University debate replaced by brawl

This country’s universities are coming under fire from all sides, with the decision announced this week that the University of the Witwatersrand is to raise fees 8% next year. Just another sign of the impossible dilemma our tertiary institutions are trapped in. On one hand, students are increasingly being enmeshed in a miasma of lasting debt that is often the price of a student striving to rise above the norm. There can be argument that this must, by rights, have a mitigating effect against letting the cream of our intellectual youth rising naturally and unhindered to the top. Not doing so, logic would surely dictate, is discriminatory practice and in its current context, arguably comes nowhere close to reaching the ideals espoused in our constitution.

But equally, the universities are caught between the jaws of an insidious threshing machine over which the hard-pressed institutions have little real control. Any meagre bounty provided by the state has little concrete relevance in the costs of the real world out there. And is shrinking in true terms.

The wages of every single part of the complex machinery of a university have to be met. And as the pressure for entrance to the institutions of higher learning mount – fed by a growing number of students taking five years to complete a three-year graduate course, linked inextricably to the dropping of school-leaving entrance standards – the cogs within the academic machinery must perforce grow in number.

Thrown headlong into what has become a toxic mix of student demands and expectations and the increasingly difficult business of keeping university gates open, has come the wave of thuggery and violence which dragged a noble debate down to the level of a bareknuckle brawl.

It is little wonder when the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.