Classes at all the Tshwane University of Technology’s (TUT) campuses were suspended amid student protests on Tuesday, authorities said.
”The decision was taken due to the prevailing atmosphere on campus and the potential for violent clashes between striking and non-striking students,” vice-chancellor Errol Tyobeka said in a statement.
”Emotions are running high,” he said. ”The safety of our staff and students is our first priority and we simply cannot allow matters to get out of hand.”
Earlier on Tuesday, about 300 students were protesting at the university’s main campus in Pretoria West on Tuesday. Police initially said they had not been required to take any action against students, but later reported that a door had been broken.
Police spokesperson Captain Dumisani Ndlazi said the students began gathering at the university from about 10am. ”Some students have broken one of the doors at one of the lecture halls. Nobody has been injured and at the moment police and members of the university are talking to the students.”
University spokesperson Willa de Ruyter said the students were protesting over university fees as well as academic exclusion.
She said the university council had last year, with the participation of a student representative who sits on the council, decided on an average fee increase of 9%. This had been trimmed down to 8,5%. Students have since, however, presented the university with new demands.
”The group of students — who are from the Garankuwa and Soshanguve campuses — are protesting in front of the administrative building at the university,” she said.
Earlier on Tuesday, she said operations at the university ”were fairly normal”, but that ”managers at ground level were monitoring the situation”. It was subsequent to this that classes were suspended.
She added that a memorandum handed over to the university on Monday gave the institution time until Wednesday to respond to the students’ demands.
Freedom Front Plus (FF+) student representatives, meanwhile, said they feared the protest had become racial and were to lay a complaint about allegations of hate speech, according to Pieter Janse van Rensburg, a student representative council (SRC) and FF+ member on the main campus.
Many poorer students are funded by loans supplied by a statutory body, the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, as well as some individual bursaries. The loans can vary from R2 000 to R32 000 annually with the possibility of up to 40% of the loan becoming a bursary that need not be repaid.
The conversion to bursary status depends on academic achievement, according to the fund’s website.
However, student funding in general has not kept pace with costs and grants to universities in recent years, and the burden has fallen on university fees, and students, to make up the shortfall, said Professor Mary Metcalfe, head of the education department at the University of the Witwatersrand.
She said the protests at the university are part of several in recent weeks that are, in turn, part of a student campaign for free and compulsory higher and tertiary education following a decision taken by delegates at the African National Congress’s (ANC) Polokwane congress in December last year.
Metcalfe was an ANC minister of education in the first Gauteng provincial government in 1994. She said that while such free education is an ideal to continue to strive for, she does not believe the country can afford it. — Sapa