The sixth successive students’ representative council (SRC) victory for the Freedom Front at Tuks, the University of Pretoria (UP), calls into question the extent of transformation at the institution.
One of the few charmed universities to escape a state-mandated merger, UP nevertheless faces incorporating Vista University’s Mamelodi campus. From January next year, when UP takes over the administration of that campus, its preparedness and readiness for change will be tested.
These are torrid times for a university already in the media spotlight for the rape case now in the courts. Three male students are facing charges of having gang-raped a matric pupil in one of the university residences, Maroela.
In April this year a resident of the same residence was suspended for assaulting a black student in a racial incident. In May a wall decorated with an old South African flag in Maroela was repainted after black students objected to it.
The incidents at Maroela highlighted previous racial incidents in residences that led to a Human Rights Commission (HRC) investigation into racism at UP in 1999.
The South African Students’ Congress (Sasco) and the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) say nothing has changed at UP. ”Racism is enemy number one on the campus” was the slogan of their campaign in last week’s SRC elections. They lost to the FF.
The university started as the Transvaal University College in 1908 with 32 students, becoming a fully fledged university in 1930. Some notable apartheid luminaries among Tuks alumni are JG Strijdom, Magnus Malan and Pik Botha.
Tuks this week told the Mail & Guardian that actress Sandra Prinsloo, Liewe Heksie creator Verna Vels and comedian Fanus Rautenbach adorn its list of distinguished graduates.
The SRC results are in line with the current pattern indicating an increase in support for the FF countrywide, Pieter Mulder, leader of the national FF, told the M&G. He says UP’s SRC elections may very well be a harbinger of next year’s national general election.
Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota agrees. ”The election at Tuks is a micro-cosm of the national election next year, particularly [when it comes to] issues such as language and culture.”
Lekota took a walkabout on campus last Friday, but did not speak to African National Congress supporters. Instead he approached white students, inquiring in Afrikaans about their political views. The minister even addressed FF party members, who offered him one of their Paul Kruger T-shirts.
Kruger had been their poster boy, his face accompanied on some posters by the words ”Jou pa soek jou stem [Your dad wants your vote]”. The FF promised to fight for Afrikaans on campus and to ensure that Christian principles were upheld. Cornelius Janse van Rensburg, head of FF-Tuks, confirmed the FF targeted the votes of white Afrikaners.
Leanda Greyling of the Democratic Alliance said she was irked by the FF’s racist campaign. ”But,” she said, ”they still get votes despite their racial agenda.”
Though the DA insists its campaign is non-racial, the M&G witnessed a DA campaigner telling prospective voters they ”must vote to keep both the FF and the blacks out of office”.
Janse van Rensburg told the M&G his party doesn’t draw many black votes, though the occasional black student does vote in support of the party’s campaign to retain high standards.
The Afrikaner Studente Bond (ASB), which unashamedly proclaims itself a whites-only party, caused a stir on campus when it campaigned with posters such as ”Where others are a box of Smarties, ASB is a Milky Bar” and ”Proudly Afrikaans, proudly white”. The posters had been permitted by the university’s administration.
”I can’t understand how the university cleared the posters,” said ANCYL president Malusi Gigaba, who visited the campus on the last day of the SRC elections. He said the posters were racist and had no place on campus. ”The leadership of Tuks is not sensitive enough to matters of racism.”
Chris de Beer, UP acting principal, said there were undoubtedly ”sub- cultures” among the students ”who do not share the university’s mission and vision to transform society. But we are committed to making transformation work.”
He said: ”The traditional perception is that we are a white Afrikaans university. But our language policy is 50% Afrikaans, 50% English.” De Beer said he was happy about the increase in the number of black students since 1993. ”We have exceeded our targets that we initially set.”
The university has a total student body of 62 000, more than double what it was five years ago. The massive increase is attributed to UP’s introduction of distance learning programmes, which have brought 25 000 black students on board. There are 36 000 black students enrolled at Tuks, but only about a third of them are ”contact students”, that is, studying on campus.
Ninety-two percent of Tuks’s distance education enrolment is black, distributed all over the country. Most of them are enrolled in education studies.
The ministerial national working group’s report on the restructuring of higher education, submitted in December 2001, criticised UP and other historically Afrikaans universities such as the University of Potchefstroom, Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) and the University of Stellenbosch, for their lack of transformation.
The report said UP ”should pay special attention to the development of an enabling environment in which all South Africans can pursue their studies unhampered by social and cultural impediments”.
”The recent distance education developments at the University of Pretoria … should also be reviewed and where appropriate discontinued,” said the report. It questioned the quality of UP’s distance education programmes and said ”the present situation is unsatisfactory and untenable”. It also said Tuks ”still has a long way to go in achieving equity in its academic and administrative staff profiles”.
UP has changed its distance education programmes since the report’s critique, De Beer told the M&G. ”We separate our distance students from our contact students in presenting figures to [the] government in order not to skew our student figures. When we say 34% of our university is black, it excludes distance education.”
De Beer said UP was no longer facilitating distance education through colleges in other regions. Instead it had invested in its own infrastructure to accommodate students in such areas.
”There is no difference between the quality of distance and contact students’ education,” he said.
One of the biggest challenges ahead for UP is the incorporation of Vista’s Mamelodi campus. But this too has been a problem for the university.
The Mamelodi campus was given a mandate to negotiate with UP independently of Vista headquarters. This, said Sipho Seepe, acting vice-chancellor of Vista University, was to help ease incorporation: ”The process of incorporations has been complex for all our campuses, but so far everything is going well.”
In terms of the government’s national plan for higher education, Vista will cease to exist: all its campuses will be incorporated into nearby institutions.
A product of apartheid education planning, Vista was established in 1982 with a head office in Pretoria and eight campuses spread over three provinces. It has 20 000 students, 2 800 of whom are at Mamelodi.
UP will take over everything at Mamelodi — including its debts. ”It is a very complex and difficult process,” said DesirÃ