Transforming the Professoriate in Africa: Contributions/Considerations from Future Professors Fellows of the Future Professors Programme

Since 2015, South African universities have been confronted with several significant challenges. These include the #fallist movements’ demands for “free higher education and students” subsequent call for the decolonisation of the university curricula and advocating for economic and social equity (Waghid and Meda 2023). The subsequent global COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption of teaching and learning practices brought into the spotlight and underscored deep-rooted educational inequalities (Ontong and Waghid 2020). It also raised concerns among (higher) education institutions about the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on assessment practices and unethical research conduct (Christou 2023; Slimi 2023). When management in South African universities could not respond to students’ demands for free decolonised higher education, the latter reacted violently by burning university infrastructure. As was the case with the onset of the pandemic, the government offered guidelines to universities concerning remote multimodal teaching and learning. This was despite the challenges for students around access to the internet in remote communities and limited access to the devices they needed to engage in any form of online learning.