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.