Prof Saleem Badat is a university leader, critical sociologist, scholar, higher education policy specialist and activist. He uses scientific knowledge and activity – his own and that of others – as a common ground to inform his research on social reproduction and transformation, structure and human agency, domination and liberation, and the decolonization and transformation of universities and society. Saleem’s embrace of the early 1970s radical ‘Revisionist’ school, critical theory and critical university studies shaped his commitment to ensuring that university education is an ennobling adventure and a formative intellectual and social experience that is available to all with the necessary talent. His scholarly understanding combined with anti-apartheid political activism underpin his profound commitment to knowledge and universities, equity, diversity and inclusion, non-racialism and non-sexism, social justice and the transformation of universities. Hence his books on exceptional but forgotten persons who were banished under apartheid and on neglected non-racial tennis players, his passionate promotion of effective support for promising early career scholars, and his mentoring of many Humanities scholars. Saleem is Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Free State. Between 2014 and 2019, he was the first Programme Director of International Higher Education & Strategic Projects at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York. His R1 billion in grant making supported innovative scholarship and many hundred postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the Human Sciences at universities globally, but especially in Africa and the Middel East. 13 Prior to that, from 2006 to 2014, Saleem was vice-chancellor of Rhodes University. In 1999, he became the first Chief Executive Officer of the Council on Higher Education (CHE), a post he held until 2006. He began his academic career in 1989 at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where he become the Director of its Education Policy Unit. In 2004 the University of the Free State awarded him an Honorary Doctorate to recognize his ‘outstanding achievements in the shaping of policies and practices’ in higher education. Honorary doctorates followed, from the University of York in 2008 and Rhodes University in 2015. In 2008, Inyathelo conferred on him its Exceptional Philanthropy Award for excellence and leadership in Personal South African Philanthropy.