Johannesburg – With Wits University preparing for the 2017 academic calendar, a new round of protests looms.
Mcebo Dlamini, one of the leaders of the Fees Must Fall movement, accused Wits of “waging war” when the university announced an eight percent fee increase in December. He said his group held back on protests to allow exams to finish but warned that a solution needed to be found soon.
“Then serious negotiations and engagement will begin, and if we don’t find each other there, then it’s game on,” Dlamini said.
The Department of Higher Education and Training and the task team investigating funding has outlined a plan to help fund the tuition of low-income learners and the “missing middle”, but it remains unclear how far this will go in appeasing protesters. Its proposal has not given any guarantee of free education, and there is no indication from where the money to fund the so-called missing middle will come.
In December, the majority of universities increased their fees by eight percent.
Without its fee increase, Wits projected a R191million deficit this year.
Wits spokeswoman Buhle Zuma said, “The South African Police Service will continue to be on campus until we are confident there are no threats to lives, the academic calendar and/or university property.”
Zuma said Wits continues to be open to engagement with students.
One professor described how sympathy for the protesting students turned into disappointment. She requested anonymity because of threats against Wits staff.
According to the professor, the vast majority of the university’s staff was at one point sympathetic toward the protest.
However, faculty members turned away when the protesters pushed forward despite many students and staff voicing a desire to return to class.
“One of my colleagues was threatened with a knife. Another was shut in her office with about three students who had come to her lecture, and (protesting students) threatened to set her office alight,” the professor said.
She, too, was the target of threats.
Staff members were forced to act in a buddy system where one would stand outside a lecture hall and warn the lecturer and class inside if protesters were coming.
In one instance, the professor was standing outside a classroom.
A group of protesters approached and asked if she were the bodyguard.
“Yes, and you’re not going past me,” she told them. Before they dispersed, they cursed at her and threatened those in the classroom.
“As the protesting students became more intractable and more violent, the majority of staff felt more and more alienated from them.
“We were aghast at the violence,” the professor said.
According to several professors, the university had a difficult time convincing students to return to class even once the violence began dying down. They laid the blame at a sensationalist media publishing depictions of violence even when most of the campus was calm. As the protests threaten to drag into a third year, faculties are weary of working in such an environment.
“I’m making arrangements. I don’t want to leave academia, but I’m making a plan B,” the professor said of her plans to possibly move on from Wits.
Several other faculty members confirmed that the protests were also playing a part in their thoughts about the possibility of leaving.
The professor’s personal turning point came after the failed attempt to convene a general assembly in October.
She said members of the faculty, herself included, were prepared to march with the students before the protesters disagreed with the terms of the meeting.
“The protesting students at Wits really missed a golden opportunity to get the majority of the staff behind them,” the professor said.
However, she thanked the protesters for making the university “more aware of student needs, much more sympathetic to student needs.”
Another faculty member echoed the sentiments of a protest gone way too far. “The students made an enormous impact, in my opinion, and it’s a shame they’re ruining it.”