility of dialogue, and students regain the possibility of being seen.

Infrastructure as pedagogy

Infrastructure must be understood as pedagogy. The glamorous building is less decisive than the unglamorous maintenance of the ones we have.

A functioning projector can save hours of improvisation. A procurement system that delivers lab supplies before the semester ends is an intervention in the timetable of learning, not a bureaucratic nicety.

Universities should publish service-level commitments the way hospitals publish hand hygiene rates: hours of network uptime, time to repair essential equipment, average queue times for student services. It is a short path from accountability to improvement when the numbers are public and regular.

The city can be recoded as campus. The most expensive square metre in a university is the empty one at 2pm on a Tuesday. Partnerships with municipalities, schools, libraries, and community centres can expand study space and practical learning environments without pouring concrete.

A studio on urban planning taught partly inside a city agency or a clinic-based public health seminar is not a dilution of academic standards; it is an alignment of site and subject. Work-integrated learning should be graded by academics, not outsourced as a benevolent afterthought.

When designed as curriculum rather than charity, it reduces pressure on physical infrastructure while increasing relevance.

Digital technology, often marketed as the saviour of scale, is no such thing if it simply adds brittle complexity. The priority is reliability over novelty. Build resilient, low-bandwidth teaching: local mirrors of course content that work during outages; downloadable packs that allow students to study offline; assessment that tolerates intermittent connectivity rather than punishes it.

Use artificial intelligence where it returns time to humans – drafting feedback for refinement, clustering common errors for targeted mini-lessons, generating multiple versions of practice problems – without converting education into a surveillance regime. The point is to release faculty to do what only they can do: interpret, question, mentor.

We must also align admissions with reality. An honest policy is more dignified than an inflated one. No student should be admitted without a guaranteed minimum of pedagogical conditions: a seat in a small-group discussion at least twice a month, practical exposure where the programme requires it, a named person responsible for academic advising.

If the state cannot fund these minima for every qualified applicant in a given year, it can fund deferrals with bridging programmes, stipends, and priority placement the following intake. Access delayed is regrettable; access diluted is deceptive.

Assessment

Assessment is the backbone of any system and, under massification, it bends toward the cheap. We can resist this gravity by designing evaluation that scales in ways other than downward. Projects can be graded with structured rubrics and moderated by sampling and brief vivas; iterative assignments can be supported by AI tools, with humans auditing for equity and sense; exams can incorporate open resources and focus on transfer rather than recall.

Plagiarism thrives in systems that reward regurgitation. If we want academic integrity, we must ask for work that requires integrity to produce.

Heroism is a ‘terrible strategy’

The temptation now is to demand heroism: the teacher who answers e-mails until midnight, the administrator who ‘makes a plan’, the student who studies under a streetlight. Heroism is an inspiring story and a terrible strategy.

It is what we rely on when systems refuse to change. Far better to accept the paradox we cannot escape: access without adequacy becomes access without meaning. We need a rule worthy of being printed on office walls and budget memos alike – no growth without groundwork. It is less poetic than a vision statement and more useful.

If the lecture theatre is full and the learning is empty, we have not advanced. We have rearranged scarcity into a new shape and called it progress.

The world does not owe our degrees the benefit of the doubt; it listens to what our graduates can do.

If we treat time as our primary capacity, if we build the middle layer that converts crowds into classes, if we repair what is boring to repair, and if we refuse to enrol promises we cannot keep, the ‘great unlearning’ can begin to reverse.

The lecture hall will still be large, but it will no longer be a warehouse for hope. It will be a place where voices carry, where feedback returns, and where a student’s education is not a rumour heard at the back of the room.

This article first appeared on University World News

In my role as a senior information analyst within an institutional planning department at a university, I occupy a curious position. I am, in a sense, a mechanism for the university’s self-observation; I am the university observing itself.

Having spent my postgraduate studies immersed in the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, this position affords me a unique theoretical lens – both a telescope and a microscope – to make sense of the operation of a second-order observation I am part of.

From this vantage point, two recent University World News signals from the university environment have caught my attention, both representing powerful calls for institutional change.

The first is the article “Interculturality: More than another management exercise” by Julio Labraña and Paulina Latorre. The second is a candid interview with Professor Deresh Ramjugernath, the new head of Stellenbosch University, one of Africa’s leading institutions.

Both pieces diagnose a critical problem: a gap between the university’s stated purpose and its actual function. Both issue an urgent call for the university to become more relevant, more inclusive and more deeply engaged with the society it claims to serve.

They are passionate, intelligent and correct in their diagnosis. Yet, based on my own studies into The University as a Social System, I must argue that these calls, however necessary, are destined to be neutralised by the very institution they seek to reform.

The problem is not a lack of will or a failure of leadership; it is a problem of physics. The university, as a system, possesses a powerful immune response that is exceptionally skilled at turning revolutionary calls for change into manageable administrative tasks.

The ‘noise’ of value-laden appeals

In their incisive article, Labraña and Latorre describe this process perfectly. They note that “interculturality”, a concept born of a radical critique of power and knowledge, is being systematically tamed. It now appears in mission statements and strategic plans, transformed from a “challenge to dominant paradigms” into an “object of management”.

This observation is sharpened by the authors’ own positions: Labraña, as a director of institutional quality with a background in social systems theory, understands the university’s internal machinery, while Latorre, a veteran practitioner of internationalisation, has seen these dynamics play out on the ground for over a decade. They describe a “managed form of interculturality, legible to evaluators, easy to report, but largely devoid of critical traction”.

In my own currently ongoing research, for now entitled “The Physics of Irritation”, I use the systems theory of Luhmann to model this exact phenomenon. I argue that the university is an “autopoietic” system, an operationally closed organism that can only “think” in its own language, according to its own internal logic.

Its core functions are governed by a limited set of binary codes: true/false for research, pass/fail for education. Value-laden appeals from the environment – for social justice, for community needs, for interculturality – arrive not as instructions but as “noise”.

The system’s genius lies in how it handles this noise. It doesn’t ignore it; it processes it through a sophisticated immune response. The first line of defence is “re-description”, where the external demand is translated into a core value the university already produces. The call to be more inclusive is re-described as a commitment to producing “global citizens”, a task that requires no fundamental change to a Western-centric curriculum.

The second defence is the formation of “buffers” – specialised units designed to handle the irritation and protect the operational core. The creation of a new diversity office or a set of intercultural workshops, as Labraña and Latorre describe, is a perfect example of a buffer. Its systemic function is not to change the university, but to manage the demand for change, signalling responsiveness while ensuring the core functions of research and teaching continue, undisturbed.

The situation Labraña and Latorre describe is not a failure of the intercultural project, but a sign of the university’s immune system working perfectly. The focus on “evaluable components” is the very mechanism by which a radical critique is neutralised into a bureaucratic task.

Ethical appeals

This brings me to the second signal: the compelling interview with Ramjugernath. Here is a seasoned higher education leader, a chemical engineer by training, now at the helm of a major university, speaking with clarity and conviction. His vision is precisely what is needed. He argues that universities must move from “outputs to outcomes”, translating knowledge into “tangible benefits for society”.

He rightly identifies the main barrier: the “ivory tower” mindset, the inward focus of the university itself. His solution is a “mindset shift” toward co-creation and mutual benefit with partners, driven by leaders who embrace “service, not self-interest”.

I have no doubt about Ramjugernath’s sincerity or the correctness of his vision. Yet, my research compels me to issue a respectful but firm warning: it will not be enough. A “mindset shift” in a leader, however powerful, is a moral appeal to the individuals within the system. But the university is not merely a collection of individuals; it is a system with its own logic, its own momentum and its own physics.

Ramjugernath himself provides the evidence for this. He laments the “overemphasis on outputs driven by subsidy models” which creates a “culture of mass production rather than meaningful, impactful research”.

This is a perfect description of the system’s logic overpowering individual intentions. Those subsidy models are a form of structural coupling – an established channel of irritation – between the university and its environment (in this case, the state or funding agencies). The university has adapted to this pressure by optimising for the metric that ensures its survival: research volume. A leader cannot simply will this away; they are confronting a deeply embedded, systemic behaviour.

The “ivory tower” is not just a “mindset”; it is a structural feature of an operationally closed system. The call for “service, not self-interest” is an ethical appeal, but the system itself is not an ethical actor. It does not respond to ethics; it responds to environmental pressures that threaten its core operational codes.

This is the leadership paradox: a good leader like Ramjugernath can correctly identify the need for change, but the very structure of the system they lead is designed to resist that change. His call for a new “mindset” is, from a systemic perspective, more “noise”.

The system will hear it, and it will respond. It will re-describe his vision, translating “societal impact” into metrics it can already measure – patents filed, industry partnerships signed, income generated. It will create buffers – a new “Office of Societal Impact” – to manage the vision, while the core academic departments continue to operate according to the codes of true/false and pass/fail and the pressures of subsidy models.

Complex pressure

If moral appeals and visionary leadership are insufficient, what, then, is to be done? My research suggests that if we want to change the university’s behaviour, we must stop trying to persuade it and start engineering a more effective irritant.

An effective irritant must be “entangled”. It cannot be a simple demand that can be delegated to a buffer. It must be a complex pressure that simultaneously threatens the university’s core survival logics: its Body (liquidity and funding) and its Mind (legitimacy and accreditation).

To achieve the laudable goals set out by Ramjugernath and to realise the critical project described by Labraña and Latorre, the irritant must be structural.

• Threaten the body with conditional liquidity: The demand for societal relevance and interculturality must be tied directly to the university’s budget. This means moving beyond asking for goodwill and creating funding formulas, whether from government or philanthropists, that are explicitly contingent on verifiable metrics of community engagement, curriculum reform and co-designed research. The university cannot re-describe a 20% budget cut as “excellence”. It must adapt.
• Threaten the mind with conditional legitimacy: The demand must be woven into the fabric of accreditation. If accrediting bodies make deep, curriculum-integrated community partnership a core, non-negotiable standard, it becomes a matter of systemic compliance. A single buffer cannot handle an accreditation review; it is an invasive, system-wide procedure that forces every function to document and prove its compliance. This transforms the mission from an optional activity into a mandatory operation.

This is a less inspiring vision than one driven by servant leadership, I admit. It suggests that the university will only act in service of society when it is strategically advantageous for its own survival. The resulting change will be a product of calculation, not a conversion of the heart. But in a system as complex and resilient as the university, it may be the only realistic path forward.

The task for stakeholders – governments, funders, accreditors and even visionary leaders like Professor Ramjugernath – is to recognise the limits of rhetoric. The challenge is not to find better leaders, but to change the environmental conditions so that the existing leaders have no choice but to guide their institutions in a new direction.

We must stop trying to teach the university a new morality and start speaking the only languages it truly understands: the cold, hard codes of payment and legitimacy. The most successful intervention will be the one that makes the desired change the system’s own clever idea.

This article first appeared on University World News

There is a polite way to describe Africa’s academic brain drain. It speaks of mobility, opportunity and the global marketplace of ideas. It prefers verbs like network, circulate and connect, as if movement, itself, were a virtue requiring no object.

But, on the balance sheets of our universities, this movement has another name: decapitalisation. It is capital flight conducted in human form – a multi-decade public investment carefully cultivated, then harvested elsewhere. We have become the world’s most generous donors: we export the scarce and import the expensive.

We misframe the problem when we treat it as a simple migration story. People are not problems to be managed, nor assets to be owned. The problem is institutional: a system that reliably converts training into exit. Every departure is a reclassification.

Public expenditure becomes private gain, national capacity becomes foreign productivity, and our universities are left to applaud the success of graduates who now solve other nations’ problems on time initially funded by our budgets.

A senior academic is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It often takes 15 to 20 years of cumulative investment to produce a principal investigator capable of mentoring, attracting grants and building teams.

That production chain runs from subsidised primary schooling through undergraduate stipends, state-backed postgraduate scholarships, laboratory and library infrastructure, and the invisible currency of mentorship.

Time accumulates as capability

The chain is unforgiving: if one link fails, the whole fails. Brain drain interrupts this chain precisely when it begins to yield returns. When a newly trained PhD leaves, the nation loses, not only a person but the time-value of past investments and the compounding future of local mentorship. Time does not merely pass in universities; it accumulates as capability – or as missed cohorts.

Our accounting assists the amnesia. Universities live on annual budgets and short grant cycles, which means their most valuable assets – people – sit off the balance sheet. There is no line item for the scholarship pipeline, mentorship capital, or lab continuity.

We track publications but not the reproduction of producers. A national disaster hides inside smooth spreadsheets. When the ledger excludes the cost of replacement, exit looks tolerable. It is not.

Consider the silent subsidies that lubricate the loss: public funding discounts the true cost of training; external fellowships often require relocation to where equipment actually works; bibliometrics reward affiliation with global brands, not with the labs that paid for the early years.

The state pays the first 80% of a career, then the last 20% – where reputation, patents and lab leadership accrue – matures abroad. We harvest pride; others harvest productivity.

Science as paperwork

Explanations for departure are abundant – salaries, infrastructure, political interference, visa regimes, predatory recruitment, the status gradients of global science.

None alone explains the regularity of the outcome; together, they form a machine whose visible function is the export of excellence. Underfunding and massification expand teaching loads until research becomes a night shift.

Offering a pay raise without protected research time simply accelerates burnout; it rewards staying until one can leave. Procurement systems that treat a pipette like a national security threat ensure that experiments are designed around bureaucracy rather than hypotheses; science becomes a performance of paperwork.

Governance by political appointment replaces merit with loyalty; the fastest way to preserve intellectual freedom becomes a flight itinerary. International donors, acting rationally within their own constraints, channel training to institutions with predictable labs, stable electricity, and librarians who can approve a journal subscription before the grant expires.

This is not malice; it is selection. Add the asymmetry of borders – one visa system engineered to attract skill, another to discourage departure – and the outcome is unsurprising. Systems reproduce themselves through the selections they reward. We reward exit.

Producing opportunities to leave

The paradoxes are instructive because institutions fail by ignoring them. The very activities that produce excellence – global collaboration, competitive grants, sabbaticals – also produce opportunities to leave.

The solution is not to curtail exposure but to structure it as a loop with a return path. Efforts to manufacture commitment through control – bonding, surveillance, punitive contracts – create the appearance of retention while accelerating distrust.

Commitment grows where institutions keep promises over time. A salary without science is another trap: paying more without fixing labs, administrative bottlenecks, and doctoral pipelines merely increases the cost of underperformance.

People do not join universities to be bureaucrats at a higher price. And capacity-building becomes dependency when excellence requires departure to access equipment or supervision. Training then builds capacity in the abstract and dependency in practice.

We will not prevent movement, and we should not try. Designing circulation is both ethical and feasible.

Offering credible trajectories at home

A system that expects mobility can anchor talent if it offers credible trajectories at home and frictionless re-entry. Split appointments anchored in Africa can normalise mobility: scholars spend a defined part of the year in a partner lab abroad, while their primary appointment, PhD supervision, and grant management remain at home.

Partner universities commit to joint doctoral committees and co-supervision by default, not as a grant-writing stint, ensuring that leadership capacity accumulates locally.

Grant portability can be structured with an obligation to fund travel, but at least half of research expenditures and all doctoral supervision remain within African institutions. Donors can enforce this; it is programme design, not diplomacy.

Sabbatical homecomings invite the diaspora back into the routine of institutional life – multi-year re-entry sabbaticals that bring scholars home for a semester every other year with guaranteed lab time, protected from the administrative and teaching avalanches that make homecomings purely ceremonial.

Start-up packages matter, but the real currency is time: a functioning lab and half-time research protection for the first three years correlate far better with retention than titles or cars. Promotions should reward team-building – graduates supervised, grants anchored – alongside personal citations.

The dullest levers are often the most powerful. Science moves at the speed of customs; fast-track scientific procurement is free capacity. Visas are talent policy; regional multi-entry academic corridors reduce friction more efficiently than any conference speech.

A continental training fund

And, because the system is international, reciprocity has to be negotiated internationally. Destination institutions that recruit at scale should contribute to a continental training fund, modelled on ethical recruitment compacts in health.

This is not a tax on individuals; it is a fair-cost mechanism to sustain the pipeline from which they benefit. Universities should publish a talent balance sheet with net flows, replacement ratios, time-to-principal-investigator for doctoral graduates, and re-entry rates for diaspora programmes. What we measure, we learn to manage.

Artificial intelligence will either harden dependency or soften it. If computing power, data, and models remain offshore, AI will redirect our best minds toward prompting other people’s tools.

If we invest strategically, AI can change the gradient that pulls scholars away. A continental compute cooperative – pooled GPU clusters across regional hubs – makes the unaffordable feasible; access through authenticated university networks creates a commons rather than a queue.

Data sovereignty commons in health, agriculture, climate, and languages make Africa the only place where some questions can be answered properly; tools then follow the data.

International AI grants that involve African problems should require African institutional leadership as a rule, not an afterthought. This is not technological romanticism; it is a relocation of problem-solving so that meaningful work accumulates at home. People stay where the most interesting problems are solvable with the tools at hand.

Doctoral schools as continental goods

The doctoral bottleneck requires equal candour. The faculty cliff is not a metaphor; it is a demographic fact. Without senior mentors, the system cannot reproduce itself.

Doctoral schools should be treated as continental goods: pool supervision capacity so that a candidate in Gaborone can be co-supervised by a lab in Addis and a methods expert in Lagos, with joint credentials that bind institutions into networks rather than leave fragile departments to solve complex problems alone.

Protect the first five years of academic careers with fellowships that offer light teaching loads, guaranteed doctoral slots, and administrative shielding. If someone must inspect hostels and approve toner cartridges, it should not be your future research leaders.

Governance, the slow poison, needs its antidote. We often speak of political interference as isolated events. Its real effect is cultural: it normalises loyalty over merit, producing rational exits.

Retention strategies that ignore governance will fail quietly. Transparent, competitive appointments and promotions; external peer review insulated from ministerial discretion; and multi-year rolling budgets that cannot be weaponised are straightforward to describe and difficult to fake. Trust is not a value; it is a timetable. When promises survive several budget cycles, people begin to believe them. When they do not, exit plans remain open.

We should stop counting retention as a moral victory. People are not hostages. Count anchored teams, anchored grants, and anchored doctoral programmes. Stop equating salary increases with reform.

Excellence must be reachable at home

Without time, tools, and governance, higher pay simply buys better luggage. And stop designing training that requires departure to be excellent. Excellence must be reachable from home, not merely visible from afar.

We should start measuring talent like capital by publishing national knowledge accounts that quantify training investment, net flows, and replacement costs. Start noticing friction as a strategy variable; every month a microscope sits in customs is goodwill burned. And start negotiating reciprocity; the countries that gain most from African talent are rational actors, many of which will co-finance the very pipeline that sustains their labs if we build credible mechanisms.

The world does not steal our scholars; it lowers the transaction costs of their best work. If we want to keep more of that work, we must lower those costs here – predictably, publicly, and for long enough that habits form.

The good news is that talent wants to contribute at home. The bad news is that systems can make that contribution impossible. We cannot stop movement, and we should not try.

But we can re-engineer its consequences. If we design for circulation rather than captivity, if we invest in the re-entry loops that convert mobility into capacity, and if we fix the slow variables – governance, time, and tools – then the arithmetic of absence can begin to change.

In that future, success will look different. Our scholars will still fly out. The difference is that they will fly back – because the most consequential conversations, the most demanding problems, and the most capable teams are here – and because our universities have remembered how to turn time into talent without exporting the dividends.