Student Uprising
In a final attempt to get the government to pay attention to the issues surrounding higher education, students around the country have taken to violent, destructive protests. Terence Pillay questions whether the end justifies the means.
It all started with the #FeesMustFall protests just over a year ago and a demand for free higher education. The recent violent and destructive student protest is simply the continuation of that struggle. But the thing for me is that it’s escalated to breaking the law. They’ve burned the law library at UKZN and with it, some really old, irreplaceable manuscripts and last week another building at the university’s Pietermaritzburg campus was set alight.
So on the one hand, I sympathise with these students who want, and actually deserve, free education but I can’t condone this violent destruction of property in order to get there.
Yes, everybody deserves free education. We now have the United Nations Development Goals, also known as the Global Goals, which every country in the world has signed up for. And this simply says that by 2030 we should have free universal primary and secondary education. This means every child should be able to go to school regardless of gender or social status and this is a good thing. But I don’t believe higher education is on that agenda yet.
I believe that everybody should have an opportunity for post-school education but this doesn’t necessarily mean university education. It simply means that you should pursue something that’s your passion, whether it means going to apprentice, a teacher training college, a technical college or going to university (it could be that) but it shouldn’t necessarily be an automatic path. People have to face the reality that we only have so many institutions with so many places, so we already have to overcrowd in universities. And universities are already so under-funded.
So perhaps the issues are around the funding models for universities. I think it’s difficult to make an argument against free education when you see such an incredible waste of resources in the country. People will argue that you can’t sponsor students to attend university but you can afford to buy fifteen BMWs and an aeroplane for ministers; you can afford to pay Hlaudi Motsoeneng R11-million for not doing a very good job at the SABC, and you can afford to pay SAA another R5-billion bailout.
The fact is the shortfall on university funding is large; you need about R4-billion to fund fees subsidies, so where’s the logic? I can understand why people are frustrated. But destroying infrastructure is not going to help; because it just means that it’s an additional cost to the university.
The other problem that we have is that we expect universities to be independent institutions but part of their funding comes from government and the other from fees, but the majority of these fees will then come from government subsidies. The latest declaration by the Minister of Higher Education was that universities must determine their own fee increases but that it shouldn’t be more than 8%, but that’s not acceptable to the student body.
So what these students expect is to go to university for free and that taxpayer would pick up the tab. There actually needs to be a level of accountability brought into that system. So if you’re going to demand free higher education, first of all, you must work really hard at school to make sure that you are equipped to go to university and pass within the minimum prescribed time. You can’t spend seven years doing a three-year degree.
And once you finish, you need to pay the subsidy back. Or at least make a positive contribution as a tax payer. You need to work bloody hard to get or create a job and become a contributor to the tax base. And if you signed up for a student financial aid scheme loan, which many of the students have, they’re not scholarships that you don’t have to pay back, you have to commit to paying it back.
It should be mandatory that the minute you start earning at a certain level you pay back those. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme has billions of rands that are owed by students who have since graduated and are working. So when you talk about free higher education, everybody has to take responsibility for funding that. You yourself as a student, now, need to think about how you are going to help future students pay for their education when you become gainfully employed.
For me, there needs to be an honest conversation around accountability – everybody needs to be accountable. You can’t just walk in and say everything has to be free. The idea that it’s your right, and yes we can argue for the right to free education, but at some point, we have got to face the reality of how you pay for it as a country. And if that means holding the government to account in term of its wasteful expenditure, then we need to do that; that’s one part of the puzzle. The other part is asking as students, how do we contribute?
I don’t know how we’re ever going to deal with the fact that the only time government seems to respond is when you threaten the violent destruction of people and property or in this case actually do it. It’s really unacceptable.
But there’s no quick, short-term fix for it. We have to go back our young people and communities and talk about what kind of lessons we are teaching them. Are we teaching them how to problem solve and think critically about situations so that we don’t just have a knee-jerk emotional reaction to them? And that we’re actually able to be analytical about what we’re doing. This is a whole problem that needs to be dealt with at a very basic level throughout the schooling system and within universities. Universities are supposed to be sites of critical thinking and creative problem solving but I don’t see how destroying infrastructure is critical or creative.
As an outside observer who’s not going through the daily struggle of going to university, having to feed yourself and having to be in the system, it’s difficult to make assumptions of the struggle. It certainly has been a struggle for everybody historically. When I was at varsity there was also a number of violent protests against unequal education and access but we got through it – we didn’t burn down the actual institution, because once the institution is gone, you’ve got nothing. Then where is this free education?
And then, of course, you have these reactionary responses from people in positions of authority and power; politicians who’ll say things like “We should just close down the universities and make them feel what it’s like to have no education! Shout down the universities for sixteen months” or whatever the statement was. So now you have these young people who are Not In Education or Training, what we call the NIETS, referring to someone who is not qualified to do anything and they’re not employed and are not working towards getting qualified to do anything, and this just adds to the problem. There are millions of these young people who are defined in that bracket. And now we are going to add all these students to that pool of people. How’s that helping the situation?
It’s not a constructive solution; that’s just getting people’s backs up, instead of engaging in a constructive way. The other problem is that everything rises and falls on leadership, and we know we don’t have leadership within government in critical positions that deal with issues like these. And you don’t have leadership within the student body. So who’s providing the leadership? Where are the young creative problem solvers who are going to lead the student body to constructive solutions to this problem?
The reality at the end of the day is that there are a lot of students who are desperate for an education and are not getting it. In many situations where there is major social upheaval, which is what I think we are facing now – a revolution of some kind around higher education – there always has to be a process of rebuilding. Somebody has got to lead you.
We need a kind of Nelson Mandela of the free higher education movement. We need someone to really ask, “How do we reconcile this? How do we build and not break?”
And quite honestly, I don’t see anyone emerging as that kind of leader.
What are your thoughts on the current student unrest at universities across the country?
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.
So on the one hand, I sympathise with these students who want, and actually deserve, free education but I can’t condone this violent destruction of property in order to get there.
Yes, everybody deserves free education. We now have the United Nations Development Goals, also known as the Global Goals, which every country in the world has signed up for. And this simply says that by 2030 we should have free universal primary and secondary education. This means every child should be able to go to school regardless of gender or social status and this is a good thing. But I don’t believe higher education is on that agenda yet.
I believe that everybody should have an opportunity for post-school education but this doesn’t necessarily mean university education. It simply means that you should pursue something that’s your passion, whether it means going to apprentice, a teacher training college, a technical college or going to university (it could be that) but it shouldn’t necessarily be an automatic path. People have to face the reality that we only have so many institutions with so many places, so we already have to overcrowd in universities. And universities are already so under-funded.
So perhaps the issues are around the funding models for universities. I think it’s difficult to make an argument against free education when you see such an incredible waste of resources in the country. People will argue that you can’t sponsor students to attend university but you can afford to buy fifteen BMWs and an aeroplane for ministers; you can afford to pay Hlaudi Motsoeneng R11-million for not doing a very good job at the SABC, and you can afford to pay SAA another R5-billion bailout.
The fact is the shortfall on university funding is large; you need about R4-billion to fund fees subsidies, so where’s the logic? I can understand why people are frustrated. But destroying infrastructure is not going to help; because it just means that it’s an additional cost to the university.
The other problem that we have is that we expect universities to be independent institutions but part of their funding comes from government and the other from fees, but the majority of these fees will then come from government subsidies. The latest declaration by the Minister of Higher Education was that universities must determine their own fee increases but that it shouldn’t be more than 8%, but that’s not acceptable to the student body.
So what these students expect is to go to university for free and that taxpayer would pick up the tab. There actually needs to be a level of accountability brought into that system. So if you’re going to demand free higher education, first of all, you must work really hard at school to make sure that you are equipped to go to university and pass within the minimum prescribed time. You can’t spend seven years doing a three-year degree.
And once you finish, you need to pay the subsidy back. Or at least make a positive contribution as a tax payer. You need to work bloody hard to get or create a job and become a contributor to the tax base. And if you signed up for a student financial aid scheme loan, which many of the students have, they’re not scholarships that you don’t have to pay back, you have to commit to paying it back.
It should be mandatory that the minute you start earning at a certain level you pay back those. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme has billions of rands that are owed by students who have since graduated and are working. So when you talk about free higher education, everybody has to take responsibility for funding that. You yourself as a student, now, need to think about how you are going to help future students pay for their education when you become gainfully employed.
For me, there needs to be an honest conversation around accountability – everybody needs to be accountable. You can’t just walk in and say everything has to be free. The idea that it’s your right, and yes we can argue for the right to free education, but at some point, we have got to face the reality of how you pay for it as a country. And if that means holding the government to account in term of its wasteful expenditure, then we need to do that; that’s one part of the puzzle. The other part is asking as students, how do we contribute?
I don’t know how we’re ever going to deal with the fact that the only time government seems to respond is when you threaten the violent destruction of people and property or in this case actually do it. It’s really unacceptable.
But there’s no quick, short-term fix for it. We have to go back our young people and communities and talk about what kind of lessons we are teaching them. Are we teaching them how to problem solve and think critically about situations so that we don’t just have a knee-jerk emotional reaction to them? And that we’re actually able to be analytical about what we’re doing. This is a whole problem that needs to be dealt with at a very basic level throughout the schooling system and within universities. Universities are supposed to be sites of critical thinking and creative problem solving but I don’t see how destroying infrastructure is critical or creative.
As an outside observer who’s not going through the daily struggle of going to university, having to feed yourself and having to be in the system, it’s difficult to make assumptions of the struggle. It certainly has been a struggle for everybody historically. When I was at varsity there was also a number of violent protests against unequal education and access but we got through it – we didn’t burn down the actual institution, because once the institution is gone, you’ve got nothing. Then where is this free education?
And then, of course, you have these reactionary responses from people in positions of authority and power; politicians who’ll say things like “We should just close down the universities and make them feel what it’s like to have no education! Shout down the universities for sixteen months” or whatever the statement was. So now you have these young people who are Not In Education or Training, what we call the NIETS, referring to someone who is not qualified to do anything and they’re not employed and are not working towards getting qualified to do anything, and this just adds to the problem. There are millions of these young people who are defined in that bracket. And now we are going to add all these students to that pool of people. How’s that helping the situation?
It’s not a constructive solution; that’s just getting people’s backs up, instead of engaging in a constructive way. The other problem is that everything rises and falls on leadership, and we know we don’t have leadership within government in critical positions that deal with issues like these. And you don’t have leadership within the student body. So who’s providing the leadership? Where are the young creative problem solvers who are going to lead the student body to constructive solutions to this problem?
The reality at the end of the day is that there are a lot of students who are desperate for an education and are not getting it. In many situations where there is major social upheaval, which is what I think we are facing now – a revolution of some kind around higher education – there always has to be a process of rebuilding. Somebody has got to lead you.
We need a kind of Nelson Mandela of the free higher education movement. We need someone to really ask, “How do we reconcile this? How do we build and not break?”
And quite honestly, I don’t see anyone emerging as that kind of leader.
What are your thoughts on the current student unrest at universities across the country?
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.