Professors Curwyn Mapaling and Nokulunga Shabalala are two Black clinical psychologists working as academics in South Africa. What started as their shared frustration with the pace of change in universities became a research programme. For three years they recorded their conversations with each other, leading to three journal papers that document their own experiences in higher education and the shifts they would like to see. Here they explain why this matters.What is the problem you’ve identified in South African higher education?When a postgraduate student hesitates to greet you in the corridor, or questions whether you really belong behind that desk, you learn something about the university that no policy document will tell you. The institution may have hired you to transform it, but it has not transformed itself enough to fully recognise you.Our papers are about what it feels like to be a young Black academic in a system that says it wants you but struggles to make room for you.Black African academics remain underrepresented at senior ranks. In 2018 they held 19% of professorial posts while white men held 67%, in a system where 80% of students were African.South African higher education remains shaped by its colonial and apartheid history in ways that go well beyond demographics. The curriculum still privileges Eurocentric knowledge. Institutional cultures carry assumptions about who is credible, who deserves authority and who should simply be grateful for the opportunity. Black academics and students have been calling for deep transformation for decades, but the pace of change has been slow and uneven. Read more: South African universities must do more to tackle staffs’ race and gender imbalances Representation has improved. Whether the institution has changed is a different question.What has shifted is where the sector’s attention goes. As psychologists we notice what people attend to – and what they are steered away from. Universities have been absorbed by commodification: run as businesses, with students as customers and academics as producers of countable outputs. That pressure has displaced the transformation agenda. We ask what happens to the work that cannot be counted at all. That work is care labour: the less visible human work that accompanies teaching, supervision and mentorship. It means helping a student through self-doubt, making the unwritten rules of university life easier to follow, or staying late because a student needs someone who understands what it means to be the first in their family to reach postgraduate study. In psychology the load is particular, because we sit with students facing a profession whose training places are scarce. It grows with student precarity, too. Enrolment doubled to over a million between 2014 and 2024 while support never kept pace, and campus studies have found between 60% and 70% of students food insecure. A hungry student brings that into the supervision room. Read more: Hunger among South African students: study shows those studying remotely need financial aid for food Who carries more of this labour? We do not claim to know, and our research does not measure it. But South African research shows that it falls unevenly, particularly on Black women academics. What we can say is that as early-career academics we are still close to students’ vulnerability, and we do not assume our senior colleagues are not.How do you know how widespread the problem is?We used collaborative autoethnography: structured conversations, transcribed and analysed for patterns, then read against the literature on Black academics’ experiences of belonging, from Black Academic Voices to Jason Arday’s work in Britain. Read more: Jason Arday’s death: Black academics need to feel they belong in higher education Two of us cannot speak for a sector, so we also read our findings against the national picture: 60% of all staff in public universities were on temporary contracts in 2022, most of them African and women.Across our three papers we found two things that kept surfacing. First, mentorship often functions as a site of gatekeeping. Much of academic life runs on unwritten knowledge: which opportunities are worth pursuing, how authorship is negotiated, who to approach for funding or collaboration and how professional networks are entered. Senior academics accumulate this knowledge over time and decide, sometimes without realising it, who gets access to it. We found ourselves working against this by refusing to treat that knowledge as scarce. If we knew how something worked, we made it visible to our students rather than expecting them to work it out alone. Second, the pressure to produce outputs squeezes out the time needed to grow as thinkers and teachers. These are structural pressures, reproduced through workload models, promotion criteria and the funding incentives of the national research output policy. For Black academics they intersect with institutional cultures that still treat their authority as provisional.We know this because we live it, and because a generation of Black scholars has written it down. What none of us can do is quantify it. It appears in no workload model and no performance contract, and that invisibility is the problem.What are the consequences?The consequences extend beyond the academics themselves to having an impact on students and student engagement. Universities run the risk of losing early-career academics due to burnout and disillusionment, and students lose the mentors who understand their contexts. When relational labour goes unrecognised, departments hollow out, and when the system rewards only what can be counted, it narrows what counts as knowledge, who produces it and for whom.This is not only an academic concern. It shapes the quality of education that students receive, the relevance of research to South African society and the credibility of the transformation agenda itself.What should change?Our most recent paper proposes concrete shifts at three levels. At department level, mentorship should be built into workload models as core academic labour rather than treated as a personal choice. Pathways to opportunity, such as research assistantships and co-authorship, should be made transparent so that access does not depend on informal networks.At institutional level, universities need real protections against exploitation and bullying for staff on short-term contracts. Promotion criteria should recognise collaborative scholarship, community engagement and the relational work that sustains academic life. In some institutions these contributions are formally recognised but may still be inconsistently valued in practice.At sector level, the incentives that drive individualism need rethinking. Promotion and reward systems tied to monetary incentives discourage collaboration within and between universities. The research output subsidy pays universities roughly R120,000 (US$7,500) per accredited article, regardless of quality, and less when co-authors sit at other institutions. Many universities pay a share directly to the author, which turns publication into personal income and rewards the sole-authored paper over the collaborative one. Alternatives exist. The Declaration on Research Assessment, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment and the narrative CVs now used by major funders each ask evaluators to recognise what collaborative and socially responsive scholarship looks like, not only what fits neatly into a publication count.None of this will happen through goodwill alone. It requires structural reform: changes to the rules through which academic life is organised and through which worth is made legible. The university we imagine is not a fantasy. It is an administrative and political project, one that begins with taking seriously the experiences of the people doing the work of transformation from within.The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.