Transformation debate
free higher education forces us to reopen a national debate that the student movement lost in the mid1990s when transformation became reduced to a series of technocratic interventions, and the representation of different constituencies (or “stakeholders”) in institutional processes and structures increasingly began to dominate the discussions about and approaches to transformation.
As this happened, our struggles for changing the very nature of structures of governance such as councils, curricula, forms of learning and teaching, and a decommodified system overall, slowly disappeared. As students problematise the state of transformation today, arguing that current technocratic agendas do not serve the interests of a majority of students or society more generally, it is perhaps time for us to revisit some of the decisions that were settled on in the past.
Key to this should be a reopening of discussion about the ways and forms of governance at the institutional level. At Wits, the defeat of student representatives in council around the proposed fees increase has resulted in the student leadership and general student body questioning the makeup of council once again, and insisting on the ratification of any decision around fees by a university assembly, a formation imagined by protestors as an alternative, open, democratic space constituted by all members of the university community.
Although such a space is yet to be constituted, there has been talk at student meetings about the need to think more seriously about what such a form of collective engagement would entail in more concrete terms.
At the same time, conversation has to be reopened at both national and institutional level (and across them) about the funding crisis.
In spite of Nzimande denying that there is a crisis, the fact that students have mobilised sufficiently to shut down institutions countrywide confirms that something new has to happen for this not to be repeated next year on a bigger scale.
In truth, the crisis has existed since the transformation project began, as a result of a series of compromises in concretising its goals and objectives, handing over any possibility of “opening the doors of learning and culture to all” to the logic of the market.
Students are forcing us to acknowledge that resources need to be mobilised in different ways and the transformation project opened up in more democratic ways. We need to listen to them — and learn from them.