**4.2 Scholarship of engagement as the organizing principle for a viable and sustainable academic project**

Against the backdrop both of WSU as a developmental university (2015–2019) and the recommendations of the first phase of the national institutional audits [17], WSU adopted for both her regimes (2015–2019; 2020–2024) scholarship of engagement as the organizing principle for the academic enterprise. This principle promotes the idea about WSU as an Engaged African University [14, 15]. University Senate, as the academic board, gave the three Institutional Directorates a specific mandate to develop an enabling system and the implementing agents for such a principle and for the idea of an engaged university.

**Figure 1** portrays scholarship of engagement as emergent from, and as the product of, the three Directorates (Scholarly Learning and Teaching, Community Engagement and Research and Innovation), which are central to the implementation of the institutional quality management system [10]. According to this model, the three functions (in the form of the Directorates, for the case of Walter Sisulu University, for example) must interface in the following three important functional areas for scholarship of engagement to be possibly realized:


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

#### **Figure 1.**

*The conceptual model for an engaged African university, which emerges from the infusion model expressed as scholarship of engagement.*

As can be inferred from **Figure 1**, scholarship of engagement is conceptually and dialectically related with quality as the enabling system for CSR for UE-PG. Conceptually, CRS can be simplified by the two questions, *relevance to what and responsive to whom,* which therefore take the subject-object relationships. In this way, the idea of university education as the public good becomes a convenient concept, which, when analyzed along the macro-micro politics of quality management and reporting, allow for the concept of scholarship of engagement to be practically possible! At the macro level, the three Directorates have business integrated quality management systems as their core, whereas at the micro level, scholarship of engagement ought to be the key success factor.

Therefore, the WSU academic project functions, published in the self-evaluation report (SER) as part of the institutional audit process [10], allowed for the potential analysis of the value of understanding the role of agency in the theory and practice of CFR for E-PG. The main argument for answering such a question *(relevance to what and responsive to whom?)* would be about identifying, understanding, and explaining the silences and superficialities of such SER submissions in the form of contradictions and inconsistencies in the three main functions.


about the institutional Directorate for Learning and Teaching, for the practical knowledge as the practical order, thus surfacing the potential for internal integration for regional integration.

Therefore, the case of WSU as CSR for UE-PG, as represented in the SER, would become a convenient way of making inferences (transcendental argument) about what could potentially be the case of contradictory totality where university education is supposed to be a public good and thus a representation of corporate social responsibility (the unity of purpose), and yet, diversity arises from implementation. In this way, CSR for UE-PG would play out as contradictory totality in two ways.


Scholarship of engagement as the organizing principle for the academic project promised the potential answer about the academic project as the measure of quality in the following three ways:


The research value for such an exercise, as scholarship, would entail promotion of a cultural system about CSR for UE-PG. Specifically, it would be about how the institutional units, which were designed and managed to work in discrete and fragmented ways, could learn to work in ways that could promote collaboration and partnerships. The net result would be organizational learning at all performance levels of operations, business, and strategy, including the potential relevance and responsiveness of the institution to the local, regional, and national developmental imperatives.
