protests have been violent and persistent, with student organisations often aligned to external political parties and making their demands on both local universities and the national government. In this sense, South African student protests are more similar to protests at other post-independence African universities, but they are still distinguished by their scope and by the intensity of violence on local soil. That must be explained, as is attempted in the final chapter of this book.
One more thing: in the US context, university presidents did, on occasion, resign under protest-related pressure (such as at the University of Missouri and Ithaca College). While this book on South Africa’s university leaders was still in production, one vice-chancellor in the study was placed on special leave by the university council, two had left their jobs, and two others had announced plans to leave in the near future. The leadership costs of the crisis are mounting.
Chapter 2
The Roots of the Crisis I: Financial Exclusion
Professor, as you can see, I have a beautiful face. I do not want
to use it. But I need food to eat. Money to study. A place
to live. I cannot go on like this. But if I must, what can I do?
I can make lots of money with this face.
– Excerpt from a UFS student’s email
Having spent most of my working life teaching and leading young people, I know a blackmail note from a student when I see one. But this particular email (see excerpt above) was not blackmail. Ntokoza (not her real name), a young, soft-spoken woman from Umlazi township in Durban, had travelled all the way to Bloemfontein on her own. She was not one of the top students we had selected for full funding; her marks were good, but not as competitive as those of other students who qualified for the limited pool of full state aid. She came to UFS anyway, made her way into classes, squatted with some friends, and now that tuition payment was due, she faced the real possibility of financial exclusion.
It often happens that students without a cent for their studies take advantage of provisional registration (a partial payment arrangement) in the faint hope that money will materialise from somewhere – a miracle, nothing less. This provisional arrangement to access university and attend classes is an accommodation sympathetic universities make to give students more time to find the funds for their studies. One deadline for payment is pushed back to another deadline and, under pressure from student leaders, pushed back again. Suddenly, the year-end examinations loom and there are still students who do not have the funds to pay. Unsurprisingly, students then enter the next year of studies with debt from the previous year, and the administrative dance between deadline enforcement and sympathetic accommodation takes place all over again.
Ntokoza had eventually run out of options as another cut-off deadline loomed, and in desperation she sent me an email, begging for assistance. ‘Ask her to see me,’ I instructed my secretary, and within hours the frail, downcast student appeared in my office. Rarely had I seen such deep sadness in another person, and I had to ask Ntokoza to raise her faint voice so that I could hear her from across my desk. I clicked my computer mouse and the screen showed that there really was very little money left to support students from my ‘cost centres’ – unless I once again dipped into my personal banking account. But if my wife found out I would be dead meat; we were already supporting too many students from the family budget. And I could not bear my secretary coming into my office and once again giving me those big eyes that said, ‘Alweer’ (Not again). That would be infinitely worse than appearing before a long-suffering priest to confess that you had sinned again.
How does one explain the situation of this academically talented student – and many others – in a university that desperately wants to help each and every high school graduate qualifying for degree studies? Four factors converged to create this state of affairs: (1) a steady decline in the state subsidy to universities over two decades; (2) a dramatic increase in the number of poor students enrolled over the same period; (3) a growing reliance on raising tuition fees as the only way to recover institutional income; and (4) a mounting inefficiency within undergraduate institutions as the growing number of students were mainly from academically dysfunctional schools, leading to high dropout and low graduation rates. Together these four elements caused the perfect storm which, university leaders say, could be seen coming from a distance.
Declining subsidies
Without question, the primary driver of the crisis in South African universities was the declining state subsidy in successive years and its deteriorating impact on institutional budgets. The vice-chancellor of Wits summarises the situation as follows:
Adam Habib: Since 2000, we have had a political economy of the universities where the subsidy, in per capita terms, is declining. Universities have tried to compensate by increasing student fees to make up for that deficit. So if you look at the historically white universities … in 1994, 1993, Wits had 70 per cent of its expenses covered by the government subsidy. By 2013, 2014, it’s down to 30 to 35 per cent. What the university then does is increase the fees. But there is no doubt that as we were increasing the fees by double-digit percentages – to compensate for inflation and currency exchange rates and all of that – effectively what we have done is to price higher education beyond reach. And all of these things came together to create quite an explosive mix by 2011, 2012, 2013. It’s quite a threat at multiple levels. All you need is two or three sparks to ignite a crisis. And by the way, we recognise that.
So vice-chancellors were saying for many years that this is unsustainable. In fact, at the end of September 2015 I had written on behalf of the Universities South Africa [USAf] to the president [Jacob Zuma], above the minister of higher education [Blade Nzimande], arguing for a meeting with vice-chancellors in early October 2015. At that meeting all of these issues were raised. We said to him that we’re heading for the eye of a storm, except we said that the storm would break in January because that’s when we anticipated that the students would strike. What actually happened is it exploded ten days later in the October #FeesMustFall protest across the country. But we saw it coming.
The Wits vice-chancellor was not alone in foretelling the storm; so too did Ahmed Bawa, who until recently was the head of the Durban University of Technology (DUT) and is now the head of USAf, which represents all vice-chancellors.
Ahmed Bawa: Without question I think most vice-chancellors recognise that the system was quickly running into a kind of unaffordable situation where sooner or later there was going to be an upheaval. Some of us actually wrote about that. That a kind of perfect storm was coming at us and that we had to rapidly think about restructuring higher education. And many of us also had this analysis that you had to think of higher education as having a social justice agenda in a situation where there is an unequal society. There was the added problem that with the fees running high and with the ceiling on the amount of financial aid available, fewer and fewer students would be able to come to university.
So I think that among at least some of us there was a view that these 10 per cent increases, although they were necessary for the viability of the institutions, were sooner or later going to lead to difficulty. No amount of interaction with the Department of Higher Education and Training [DHET] resulted in any kind of conversation that would begin to look at that problem in some detail. Every single meeting we had with Minister Nzimande – and not just this minister but also previous ministers – failed to engage in any kind of serious discussion about the financial viability of the universities. So my own view at DUT was, let’s just try to manage the needs of students who are most at risk, and let’s just try to understand if there’s capacity within the institution itself to bring some resources to the table, much to the anger of the council and so on, but at the same time just being really rigorous about trying to ensure that we don’t put the university into financial crisis. But what it meant essentially is that we were spending
