EDITOR – The fees must fall campaign was borne out of frustration that had its roots in the University of Witwatersrand (WITS) when the “management” and the Council approved a fee increase of 10 per cent which was considered extraordinarily exorbitant by students who were just about making ends meet.
From Wits the campaign spread like a virus and contaminated the entire higher education industry within days. Today almost a year later the campaign has not lost any steam and even the presidency awoke to the reality of a possible revolution. A Commission was established by the presidency to find a way forward and nothing concrete has come out of that except that it forced a stay on the campaign in that what was expected was that the campaign will lose steam and fizzle out. Unfortunately for the state this did not happen.
The universities and technikons however have been crying foul because they believe that without the injection of the student fee component they would perish but the universities and technikons were not willing to allow the state to interfere with the sacrosanct autonomy. The autonomy basically prevents the state from any control of the institutions.
In business when such a problem arises the CEO and the Company Board will make some harsh and hard decisions – staff retrenchments, downsizing, rationalisation, a moratorium of salary increases and so forth to ensure financial sustainability. Why can’t the institutions of higher learning do the same?
The question arises as to whether the educational programmes being offered by these institutions meet the goals of the National Development Plan because if they did we would not have such a serious shortage of skills in the country. All these institutions should be forensically audited to establish relevance and wastage of taxpayers hard earned money and then only should the state quantify the level of subsidy that each one of them be allocated. In 2001 the first merger of institutions was accomplished in KZN with a view to cost saving, non-duplication, rationalisation and equity. Are we now saying after 15 years that the merger project was a flawed.
The higher education industry needs to be completely over-hauled and Minister Nzimande should make some bold decisions before he subsidises the shortfall between the state subsidy and the amount derived from students fees and also re-look at the whole principle of institutional autonomy.
In essence the higher education industry must be run like a business by CEOs who run multi-national companies and not some playground for philosophers.
Sicario
Durban
