Thierry M Luescher
Student activism is in limbo. The struggle is over and no new driving force has emerged. HIV/Aids, poverty, unemployment, education, housing, crime, nation-building … students know that these are the issues. However, when asked what they do about them, there is silence. “I use condoms,” one might say, and many smirk or feel embarrassed. Where is the sense of social responsibility that galvanised a united and democratic group of vanguard student leaders in the past? Are there any notable efforts by students to engage with and address the multiple challenges in society?
First and foremost, students enrol at universities and technikons because they want to be empowered personally. They want to be in the queue for better jobs, better futures, better lives. Once in higher education, however, this focus needs to be broadened and students need to be conscientised about their social responsibility as a privileged bunch, as citizens and, most likely, as the future leaders of the country.
Student life in higher education is an important playground for the socialisation of future leaders. I believe that student life just like a seismograph has a somewhat prophetic quality for society. Let’s therefore look at current developments in three areas of student life, mainly with reference to an African world-class institution, to search for clues about the future: student governance; student clubs and organisations; and residences.
“Students don’t have issues,” we hear. Student representative councils (SRCs) all over the country know their plight: apathy. Beyond their own financial and academic well-being, students appear apathetic to anything regarding politics. In a time where students ought to spearhead radical solutions to deal with past inequalities and new problems like the Aids pandemic, student activism is close to nil. SRCs have become bureaucratised and mouth-caged since the 1997 Higher Education Act integrated them neatly in the committee structures of public institutions.
Yet, the new breed of student leaders emerging middle-class, mostly black, independent, and arrogant are badly prepared for politics and in addition often have no administrative support to really contribute significantly to the running of their institutions. Good student governance is a far cry from reality, and it is no wonder that many student leaders prefer to abuse the resources they have access to for a time and jet-set around the countries meeting other dreamers and fat cats. Which SRC has gotten its hands dirty in the past eight years to make a significant impact in the communities surrounding their campus?
Students from across the country, the continent and the globe meet, study together, live together in universities and technikons. This splendid diversity, unified only by the common purpose to succeed academically, does produce some notable, if exceptional, innovations though. Let’s take Student Enterprises (SE). Says Fortune Mojapelo, founder of SE at the University of Cape Town: “We believe as students we should be job creators, not job seekers once we leave campus.” SE has established a number of student businesses ranging from information technology and desktop publishing companies to their own world-class campus bookstore. It supports student-initiated businesses and holds entrepreneurship talks on and off campus. Like the student website www.gal.co.za, these businesses provide jobs for students and are positioned for growth beyond the tertiary sector.
Zama Mvulane is another instigator of a new student initiative, the Student Research Institute. The institute aims to produce the next generation of researchers and academics for the country, mainly from students with disadvantaged backgrounds. “We catch the students on the way up to the ivory tower and lead them back into their communities to apply their new skills that they can become proactive and efficient agents of change.”
Entrepreneurship, and here mostly hi-tech companies, research and community development are seemingly on the agenda so far. The Student Health and Welfare Centre Organisation has been around since 1943. It runs 10 community health and youth development centres across the Cape Peninsula. Habitat is a student initiative that has been mushrooming on university campuses across the country. In the first year of its establishment students have built more than 50 houses for poor families. So, in the wild array of students’ own little civil society, there are few though inspiring examples.
In student residences, the third pillar of extra-curricular student life, developments have been ambiguous in the past few years. The diversified cohabitation has produced mixed responses. On the one hand, where there is a good mix of people from different backgrounds, living together works well and tacit cross-cultural relationships are established. Particularly international students and black middle-class students seem to be able to bridge the “race gap” more easily and find themselves with new peers of different colour and ethnic background.
Yet on many campuses, an opposite and ugly development is also observable: black and white verkramptes organise separate (and unequal) social functions such as parties (to cater for the different tastes) or even housing (with the blessing of their residence committees or the SRC)! That forms of voluntary segregation are emerging on some campuses betrays all notions of a unified country.
We have approached a stage in history where it becomes difficult to justify the inequalities and failures to rectify them by pointing at the past. To the new generation of students, apartheid is hearsay. What they see is extreme inequality and the kinds of poverty and deprivation that you don’t get in American soaps, on a lucky trip to Australia or on a study-work stay in London. “Look the other way” seems to be an approach favoured by most whites; a standard rhetoric of blame and “once I’m empowered”, the approach favoured by most blacks. Both add nothing but resignation to those youth who live daily on the fringes; it grows the perception that democracy is something for the educated and rich.
Students grow up in a society where everybody points fingers at everybody else without a history of their own, no wonder the approach is apathy. Is that the future citizen? Unconcerned and severed from the realities of the plight of the rural and urban working classes and unemployed? It is clear that it will take a while until student activism will bounce back into action. With regards to national politics, it may not need to. The laissez-faire approach to issues of social justice, cultural integration, democracy and rural-urban exchange produces a form of student life that tells much about society in the future: the fat cats are in politics, the greedy sit in business, the truly engaged struggle in civil society, and the smart grow in the backyards their own supply until they’re numb.
In a society where social problems abound, students must get involved at the grass-roots level and put the resources made available to them to good use. There are many fine examples of what engaged and diverse groups of students can do for themselves and for the less privileged. However, the third responsibility of higher education next to teaching and research is to be an agent in community development, equity and redress, and this must become an integral part of the institutional culture. But that would mean that we need a vision about a future where people who are different unite.
Thierry Moses Luescher is a postgraduate student in political science (democratic governance) at UCT and research assistant in the Centre for Higher Education Development