Another predictable fees crisis is looming and Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande’s response is completely inadequate, writes Mike Wills.
Our universities are troubled places. At the moment all is relatively calm on campuses, but another highly predictable fees crisis is looming and Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande’s response is making Nero’s fiddling look like an excellent method for putting out Roman blazes.
Nzimande keeps muttering vaguely about planning and consultation as a metaphorical runaway truck hurtles towards him. His own party is backing zero fee increases and emboldened student activists have their revolutionary rhetoric, their hashtags and their disruptions primed if any are imposed.
But the vice-chancellors say they need 8 percent minimum or their institutions will be fatally compromised or, in many cases, go bankrupt.
The minister’s job right now is either to find emergency funding of around R4 billion to cover the flatlining of fees for another year or to allow varsities to implement increases, and then back them properly as they deal with the inevitable consequences.
Nzimande and President Jacob Zuma tried the time-honoured fudge of a judicial commission of inquiry, but that is moving too slowly to meet the pressing demands of budgeting for next year. This doesn’t need a judge, it’s a matter of policy, politics and budget priorities.
If the Department of Higher Education were worthy of the name, the people within it should be able to assemble the relevant data and funding models in about a month and then put a set of hard choices to the minister, who must make his decision and then carry the day with the cabinet and, most importantly, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.
Of course none of that has happened. Nzimande has been supremely negligent.
Not that troubled campuses are unique to us. How to fund college students would be a big issue in the American election if Donald Trump hadn’t turned that into a freak show. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton certainly locked horns on the matter during the Democratic primaries.
US varsities are also racked by divisive issues of free speech, student sensitivities and historical re-framing similar to the Rhodes statue debate.
In the past few years, American campus authorities have generally retreated in the face of student demands for protection from offences of almost any kind, but the backlash has begun.
The famous University of Chicago this week sent its newly arriving students a blunt letter saying; “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
Some have hailed this stark missive as a bold reassertion of liberal values, others see it as the last thrash of the dinosaur’s tail. The cynical will see it as the university pandering to wealthy donors, many of whom have threatened to pull donations.
Cape Argus