A number of Gauteng schools are breaking the law by continuing to charge fees, despite legislation declaring them “no-fee” institutions. And the province’s education department has admitted it has no monitoring mechanisms to ensure schools apply the law. The alarm was raised by the Learner Representative Forum of the Vaal Triangle, formed in 2003.
Transcendental meditation does not appear in any government guidelines for handling tertiary mergers, but it seems to work for University of Johannesburg vice-chancellor Ihron Rensburg.A year after taking the reins at one of South Africa’s largest universities, Rensburg appears unfazed by the complexities of an especially volatile merger.
Bureaucratic sloth or unwillingness to apply the law is slowly strangling a number of schools in Gauteng. Now some are taking legal steps to force the Gauteng education department to do its job. Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies is representing five schools in Lenasia, near Johannesburg, which complain their state funding allocation is too low.
The governments "no fee" policy has set alarm bells ringing at the country’s poorest schools, with some of them finding that they are now even poorer.
The government’s “no fee” policy has set alarm bells ringing at the country’s poorest schools, with some of them finding that they are now even poorer. Since the start of the school year in January, their mounting financial difficulties have affected the supply of textbooks and stationery, the repair of school property and security services.
“Another storm is brewing,” says Marcus Balintulo, the new vice-chancellor of Walter Sisulu University, with a stoic forbearance that three months at the crisis-ridden institution appear to have already tested. He is referring to the staff demand of a 10% salary hike this year, but the comment is an equally apt description of the turbulence he faces in trying to ensure the university’s overall survival.
The troubled University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has suspended a senior academic and prominent unionist, barring him from all its campuses pending a disciplinary enquiry into four charges of misconduct. The charges against Evan Mantzaris, follow the findings of a board of inquiry headed by advocate Johann Gautschi that the university appointed in November.
Stellenbosch University has the lowest African student enrolment in the country, and black academics appear reluctant to apply for posts there, a Council of Higher Education audit has found. Central to both trends are perceptions of the university’s deeply conservative culture, including a controversial language policy that still prioritises Afrikaans.
Schoolteachers played starring roles in Trevor Manuel’s recent budget speech suggesting a welcome change in official thinking about how education funding can achieve quality.
Former Transkei bantustan strongman Kaiser Matanzima made a rare appearance in the Grahamstown Magistrate’s Court this month, where he provoked a sharp exchange about authoritarianism, gagging orders and freedom of speech. Matanzima’s appearance four years after his death was, of course, on paper, as part of a defamation suit brought by University of KwaZulu-Natal communications chief Dasarath Chetty.