Saleem Badat

Saleem Badat Saleem Badat holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of York. His scholarship is concerned with questions of equity and social justice in and through universities. He is the author of four books, various edited collections, some 60 book chapters, journal articles and policy reports. He is currently Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Free State and Senior Research Associate in the School of Education at the University of Kwazulu-Natal

Early politics
The 1976 Soweto Uprising profoundly shaped Badat's political consciousness and student activism. He was Chairperson of the Natal University student Wages Commission and served on the Release Mandela Committee. He was part of the 1980 Natal schools boycott coordinating committee. He helped found the Black Students Society at Natal University and the Student Community Programmme and the Azanian Students Organisation at UCT. In 1983 Badat entered full time political activism when he became editor of the Western Cape community newspaper, Grassroots.

Career
Badat began his professional career as a scholar at the University of the Western Cape as a lecturer in social theory, sociology of education and education and development in the Faculty of Education. He worked closely with Harold Wolpe. Upon Wolpe's untimely death, Badat took over as the Director of the Education Policy Unit. In 1999, he became the founding CEO of the South African Council on Higher Education, a position which he held until 2006. As CEO, he built the Council to serve as an effective statutory advisory body to the minister of Higher Education and as a national quality assurance and accreditation body for higher education in South Africa. From June 2006 until July 2014, Badat served as the first black vice-chancellor of Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

Badat holds Bachelors and Honours degrees in the Social Sciences from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a Certificate in Higher Education and Science Policy from Boston University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from the University of York.

Between August 2014 and December 2018, he was the Program Director of the International Higher Education and Strategic Projects program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His portfolio encompassed grant making in the arts and humanities to research universities in South Africa, Uganda, Ghana, Egypt, and Lebanon, to pan-African and pan-Arab institutions working in higher education and to some global programmes.

Over the course of his career, Badat has served on numerous boards, commissions, and committees. He was chairperson of Higher Education South Africa (now: Universities South Africa), chaired the Association of African Universities Scientific Committee on Higher Education, was a board member of the Centre for Higher Education Transformation and of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust.

Badat has received several honorary degrees during his career. In 2004, the University of the Free State awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contributions to higher education policy, followed in 2008 by an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of York, and eventually in 2015, he received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University.

Publications
As a critical social scientist, Badat's core research and writings deal with the politics of social reproduction and social transformation with special reference to universities and higher education. Based on his PhD, Badat published in 2002 Black Student Politics, Higher Education and Apartheid from SASO to SANSCO, 1968-1990 (HSRC Press, republished in 2016 by Taylor & Francis). In 2009 he published Black Man, You are on Your Own (Steve Biko Foundation / STE Publishers 2010), and 2012/2013, The Forgotten People: Political Banishment under Apartheid (Jacana Press and Brill). In 2023 his Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice was published by UKZN Press. In addition to his books, Badat published over 60 scholarly articles and numerous policy reports and briefs. He is currently working on books on a history of universities in South Africa, and on his period as vice chancellor of Rhodes, and on edited collections on a history of the University of Durban-Westville and on Research and Activism.