Cape Town -Black matric pupils who are fluent in English are being recruited to Stellenbosch University with the promise that lack of Afrikaans will not affect their academic progress, but when they get to class it’s a different ball game, some students have claimed.
The students, who spoke to Weekend Argus on condition of anonymity, fearing intimidation, said university recruitment staff had visited their schools and encouraged them to apply for admission as “the university is transforming”.
They said after the school visit, university staff invited them to stay with other prospective students from other parts of the country at a guest house in Stellenbosch, where they were given a tour of the campus and once again assured that all modules were available in English.
But once they had registered they found this was not the case.
One of the students, who matriculated at Muizenberg High School, said the university had not been up front about the extent to which Afrikaans would affect them academically.
“The university made all these promises but when we got here we were frustrated. We are frustrated everyday in class and no one seems to appreciate that.”
The third-year accounting student said he believed the university was using its promises to increase the black demographic in the student population.
A philosophy student who moved from Joburg to study at Stellenbosch said the university “is not doing enough to change the institutional culture of which Afrikaans is a big part”. The student said had he known the problems he would face, he would have enrolled at Wits University.
The students said they were given translation devices so that they listened to the translator rather than the lecturer.
”The problem is that the translators are not lecturers and they cannot explain some academic terms. If I had known that I would have to use a translation device that is uncomfortable in my ears, with a translator who is not all that good, I would not have come here,” said one student.
“I feel the university is not being fair to black students because we pay the same fees as Afrikaans-speaking students but we do not get the same quality of education.”
University spokesman Martin Viljoen confirmed that Stellenbosch University had a “focused recruitment strategy that included visiting schools where there was potential of recruiting academically deserving candidates”.
Recruitment staff communicated the specific language options used in tuition at the university during these sessions at schools.
Viljoen said the university’s language policy afforded English the same teaching status as Afrikaans. “A growing number of modules are therefore available in the parallel medium option, that is in both Afrikaans and English, keeping both the human resource constraints as well as physical infrastructure constraints in mind,” Viljoen said.
Asked for comment, the department of higher education and training said in a statement that it was concerned about slow transformation at former Afrikaans-medium universities.
“Despite having good policies, we have observed that many institutions seem to struggle to build a sense of social cohesion in which all members feel equally valued.
“The department has noted that many institutions have a range of policies in place to address issues of transformation; however there is a disjunction between institutional policies and the real-life experiences of staff and students.”
Weekend Argus