Abstract
Underpinned by institutional legitimacy, this study explores how South African public university executives struggled to maintain legitimacy during an unplanned radical change process. Universities faced a national upheaval of a violent student protest, by far the biggest disruption since the end of Apartheid; and the government introduced a free higher education policy in a sudden with a hope to stop the student #FeeMustFall# movement. We used phenomenology to collect data through interviews, observations, and documents and then thematically analyzed various institutional legitimacy forms. Our findings show that a radical change without proper planning can severely damage institutions in all aspects of normative, empirical, leadership, moral and pragmatic legitimacy. The study advances existing institutional legitimacy theories by illustrating how legitimacy can be ruined and create adverse effects during unplanned radical change. It also implies some good suggestions for policymakers and higher education managers in the management into learning and education for a sustainable world.
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