Higher education summit ‘is critical’
THE Second National Higher Education Transformation Summit was critical to assess the strides made in the past five years, and to determine what more needed doing, Higher Education Director-General Gwebs Qonde said yesterday.
Qonde was speaking before the first day of the summit, to be held at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre from today.
“We want to find common ground (with stakeholders) and determine how to assess the progress made,” he said.
He explained that part of the development of the higher education sector was the assessment of weaknesses and strengths, and mapping new interventions.
Yesterday, the SA Students Congress called on all students in KwaZulu-Natal to converge on the ICC and picket outside the summit.
Sasco has vowed to stage a demonstration on all three days of the summit, in protest against the government’s not yet having introduced free undergraduate education for poor students.
Introducing free higher education was a resolution taken at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane elective conference and confirmed at its 2012 Mangaung conference.
The student body’s provincial secretary, Pinda Mofokeng, said yesterday that the summit was a “waste of money”.
“We are tired of talk shows and summits, because they come with nothing, but we lose millions that should be used financing free education,” said Mofokeng, a student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
The broad purpose of the summit is to provide opportunities for critical dialogue on aspects of transformation in higher education between the government, university leaders and other academics, and to seek consensus on priorities, key indicators and strategies to realise such transformation.
Mofokeng said Sasco expected about 3 000 students to turn up outside the venue.
Mofokeng said that at the very least, first-year undergraduate students should be exempt from university fees.
“If we can build (Fifa World Cup) stadiums on a whim, we can finance education.”
Mofokeng also expressed dismay over what he called the “total collapse” of the technical and vocational education and training college sector.
He accused the Higher Education Department of failing to exercise the necessary oversight of the colleges, saying this was why students waited years for qualification certificates and were lectured by unqualified staff.
Sasco president Ntuthuko Makhombothi and other student leaders are expected to address the summit tomorrow morning.
TODAY sees the start of the second Higher Education Summit of the postapartheid South Africa. It’s an important gathering in Durban of role-players in the sector who will assess and address issues of transformation in the tertiary education sector.
Against a backdrop of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at UCT, the Open Stellenbosch University Luister video which highlighted racism and discrimination, and continuing protests at the Tshwane University of Technology, among others, over funding, access, and other issues, such discussion in this vast and unequal sector could not have come at a better time.
While there has been reform, including the merger of universities and opening of access which has led to a change in the student demographics, there can be no denying the challenges which remain in transforming a sector scarred by its colonial and apartheid past.
“This included, inter alia, a system structured along highly stratified racial, gender, class, cultural and spatial lines; skewed in its structural development; unequally financed; disarticulated from the most pressing economic and social needs of the majority; and internationally isolated and focused on the industrialised north with very few linkages with the developing world and the wider African continent,” reads the opening to a discussion paper prepared for the summit.
We welcome the summit and wish the delegates well as they meet, talk and work together to offer solutions which will not only accelerate change in the higher education sector but have a ripple effect in changing South African society at large.