Universities are in a race against time to address transformation on campuses. Higher-education and race-relations experts have warned that failure to do so will allow tension between students of different races to deepen.They made the warning as racial issues at Stellenbosch University brought its management before the parliamentary portfolio committee on higher education yesterday and students at an agricultural college near the town turned on each other.Students from several tertiary institutions marched through the Western Cape town protesting against the university's language policy and lack of transformation. Lindani Mhkwanazi from the University of the Western Cape said he was at the march to "disrupt white privilege"."We are trying to demolish the language policy. We are in the same province. We can't have fellow university students going through this. We couldn't not come," he said.At the parliamentary meeting the university management promised to accelerate racial transformation and to have a majority-black student body by 2019.Vice-chancellor Wim de Villiers said 62.2% of the student body was white, down from 96% in the 1990s.University managers dedicated themselves to multilingual teaching in which English and Afrikaans would be on an equal and parallel footing, and to developing Xhosa as a medium of instruction at a tertiary level by developing Xhosa academic terminology."We are listening, we are talking. We are committed to open discussion ." De Villiers said after the meeting.Racial inequality at Stellenbosch University campuses has flared into the open after the video Luister (Listen) surfaced on social media last week,laying bare alleged racism at the university and its Elsenburg agricultural college.Yesterday, former Stellenbosch professor Jannie Gagiano said the obstructionist methods of Afrikaners was not helping the university. "It's incompatible with the logic of transformation."Gagiano, who lectured at the university from 1967 to 2001 and served on its council from 2006 to 2012, said he could relate to the protesters."The demands of Open Stellenbosch [which has organised the protests] are reasonable."He said many academics had been at the university for a long time and were uncomfortable with the pace of change.Commenting on the growing tensions on tertiary campuses, University of the Free State vice-chancellor Jonathan Jansen said steps to deal with racism and transformation should have been implemented sooner.Though Jansen's university has not been immune to race scandals, it has been at the forefront of transformation."My colleagues at the time didn't cover it up, they put it out there and dealt with it. We owned up to the crisis, drove the change and haven't taken our foot off the pedal."Jansen said Afrikaans institutions were dealing with "second-order transformation".Access was the first step towards transformation while the second dealt with what happened once black students related to, among other issues, language policies, Jansen said."White people are getting used to the idea that they can't use language as a barrier," he said.A spokesman for the South African Institute of Race Relations, Mienke Steytler, said the poor economic outlook coupled with high unemployment was forcing young people to stand up for their rights, in this instance quality education and to fight the underlying inequality."What you have is a first-generation black student [in terms of wealth] competing with a third- or fourth-generation white student and that is where we're seeing the tension," Steytler said.The Higher Education Transformation Network believes students will not back down as they are "tired" of the oppressive system.The chairman of the network, Lucky Thekisho, said: "People are tired of the promises of transformation . after 21 years of democracy there is still little evidence of it in institutions of higher learning."The government must act fast," said Thekisho.The transformation network has called on the government to introduce legislation and regulation to fight institutional autonomy."The current system and its language policies marginalise and exclude black people from participating as equals," said Thekisho."It is time that the government takes action through legislation because the current system only benefits a few. Students will never back down and if government does not step in there is going to be serious conflict," he added.Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib, the chairman of South African Universities, said violence was not the key to solving transformation problems."We need to start engaging ... what we need to talk about is the boundaries and the way we fight for transformation," said Habib.Earlier yesterday, protests turned violent at the Elsenburg Agricultural Training Institute in Stellenbosch after demonstrators who tried to enter lecture halls were sjambokked by fellow students. The college is not run by Stellenbosch UniversityCarole Bloch, a language expert from the University of Cape Town Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa, said the language debate in transformation at universities was "an important one" and should be extended to schools.The Department of Higher Education said it was looking at reviewing legislation to find areas that could be changed to allow the government a stronger hand in transformation at institutions of higher learning."We might review the Higher Education Act. We are looking at legislative power on transformation," said department spokesman Khaye Nkwanyana."Students are rising because their patience is running out and they want to change the status quo," said Nkwanyana...