Protect precious varsities

There have been many bad reactions to the convulsions on our university campuses in recent months, but the comments by ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe on Wednesday are among the oddest.

Speaking on the sidelines of a union congress, he said that if he were the minister of higher education he would close universities for 16 months. This would apparently impress upon the minds of the protesting students that they were not “doing any government any favour” by studying but should be doing it for themselves and the sake of their own futures.

The idea of shutting down universities to quash dissent and punish protesters has terrible precedents in Africa, as the University of the Witwatersrand’s Professor Achille Mbembe pointed out this week. Les années blanches — the white years or the blank years — were periods of academic stagnation: no degrees were issued, no examinations written, no campuses kept open. The reasons, whether in Côte d’Ivoire, Benin or Liberia, are varied but the consequences are always the same: public universities collapse and a vital public tool of upward mobility is destroyed.

This cannot be contemplated as a solution to the South African tertiary institution crisis — not even flippantly.

If the ANC and the government share the views of the secretary general, we have a serious problem on our hands: the commodifying of what ought to be a public good. There’s an argument to be made that the government’s decision to decrease funding to universities slowly, over the past decade, was made in part because these institutions were not viewed as being part of very necessary social investments (such as the various welfare grants) that must be made for the health of the nation.

Removing access to tertiary education on a whim would be the next logical step on the path towards its full commodification. A vital tool to deal with the legacy of apartheid would be lost to us. We can never let this happen.