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This paper departs from current approaches to bilingual education at bilingual universities and draws a distinction between parallel bilingual education and integrated bilingual education. It presents an overview of language policy development at historically Afrikaans-medium universities in South Africa against the background of a changing higher education environment. The paper demonstrates that such universities have opted for a rather flexible policy on the medium of education. Although parallel bilingual education has been taken as the preferred model, allowance is made for various deviations. This approach represents a compromise between the need to reform (and thus maintain Afrikaans, so as to appease traditional clientele and secure traditional sources of external funding) and the need to transform (and increase access so as to become multilingual and multicultural). The seemingly bilingual approach does not suggest a move towards bilingual higher education per se. Other motives such as language maintenance and the need to survive are the deciding factors.
