Crisis opens up crucial

At the heart of the student protests across South Africa is the immediate question of the right to learn. Choosing to adopt tactics that have forced institutions to shut down and preventing learning from happening in its usual ways, protesting students have come under fire for interfering in the lives of those who choose not to participate in campaigns that are said to affect ‘a minority’.

They have been chastised by their vice-chancellors and Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande for infringing on the rights of other members of their university communities to engage in “the academic project”. And in the usual sensational style of the mainstream media, the actions of students have been characterised as “violent”.

But anyone who takes the time to listen closely to what the students are saying will know that their actions are not ill-considered, and that their immediate struggle against fees increases is imagined as part of a much bigger struggle against a system that they characterise as violent and speak of as experiencing in violent forms in their everyday lives.

As a lecturer who has spent the greater part of the past week with students engaged in struggle at the University of the Witwatersrand (many of whom I have taught over the past six years), I have been inspired by their individual and collective courage and resolve.

As they argue, the right to learn is compromised every day for poor black students in many different ways by a system that is shaped and driven by business principles.

At the same time they argue that what is being learnt and how it is being taught need to change as the colonial and apartheid cultures of learning, teaching and knowledge production remain intact.

Their actions, then, are directed towards disrupting the normal functioning of a system that, they argue, does violence to them as students and to black people generally.

For a while, then, their right to protest allows them to disrupt the usual ways in which the right to learn is given effect to, asking how it might be that this right can be put into effect for us all regardless of our ability to pay for it.

In doing this, they have also succeeded in putting on the national agenda once again the important question of what a public university in Africa today should be, the values it should uphold, the kind of education it delivers, and the kinds of knowledge it produces.

#FeesMustFall has as its main demand that higher education be free. The compromise that it is willing to accept is that there be no fees increases in 2016.

Though some have been quick to criticise students as being “entitled” and refusing to accept the tasks of managing a constrained national budget, the demand for free higher education is a demand for a completely transformed imagination of the higher education system and its role in society.

This is reflected also in the fact that the struggles and demands of workers as part of university communities have been central in the protests of students. At both Wits and UCT, outsourcing has been a central target of student campaigns, with October 6 marking the start of actions at the former campus.

While the issue of fees increases might be resolved in the immediate term, but the discussion about