JONATHAN JANSEN | Ten years later, did fees actually fall?

It is about 10 years since the most intense and widespread student revolt on South African university campuses. It is therefore an opportune moment to ask two pertinent questions.

Did fees fall?

When then-president Jacob Zuma declared, under pressure, that there would be free higher education starting with first year students, he was defying his own commission of inquiry under judge Jonathan Heher, which declared that free education would strain the country’s fiscus. But for a populist who had scant regard for other people’s money, let alone understand large figures when reading them off a page, such considerations did not matter.

There was, we now know, a devastating sleight of hand. It turns out this was not free higher education at all but the extension of the state’s financial aid scheme (NSFAS) to students whose combined household income was less than R350,000. If you did not apply, you lost out. If you did not qualify, you were stranded. And even if there were three children at university, your spouse unable to work, and with a crowded house of unemployed relatives, you were left in the cold if your mother was a school principal or accountant earning slightly above the cut-off amount.

This was not “free higher education” by any stretch of the imagination because the basic structure of a capitalist economy remained unchanged and therefore required that the poor and the working classes paid in one way or another for post-school education whether in colleges or universities. The term “free education” is both misleading and hurtful to those who run the gauntlet of public higher education.

It does not help that NSFAS remains one of the most corrupt and inefficient systems of administration, the kind of thing that happens in South Africa when government tries to manage an entity worth billions of rand. What this means is that even for students who qualified, the process was so onerous and the struggle to find money while waiting was so demoralising, that young people spent much of their time enduring severe hardship and scrounging for funds. Then, when the pittance called an allowance eventually arrives — if at all — they are paying off debts while struggling to concentrate on their education.

Take one of my high school mentees now in her first year and from the Cape Flats area where I grew up. She qualified for NSFAS but had to spend many hours in lines at her university resubmitting and confirming documentation. There was no money to travel to UWC, a gruelling trip from Steenberg in the south to Bellville in the north. “I need a financial calculator,” said the BCom first-year student because NSFAS hardly covers the taxis, the train and the bus. She budgets for one meal a day, on a good day. With friends, we support her, but think of the hundreds of thousands of students in similar predicaments across South Africa. This is an injustice, pure and simple.

Did Rhodes fall?

Physically, yes. The massive bronze statue of imperialist Cecil John Rhodes is hidden from sight. Did the alleged Eurocentric curriculum change? Are professors less white? Are institutional cultures transformed? Are black students less alienated on former white campuses? In short, are we all now decolonised?

In some ways, these are the wrong questions. The curriculum was always changing and had much more of an African orientation than in the apartheid years. The problem was overstated and everything that moved had to be decolonised as this conceptual hammer made nails out of every epistemological problem. Other radical traditions from feminism to critical race theory to Marxian analyses of education were thrown under the bus and forced to bow, at least rhetorically, at the altar of decolonisation. The way academics fell in line, whether out of fear or ignorance or sheer hubris, is a shame they will have to carry into old age. The criticality so essential to a broad university education was lost in the fracas.

Professors are less white, and it was always a matter of time before investments in national initiatives such as the Future Professors Programme would gradually erase historical imbalances in the racial makeup of the professoriate. You cannot summon change in the professoriate through political decree no more than you can make all aeroplane pilots black and women by the weekend. The production of highly skilled professionals takes time and will happen anyway if there is an accelerated programme of change in place; which there is.

What is harder to change is institutional cultures and the alienation of black staff and students in historically white institutions. There is work to be done and some of us are working hard at our institutions to uproot the underlying conditions that maintain the social and cultural status quo on campuses where black and white still live and learn and love apart, even if they are required to share the same facilities and sit in the same meetings.