Professor Sioux McKenna on reimagining the purpose of higher education

In these opening episodes, McKenna doesn’t deliver a rallying cry – she offers a quiet but powerful invitation to reflect. In a system increasingly driven by outputs, targets and rankings, McKenna challenges us to pause and consider a deeper, more fundamental question: What are we really here for?

This isn’t the kind of question that fits neatly into boardroom agendas or policy briefs. It asks us to reflect – on what we teach, how we teach and why we teach. It asks us to consider the kind of society we’re shaping through our institutions, and whether the systems we’ve built still serve the students we claim to prioritise.

In this conversation, McKenna challenges the norms we’ve grown used to: the busyness, the competition, the transactional view of education. And in their place, she calls for something deeper – collaboration across divides, a pedagogy that balances discomfort with care, and a renewed commitment to purpose over performance.

The problem with being perpetually busy

McKenna describes academia as a place where everyone is doing – lecturing, assessing, attending meetings – but few are reflecting. There’s no time, no space, and perhaps no perceived reward for asking the bigger questions: What is the purpose of higher education? Who are our students? What kind of citizens are we hoping to shape?

And yet, she argues, these conversations are not luxuries. They’re foundational. Without them, we risk going through the motions, producing graduates who have the degrees, but not the depth; the qualifications, but not the curiosity; the skills, but not the responsibility.

Beyond competition, toward collaboration

One of McKenna’s most pointed critiques is of the competitive, neoliberal frameworks that dominate higher education - turning institutions into rivals and academics into isolated performers climbing career ladders.

‘But if we don’t collaborate,’ she says plainly, ‘we won’t reach any of the big goals’. The challenges we face - climate change, inequality, technological disruption - are too vast, too ‘wicked’, to be solved by individual institutions or single disciplines.

She calls for transdisciplinary thinking and sector-wide collaboration. Not just between faculties or within programmes, but between private and public institutions. She calls for partnerships that are often seen as unlikely or uncomfortable due to differing stakeholders, funding models and histories. Still, McKenna believes we’re starting to see a shift, saying, ‘That big divide of the past - it just can’t hold’.

A pedagogy of discomfort with an ethic of care

Perhaps one of the most striking ideas McKenna shares is the need to stop treating students as mere customers.
Yes, they pay fees. Yes, they expect a return on their investment. But education is not a transaction - it’s a transformation. And transformation, she reminds us, is rarely comfortable.

She advocates for a pedagogy of discomfort, where students are challenged intellectually, confronted with unfamiliar worldviews and asked to wrestle with complexity. But crucially, that discomfort must be paired with care. "You should be discomforted," she says, "but the institution should also make spaces to show that it cares".

This tension - between challenge and compassion - is what enables true learning to happen. But as McKenna points out, our current systems don’t leave much room for failure, reflection or growth. Too often, every test counts, every essay is high-stakes, and students are punished for trying and not getting it right the first time. But that’s not how we learn. Instead, we need more flexible systems that create space for low-stakes assessments and multiple opportunities to learn, reflect and improve over time.

Knowledge, power and the responsibility of privilege

In discussing curriculum and epistemology, McKenna doesn’t shy away from the difficult terrain of decolonisation. She draws a careful distinction between ‘powerful knowledge’, which is abstract, transferable knowledge that equips graduates to solve real-world problems, and the ‘knowledge of the powerful’, which has long been privileged because of colonial legacies.

She cautions against relativism, but equally against arrogance. The point isn’t to discard existing knowledge, but to expand it - to listen for the voices we haven’t heard, to explore the blind spots in our disciplines, and to remain open to lifelong learning.

And perhaps most importantly, McKenna urges us to instill in our students a sense of responsibility, not superiority. ‘Having a higher education is a huge privilege,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t make you more worthy. It gives you tools to serve others.’

Looking forward by looking deeper

As 2030 edges closer - and with it, the deadline for achieving South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP) goals - and the pressure to ‘produce results’ intensifies, McKenna resists the call to merely look ahead. Instead, she proposes that we look deeper.

Who are we? What do we believe in? What are our values? These aren’t distractions from the work of higher education - they are the work.

Goals, metrics and strategies all have their place. But without clarity of purpose and shared values, they risk becoming hollow.

Professor Sioux McKenna’s message is not flashy. It doesn’t promise quick wins or easy answers. But it’s quietly radical in its insistence that we slow down, listen more and recentre the human in our institutions.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s how we begin to build the future of higher education - not by predicting it, but by shaping it with care, courage and conscience. This, we believe, is a conversation worth having.