ABSTRACT
The reform and restructuring of higher education, especially university education, in Africa constitutes a recent but major focus of donor agencies and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank. This intervention was largely facilitated by the economic crisis, which adversely affected the educational sector, constraining its operational and management capabilities. The proposed reforms extend the logic of neo-liberal economic ideology to the educational sector, with the policies of deregulation and market rules as the norm. These are policies hitherto applied to the economy under the rubrics of the structural adjustment programme (SAP). The ideology of neo-liberalism in the context of the university sub-sector emphasises drastic reduction in the state's role in supporting university education, applying cost recovery and rationalisation to educational enterprise, and aligning the acquisition of knowledge with the demands of industry. In other words, the university in Africa is being transformed from a 'citadel of learning in itself to a 'competitive capitalist market place', where there is the hegemony of market rules and philosophy (Adejumobi, 2000). This new orientation has severe implications for the nature of power relations, the mode of governance and the construction of democratic space for intellectual and academic freedom in the universities.
