Academic Inbreeding: The South African Case

Abstract

There is a dearth of academic scholarship on the incidence and character of “academic inbreeding” in South African higher education, considered for the purpose of this volume to be a policy of employment that strictly favors a university’s own graduates who have no or little experience of education at any other universities and no significant outside work experience. This chapter explores the phenomenon of academic inbreeding in South Africa. To begin with, I critically review the notion of “academic breeding.” While I use the definition of “academic breeding” that serves as the departure point for the authors contributing to this volume, I argue that the definition is too narrow to encapsulate the range of academic inbreeding in South Africa that should be equally of concern. I then describe the South African context of higher education and the academic workforce and workspace in order to ground the discussion on the nature and extent of academic breeding and its possible causes and consequences in South Africa.