NO CLASS OF 2016?
There is a growing anxiety that the 2016 academic year is in serious jeopardy as ongoing violent #FeesMustFall protests continue to see varsity campuses shut down.
There is a growing anxiety that the 2016 academic year is in serious jeopardy following the recent violent #FeesMustFall protests.
“We are worried because we do not want to see a situation where our entire education system comes to a halt,” said Dr Ingrid Tufvesson, chairperson of the Higher Education Transformation Network, to the news that most universities have closed up shop due to the protests.
She said regardless of whether universities close their doors for the remainder of the year, there cannot be any winners. Not while the issue of fees increments or free education remains unanswered.
“While we fully understand the cry from the students, we decry the destructive behaviour.
“The burden of payment for time lost won’t fall on the academic, but the parent of the students. They will remain in financial bondage.”
She said the network was not only concerned about exams being missed, but that it set back the national agenda.
Protests could also cause an increase in private education, Tufvesson added. “Chances are that people will turn to that [private institutions] more and more.”
According to Universities South Africa (USAf), this week is of “great consequence to our universities” and will determine how the sector “manages the rest of this fractured academic year”.
“It is of paramount importance to individual students, their families, to society and the economy that this academic year is not lost,” USAf said yesterday.
“It is important that each university finds its individual path to return to a period of academic stability, necessary for good student performance.”
Like several organisations to condemned the violence, USAf also said it is “deeply disturbed by the continuing damage to the academic programmes and the infrastructure”. “Students have every right to engage in activism in their quest for fee-free higher education, but we are increasingly despairing of the nature of these protests,” the body said.
“Damage sustained by the university sector in the past year due to student protests is estimated to have now exceeded R600 million.”
USAf aligned itself with Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande’s interim solution for funding. “It partially addresses the need for an eight percent increase. Had there not been such an increase, all our universities
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the battle lines drawn between the protagonists of #FeesMustFall, the embattled universities and the seemingly bemused government authorities are increasingly drawn on treacherously shifting sand. With the memories of another Heritage Day still fresh, it is also clear that there are some rights mixed in with the violent wrongs of any number of student protests which have to be addressed as important factors in the overall toxic mess this country’s education system finds itself in.
Things are certainly not easy for students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds who are trying to uplift themselves.
There can also be little question that the violence which has so badly marked this academic year emanates from a small core of protesters and that there is something ominous about the upsurge of protests as the year grinds towards the end-of-year examinations. The timing can surely not be a coincidence.
There are no simple answers and playing the blame game cannot defuse a situation rooted, as it would seem to be, in the boycott of the education system which stemmed from the 1976 student uprising. No nation can support – morally or financially – a generation of illiterate unskilled labourers.
Torching auditoriums and science laboratories is a self-defeating device which will inevitably rebound negatively.
The abrogation of the government in passing the super-heated buck to an increasingly overstretched and under-prepared police force and the universities themselves, is as dangerously incendiary as any arsonist. Nor is the SA Communist Party’s call for private companies, who already provide endowments and bursaries, to foot the bill.
The question we all need to ask ourselves is simply this: Do we want a heritage of academic wasteland?