Thousands of UCT students took part in a silent protest on 30 September calling for the university to stay open. Currently the university is closed for teaching and it is unclear when it will re-open.
Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
13 October 2016
The student groups paralysing our higher education system have shown no qualms about their methods: destroying buses, cars, libraries, administrative offices, and works of art, manufacturing petrol bombs, looting sections of Johannesburg, harassing ordinary staff with clubs and threatening the children’s creche at the University of Cape Town. At CPUT, they locked two guards into a burning building, fortunately failing to take their lives.
Because some of its stated objectives overlap with progressive objectives like equality and opportunity, we have forgotten to call this campaign by its true name. The use of violence against civilian institutions is terrorism. For a democracy such disturbances pose particular problems of control consistent with our constitutional values. The problems are so severe that UCT, where I work, is considering cancelling the academic year, a step which will strand tens of thousands of potential graduates, on one side of the pipeline, and many thousands of matriculants on the other.
A cancellation may cost the institution 40% of its annual budget, around a billion rands, and will certainly destroy its viability as a place of higher learning. The university management believes, after many weeks of fruitless negotiation, that it can appease the militant groups. Yet these groups’ demands keep shifting and escalating at the last minute and would not be realisable even in a far more advanced economy. Nor is there any guarantee that a new year will go by without a similar breakdown.
University management argues that it cannot protect the campus and that learning cannot proceed inside a police cordon. These arguments are plausible on the surface, but probably not true, or only partially true. Over time we have seen the judgment and foresight of the university executive proven poor. Barring some unforeseen change of heart on the part of the extremists, management’s tangled reasoning and incoherent strategy will have serious consequences.
In the long view the methods used against the universities represent the new and nearly absolute domination of the illegal sphere over the legal sphere, a process catalysed by the rule of Jacob Zuma. Under these circumstances it takes courage to enforce the law and wisdom to know that sometimes force, in the imperfect hands of the police, is a necessary option.
In its endless deference to fanatical groups UCT turns its back on its own faculty and community, including students, many of them poor, who had hoped for a better future, and parents, who may have saved all their working lives to send their children to university and who may not afford another year of expenses.
There will always be academics who object to the enforcement of the law, often for good reasons. This is not the time for their voices to be paramount. The loss of the year, and likely the institution, will cause lifetimes of deprivation across the province and the country, which will be felt in schools and hospitals, businesses and government. By refusing to bring us back to teach, by refusing to make the difficult and unpopular choice to protect us, the vice chancellor and his team degrade and diminish the hope and talent which our extraordinary students and researchers bring to our campus.
In recent days the University of Witwatersrand has reopened despite reaching no accommodation with protestors. Adam Habib is taking a risk but he is doing so soberly, by the most reliable accounts. His classrooms and laboratories are open. There may be no calm yet at Wits but there is not the sinister silence we have in Rondebosch, which is the silence of things not even being attempted. We have closed down without having the decency to be occupied.
Too many UCT staff accept the silence as the price of doing without the police. At Wits, in a five hundred strong petition started by the great Cathy Burns, academics as different and brilliant as Achille Mbembe and Samantha Vice, Dilip Menon and Isabel Hofmeyr, have backed their vice chancellor, choosing bustle and life, police and protest, over extinction.
Views expressed are not necessarily GroundUp’s.