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14 March 2019 | Story Opinion Article by Prof Francis Petersen | Photo Sonia Small
Prof Francis Petersen
Prof Francis Petersen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS.
2019 is the year of the national general elections in South Africa – 8 May is when South Africans will have an opportunity to vote and to impact change, hopefully for the better.  But the beginning of 2019 saw the resurfacing of student protests, mainly driven by issues of registration, challenges associated with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), student accommodation, safety of students (off-campus), insourcing, and various other issues influenced by local institutional context.
  
Challenges for university vice-chancellors

Our Constitution promotes protest, but emphasises the peaceful nature thereof, and that it should not infringe on the rights of others or damage property.  However, the protests experienced by the majority of higher-education institutions in South Africa in 2019 was exactly the opposite – disruption of classes, intimidation and victimisation, disrespect and often destruction of property.  A notion or approach of almost entitlement, even if the university management was willing to engage and was constantly open to assess ways and means to resolve these issues.  The drive for these protests was short-term gains, totally divorced from the long-term implications on the institution’s welfare.  This puts the university management under enormous pressure, sometimes feeling exposed and alone in ensuring that the institution remains sustainable – financially, as well as from an infrastructure and human resource perspective.

There is no doubt that the upcoming elections are used for political lobbying, tactical manoeuvring, and undermining to demonstrate political muscle – all playing out on our university campuses and to be managed by university vice-chancellors (VCs) and their executives.

Are universities not the pillars of knowledge in society, the providers of human capital and new knowledge to ‘lubricate’ our economy, the delivery of the next generation of professionals who will shape how our society, or a new South African citizenship should look like?  If this is the case, who are protecting our universities, who is standing with our VCs and university executives to ensure that our universities remain the beacon of hope for generations to come?  What is expected of VCs and university management in situations where there is a continual push for more, and if the response is not positive or immediate, protests, and in most instances violent and criminal behaviour. My personal view is not to securitise or militarise our campuses, but to resolve these issues through continuous engagement – but what if protests becomes violent and criminal?  What if disruptions challenge or threaten students, staff, infrastructure, and the academic project?  Student leaders seem to have forgotten the engagement with university leadership through a principle of ‘give and take’, always balancing short-term wins with the long-term sustainability and growth of the university.

Although universities often have their own internal disciplinary processes, these are slow, and the transgressors are often repeat offenders.  The sanctions are also in many cases restorative – which I believe it should, but to what end?

Help needed to ensure sustainability of universities 

We have seen how weak leadership, corrupt practices, and inadequate government funding have had a detrimental effect on the overall state of universities in the rest of the continent.  This has led to the outflow of excellent academics from the continent to elsewhere on the globe – a loss for the university and the continent!  Universities, although resilient, are also fragile as a system.  The protests associated with the #Rhodes and #FeesMustFall movements, together with the continued protests in 2019, run the risk of putting South African universities on a similar trajectory.  A fragile university system, when broken, will take decades to be restored.

Therefore, if universities are important institutions for society and the country, should there not be more concerted efforts from government and society to ensure that our universities remain strong and competitive? Although I do not offer a specific solution per se, should government, together with university leadership, staff, and students not be more vocal, thinking of a mechanism to curb and/or disallow immediate disruptions and the breakdown of infrastructure, and show visible support to university leadership in an effort to continue the academic project?  Our universities are performing extremely well against global counterparts, keeping in mind the current (and the past 10 years) South African economic growth and investment constraints with respect to infrastructure, research, and high-level scientific equipment – even a more critical argument to protect these national assets.

Academic project remains crucial

I am not for a moment belittling the issues raised by students and student leaderships – in fact, most, if not all of these issues, are legitimate.  I can understand the frustrations of the students – the slow pace of transformation, social integration, and often the lack of urgency in executing agreed decisions within the higher-education sector.  However, I am questioning the type of reaction or action exhibited by the students if, for similar legitimate reasons (through proper engagements), student demands cannot be completely met by university leaders.

In the final analysis, South Africa needs strong universities which are competitive – the country needs appropriate skills to enable and support the economy.  Also, universities need to listen to the student voice – deal with their concerns in a fair and socially-just manner; but as a sector with all its stakeholders, we need to ultimately respect the academic project and the infrastructure (physical and human) which support it.  We cannot afford party-political dynamics to ‘abuse’ the university campus in a way that can destroy the fibre of our higher-education system.  This will be catastrophic for South Africa, and I believe for the continent.

I call on government, voices in society, fellow students, student leadership, and staff to support university management openly, pro-actively and firmly, so that our universities remain places of intellectual engagement and discovery, places where different views are respected and heard, and by ‘jealously guarding’ the institutions as ‘country resources’, responding to all stakeholders’ concerns in a fair and just manner.

It is only then that universities ‘regain’ their rightful place in society, educating the next generation of scholars and professionals, advancing new knowledge, and purposefully disseminate and apply these to society – contributing to ‘lubricating the economy’ and to the betterment of the quality of life of our people! 




News Archive

Open letter from Prof Jonathan Jansen to all UFS students
2014-02-22

Dear Students of the University of the Free State

In the past four years there has emerged a new consensus on the three campuses of the University of the Free State (UFS) about the things that divide us – such as racism, sexism and homophobia. Students and campus leaders have worked hard to develop this new consensus in residences and in the open spaces on campus. There can be no doubt that new bonds of friendship have developed across the markers of race, ethnicity, class, religion and sexual orientation. I bear witness to these new solidarities every day on the campus.

You chose a white student to head up the transformation portfolio on the SRC. You chose a black captain to head up the university’s first team in rugby. You chose a white “prime” as head of residence to lead a predominantly black men’s residence. You chose a South African woman of Indian descent as Rag Queen and last week, a black student from Cape Town as the men’s Rag winner—choices not possible and never made before in our campus history. Many of you have intimate friends who come from different social or cultural or religious backgrounds. You learn together, share rooms together, pray together and party together. In other words, in the day to day workings of this university campus, you have demonstrated to campus, city and country that we can overcome the lingering effects of racism and other maladies in this new generation. You have helped create a university community inclusive of people of diverse religions, abilities, class and sexual orientation.

I have said this repeatedly that from time to time this new consensus will be tested – when a minority of students, and they are a small and dwindling minority, still act as if these are the days of apartheid. And when that consensus is tested as it was this week, and as it will be tested in the future, only then we will be able to assess the strength and durability of our progress in creating a new South African campus culture of human togetherness based on respect, dignity and embrace.

The real test of our leadership, including student leadership, is how we respond when our transformation drive is threatened.

Let me say this: I have absolute faith in you, as students of this great university, to stand together in your condemnation of these vile acts of violence and to move together in your determination to maintain the momentum for the Human Project of the University of the Free State. We have come too far to allow a few criminals to derail what you have built together in recent years.

There will, no doubt, be unscrupulous people on all sides of the political spectrum wanting to milk this tragedy for their own narrow purposes. There will be false information, rumours and exaggerations by those who wish to inflame a bad situation to gain mileage for their agendas. That is inevitable in a country that is still so divided.

I ask you, through all of this, to keep perspective. Two or ten or even twenty students behaving badly do not represent 30,000 students; a minority of violent and hateful persons do not represent the ideals, ambitions and commitments of the majority. At the same time, let us be realistic – anyone who thinks you can drive transformation without resistance clearly does not understand the difficult process of change.

The events of the week remind us, however, that we still have a long road to walk in deepening social and academic transformation at our university. Yes, we have invested hundreds of hours in training and mentorship; we have created new structures – such as the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice – to capture the energy and imagination of students driving transformation; we have created many opportunities for students to study and travel on this and other continents to enable cross-cultural learning; we have established formal and informal opportunities to dialogue about difficult issues on and off campus between students and their leaders; and we crafted new curricula to enable teaching and learning on the big questions of our times.

But this is clearly not enough, and so I have decided on the following immediate next steps:
  1. We will meet for several hours next week to think about how we can deepen the transformation of our university after this terrible incident.

  2. We will arrange a University Assembly on the events of the past week so that we speak with one voice on human wrongs and to re-commit to human rights and we will continue with open forum discussions during the months to come.

  3. We will review the entire spectrum of programmes, from orientation to residence life to the undergraduate curriculum, to determine how effective our interventions really are in reaching all students with respect to basic issues of human rights.

  4. We will review our media and communications strategy to determine how far and deep our messages on human rights travel across all sectors of the university community. In this regard it is important that the campus be blanketed on a regular basis with our condemnation of human wrongs and our commitment to human rights.

  5. We will commission the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice to review the events of the past week and make recommendations on how we can improve the campus environment so that all students are protected from harm inside residences, classrooms and in open spaces of the campus.

  6. We will take the questions raised during this week into the academic community and to the general staff of the university so that all personnel also engage with our own roles and responsibilities with respect to campus transformations.

  7. We undertake to make annual report-backs on transformation to all stakeholders in public forums so that students and staff and external communities can track the progress of the university on matters of human rights on campus.

I wish to thank my staff for acting firmly as soon as this tragic event came to our attention. We worked through the night to find and identify the perpetrators. We traced the two students and immediately handed them to the police. They were expelled. And throughout this process we offered counselling and support to the victim of this violent act.

The two former students were expelled and will now face justice in the criminal courts. It is hoped that in the course of time they will come to their senses and seek restoration and reconciliation with the student they so callously harmed. They are not part of the university community anymore.

That is the kind of university we are.

Jonathan D Jansen
Vice-Chancellor and Rector
University of the Free State
20 February 2014

 
Note: The use of the word ‘campus’ refers to all three campuses of the UFS, namely the Bloemfontein Campus, South Campus and Qwaqwa Campus.

 

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