Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Don’t burn down house we live in, warns Jansen on varsities
THE future of South Africa’s universities are at stake and are being undermined by outside forces.
The dire warning comes from Professor Jonathan Jansen, former vice-chancellor of the University of Free State and now at the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University.
In the second release this week of his book, As By Fire, which takes a critical look at the country’s universities, Jansen said forces undermining campuses were leading to the end of South African universities.
“It is the end of our universities as we know them. I have looked at forces which have brought down universities in Africa, including Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
“This includes chronic underfunding by the state, chronic instability on campuses and attacking the autonomy of universities where the state takes over the core functions. When these conditions prevail, it doesn’t take long for universities to collapse.
“And with a president who says there’s free education, it is very difficult to predict a stable year ahead,” said Jansen.
Since the book was released in July last year, unrest on campuses continues to simmer and President Jacob Zuma upped the ante on the eve of the ANC elective conference last month when he announced that free education would be available in 2018 for “students currently enrolled in TVET colleges or university students from SA households with a combined annual income of up to R350 000”.
This was quickly followed by the EFF urging prospective students to arrive at campuses for registration, despite tertiary registration taking place via an online process.
Across the country hopeful students have formed long queues outside tertiary institutions as the academic year opened this week, and in Durban this was compounded with strikes by Unisa and Durban University of Technology staff.
Negotiations to resolve the strikes at both institutions collapsed this week and are due to continue next week.
Jansen’s book includes interviews with 11 vice-chancellors from the country’s top universities and he added that turmoil on the campuses will lead to the loss of paying students from the middle class, resignations from highly qualified academic teaching staff and a decline in valuable research output.
“There will no longer be a vibrant academic culture,” he warned.
Highlighting that students do have legitimate concerns about the affordability of ter- tiary education, Jansen said that the NSFAS scheme to assist poorer students was simply not sufficient in terms of the “explosive growth” in the numbers and needs of students over the past 15 years.
Looking ahead to the 2018 academic year, he said: “The students are not back yet in full force, but there is a constant rolling national protest of student demands. We need a political leader in the country to settle down our public institutions.
“A lot depends on whether Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership is able to offer us some kind of respite. We need a political settlement between the leadership and student bodies. Don’t burn the house we live in.”
In the book, Jansen examined the issues at hand from the point of view of a vice-chancellor and, being a scholar at heart, he considers the social, economic, political, cultural and historical within student activism.
While he has empathy for the power of the student voice, Jansen is critical of activists’ unwillingness to engage in debate.