Guide to authors

Mahmood Mamdani

ISBN 2-86978-201-2 (ISBN 13: 978-2-86978-201-3); 312 pages
Price: 30.00 USD; Africa: non-CFA 20.00USD; CFA 10,000

Scholars in the Marketplace is a case study of market-based reforms at Uganda’s Makerere University. With the World Bank heralding neoliberal reform at Makerere as the model for the transformation of higher education in Africa, it has implications for the whole continent. At the global level, the Makerere case exemplifies the fate of public universities in a market-oriented and capital-friendly era.

The Makerere reform began in the 1990s and was based on the premise that higher education is more of a private than a public good. Instead of pitting the public against the private, and the state against the market, this book shifts the terms of the debate towards a third alternative that explores different relations between the two.

The book distinguishes between privatisation and commercialisation, two processes that drove the Makerere reform. It argues that whereas privatisation (the entry of privately-sponsored students) is compatible with a public university where priorities are publicly set, commercialisation (financial and administrative autonomy for each faculty to design a market-responsive curriculum) inevitably leads to a market determination of priorities in a public university. The book warns against commercialisation of public universities as the subversion of public institutions for private purposes.

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. He was previously the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Makerere University and the founding director of Centre for Basic Research in Kampala. He has also taught at the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Cape Town. Mamdani is a past president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). His previous books include Citizen and Subject (recognized as ‘one of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century’ in Cape Town 2001 and awarded the Herskovitz Prize of the African Studies Association of USA for ‘the best book on Africa published in the English language in 1996’), When Victims Become Killers and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. He lives in New York City and Kampala.  

Contents

List of Tables	vi
Preface and Acknowledgements.	vii
Chapter One:
The Reform Process: The First Phase	1
Chapter Two:
Winners and Losers	51
Chapter Three:
Commercialisation	118
Chapter Four:
Decentralisation	193
Conclusion	255
Selected Bibliography	270
Index	291

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