ABSTRACT
The term epistemological access has become ubiquitous in the scholarship of higher education learning in South Africa. Coined in 2002 by the late philosopher of education Wally Morrow, it has since been deployed in numerous papers and publications as a banner to signal intent to move beyond physical or formal access to meaningful access to the goods of the university. Epistemological access as a term of critique saw the public light of day in October 1992, first in a presentation to Morrow's colleagues at the University of Limpopo, then in a presentation to the 1992 Kenton Conference under the title A picture holds us captive. The tenaciously false picture Morrow had in mind here was the idea that academics could only teach properly if classes were small. A piece of biography may explain why Morrow felt at this early stage that a prime threat to proper teaching, which he later came to call systematic teaching, was this picture.
