There is, of course, much more which could be said about it beyond what is said here. But what struck me within minutes was Robert Morrell arguing that Transformation went beyond the usual numerical measures and touched on qualitative aspects - and then appeared to conflate two entirely different "transformations", viz. the "democratic" (for want of a better word - the one that we all agree is good and desirable and a worthy goal) with the "managerial" (the one that most people think is evil and contrary to what we are as a University).
The former is a particularly South African issue - though parallels have been drawn with other countries, such as Malaysia - and the latter a global phenomenon, albeit rather late in manifesting locally. That the two occured simultaneously in SA had to do with Apartheid isolation, and post-Apartheid conscious embracing of "international best practice" as it was naively dubbed. That's where the link ends - the one is neither necessitated by the other, nor conceptually linked... It's an accident of history that they should coincide in this way.
Arguing that "universities are less democratic than they were ten years ago" is probably true, from the vantage point of being a white male academic, if one is thinking in terms of the managerial transformation. Decision-making structures and processes have been refashioned and reshaped to allow more executive decision-making, more upfront management and greater "professionalisation" thereof. However, at the same time, the restructuring has also led to greater levels of transparency and accountability - at least on paper - and the inclusion of previously excluded estates, notably students, and to a lesser extent the subordinate estate ("non-academic" staff). Is this less democratic? Well, for the previously excluded, not.
Similarly, the argument that there has been an "increase in authoritarian practices" in universities is also probably true from the white male academic vantage point. For the rest of us, excluded from the collegial circles which previously made decisions, practices have often felt authoritarian, and the ranks closed of who is party to those practices. The "Golden Age of Collegiality" was Golden only to those on the inside, the (reputedly) dethroned white males; to the rest of us, it was just so much ore we hacked out of the rock to earn our wages.