This special issue is founded on the view of the “public good” university as slowly receding from our horizon of possibilities as a function of the speed with which digital governance and techno-rationality have achieved hegemony in the higher education sector in South Africa and elsewhere. Furthering the depoliticisation of the university, techno-rationality has emerged as an interplay of technological, economic, affective, and socio-cultural forces that are imperceptibly de/recomposing the presumptive grounds on which the contemporary university is being re/assembled.