Contestations of Stakeholder Participation in University Governance: A Case of a Historically Black University

Institutional structures of governance across universities are under strain on how to respond to the competing demands of higher education. As a result, the leadership and governance of universities is becoming more complex than never before. This is emerging out of the popular discourses of inclusion and exclusion of certain categories of student and staff in critical key committees of the university governing council. In the post 1994 South African higher education dispensation, university governing councils continue to struggle to include university students and certain categories of university staff for instance unionized staff in key governance structures of the universities. Several partisan reasons have been given for their deliberate exclusion. This continues to cause a lot of stockholder animosity and institutional climates of retribution between university leadership and these categories of university staff. This paper argues that effective governance practice in such institutional environments is linked to sufficient formulas of representation in the university governing councils. The paper makes use of the concept of culture within a micro-political framework to generate modes of good governance within such stakeholder institutional environments. The conceptual paper ends with implications for effective governance in stakeholder governed university environments.