**2.2 Relevance and responsiveness as the measure of the common and public good**

Integrated community engagement ([10], p. 8) refers to one of the core functions of higher education, involving working constructively and co-operatively with communities that are connected to the institution, to make that institution more adaptive and responsive to needs that it could service. Such integrated community engagement has the potential to affect or influence almost every aspect of an institution's functioning. In addition, as argued, for example [10], community engagement should be specifically integrated with learning, teaching, and research and should be based on, and enhance, the disciplinary knowledge and expertise of the institution. Against the backdrop from the latter two main observations for the value of university education for the public good, the following statement becomes quite compelling about the case of HDUs ([9], p. 309),

*"There is no guarantee that place-based strategies will work to revive lagging cities, of course, but the evidence suggests that if the possibilities inherent in greater local regulation and engagement in the interests of the public good are ignored, higher education will not be able to greater opportunity, and will likely serve to reinforce and exacerbate inequality in South Africa".*

Furthermore, what could be regional integration is provided for in the body of knowledge; for example, [9], it refers to the development of place-based roles of universities and the critical need for subnational and city-level participation in higher education planning and development. Integrated community engagement and regional integration, in such contexts, refer to the subnational and especially the city-level opportunities that exist for universities to become more integrated into their place-based contexts, as a way of achieving their mandate to redress inequality. This also entails how the development of the region, through program qualifications mix,

#### *Reimagining Corporate Social Responsibility in the Idea of University Education as the Public… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110177*

enables the required capacity to create jobs, drive innovation, and reverse some of the detrimental effects of decades of migrant labor and under-development.

Therefore, in this article, I have organized my argument and claims around the case of historically disadvantaged universities (HDUs), in South Africa, which, due to the conditions that are not of their own making, are still located in the communities that used to be reserved for blacks and the lowest stratum in the socio-economic ladder. These university institutions, which operate from these communities, continue to face difficult questions about relevance (knowledge systems) and of responsiveness (student or people-centeredness). They face the questions about CSR for UE-PG as relevance to what (cultural system of belief, values, norms, and standards) and responsiveness to whom (students' first choice for university education). The communities were framed, through settler colonialism and the structured racist apartheid system, as the Bantustans and later as homelands (HL). It is from this enduring legacy of many years of modern slavery that these HDUs still admit students from working class families (SWCF). For this reason, the HL-HDU-SWCF phenomenon will be the basic feature in discussing the absences and silences about the CSR cases, which are the basis of my claims. Out of 26 universities in South Africa, eight belong to this HL-HDU-SWCF phenomenon. The unfortunate picture about the phenomenon, and therefore the CSR ideals, is that, for many, and almost three decades into constitutional South African democracy, the phenomenon is still characterized by the PUI factors, as briefly introduced above, which, in turn, have a face along black color, female gender, and rural location. Therefore, the HL-HDU-SWCF phenomenon faces a myriad of systemic and contextual challenges that have been compounded by the demands of both Rhodes Must Fall and the #FeesMustFall movements (2015–2017) and the unprecedented unfolding crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Such a character about the idea of university education takes a particular reflective exercise in the South African context. At the macro level, it is best captured in two expressions. This is the context that I prefer to refer to as the complexity of power relations in politics of knowledge and of being. In the HETSA context, knowledge production is still characterized by settler colonialism and the old apartheid system where the universities that used to be characterized as historically white, or still black but relatively advantaged, remain so almost three decades into constitutional democracy [11]. In such a context, the case about the HETSA transformation project provides for the potential response to the current limitations of mainstream theories about CSR for UE-PG. About HETSA alone, the debates become very contrasted against the enduring systems of class, race, power, and privilege, which therefore pose a serious challenge to CSR as generally understood.

In the subsequent section, I discuss the need for surfacing the ontological position about CSR for UE-PG and why drawing on the realist-oriented theories, by focusing on the role of agency, allows for the better understanding and explanation of the construct of CSR for UE-PG. It is for this reason that, for these purposes of the claims and the main argument in this article, the discussion revolves around what ought to be the unity of theory and practice about CSR in the context of UE and its expressively veracious considerations.
