Suren Pillay
I came to the University of the Western Cape in the late 1980s, at the tail-end of the post-1985 generation of school-leavers.
Fresh from this experience, infused with dewy-eyed Marxism, it seemed a natural progression. If an alternative society was being built, then the seeds of it were being nurtured at “the home of the left”.
It was this kind of optimism that encouraged an admissions policy based on the idea that the children of the black working class should not be deprived of a tertiary education because of their race and class.
The doors were flung open based on what was called an “open admissions policy”, and the university created the space for students who are now key government ministers and policy- makers. I remember students remarking that we studied at “Q”WC, because of the snaking lines we would have to endure in the sweltering Cape heat in order to register.
It’s now February 1999 and there is a small queue standing in a polite drizzle outside the administration building. The first-year political studies class that I teach has less than a third of the students that normally fill the class. There have been no disruptions or student protests.
Small manageable classes, no disruptions, and only students who have paid – a teacher’s dream and an administrator’s delight. This is what the hardline approach of the last few years has achieved.
The common wisdom is that students cannot expect to learn without paying. This mantra came down from the top echelons of government, to the university administration and had many of us agreeing. After all, if the university has no money, if the deficit continues to grow, the place will just go bankrupt. Simple.
Yet to look at the small classes and incoming fees and to laud that seems to be bizarre. A superficial glance around the campus tells one that the number of black “African” students has decreased, and the number of “coloured” and “Indian” students has increased. And was not the original plan for UWC to create a “coloured” university? In a perverse twist, the new government of South Africa is creating what the old government tried to create.
If only resourced families can afford to send their children to university, then universities are going to largely remain the way they are. Historically resourced white universities can offer a nominal amount of black students financial assistance. But historically under-resourced black universities cannot offer much funding assistance. Transformation requires money and systematic state intervention.
Those ministers in national government must know this from their experience at UWC, yet they now seem to be turning a blind eye to that commitment. They, like Blade Nzimande, would remember arguing that the right to have an education is a fallacy unless that right has socio-economic dimensions attached to it.
If the government is committed to justice, then it must finance students through a national bursary and loan scheme so that no academically eligible black student is denied an education because they cannot pay their registration fees. If they are committed to justice, not only reconciliation, then they must take resources away from privileged institutions and restructure tertiary education in a radical way that fulfills the slogans our ministers shouted and toyi-toyied to, who themselves would have been denied a tertiary education under the policies they are putting in place.
UWC has not made the headlines in the past two weeks, and I think we are all supposed to sigh with relief – no news is good news.
It seems, however, that students who could not afford to pay have not bothered to make the long trek to UWC to starve and squat hoping to get registered. They knew that this approach would not get them into the University of Cape Town or Wits University because these bastions of privilege never pretended to have a progressive stance to access for black students. UWC did attempt it and working class students knew that.
The knowledge has since filtered back to students in the townships and far-flung rural dorpies that they don’t stand a chance. We have obliterated them from our vision and what we do not see seems not to be our problem.