Perspective Chapter: Reflections from the Field - The Struggles of a Senior Manager in Pursuit of Social Justice and Equity, the Case of Walter Sisulu University in South Africa

In this chapter, I provide a perspective about what can constitute the struggles of the educational development practitioner for social justice and equity from the position of a senior manager. I enunciate the case of three crisis events about educational development from the social realist explanatory program, which draws on the critical realist philosophy, by arguing that what can be the crisis cases in the academic project can take place because the actors in such cases might be informed by the privileged discourses of economic rationality and neoliberalism (ER-NL) instead of social justice and equity (SJ-E). The instrumentalist and personal interests can allow for what can ultimately become more of the reproductive than what ought to be transformative outcomes. Such cases are antithetical to the value of university education as the public good. The analysis about the cases took a particular focus on the university education phase of its development as the two management and governance regimes were grappling with the institutional transformation change in general and the challenge of the academic project. The scholarly engagement of the cultural and human systems for some crisis events during the "change of guard," albeit with demonstrable silences about the critical construct of quality enhancement, allowed for what could be finally declared as the exploratory research. The significance of such exploratory research is thus the advancement of what ought to be the theorization and conceptualization about social practices in contexts of historical and structural disadvantage and their expressively veracious considerations.