The rationale for this article is that the actors in the South African higher education system, and particularly those with the responsibility for leading it, need to be clear about the arguments in the transformation debate and in particular about how these get at what is actually happening within it, and to be-consciously and self-critically aware of their own positions within it and in relation to these developments. Drawing on the work of the Ministerial Committee into Transformation in Higher Education and other data, it suggests that the debate has to engage the two-fold nature of the transformation puzzle, namely, those issues which take their character from the structural and those which are ideological in their construction. Approaching it as if it is only one or the other does not get at the complexity of the challenge of transformation. (Contains 6 tables.)