Fort Hare after protesting students burned down buildings this week – Picture: TMG Digital

 

That’s it. I’ve had it with the students, with their violent demand for free education, their denouncement of a government proposal to raise tuition fees by up to 8% in 2017.

I’m sick to my back teeth of their screaming and shouting, of their ridiculous inability to rely on academic acumen or even plain old common sense to make a cogent argument, of their rudeness and lack of civility and respect for their teachers – and for those who have been, up until now, sympathetic to their cause.

Actually, I’m so over their bleating, their refusal to bring even a modicum of rationality into their increasingly empty and useless debate. I’m sorry to see how weak and pitiful is their level of debate. Their discontent is brought to print and radio and television stations and on social media with absolutely no understanding of the wider context of their blatherings.

It’s all “WE DEMAND” and #feesmustcontinuetofallnomatterwhattheconsequences…

And #wedon’tcareifwecausetertiaryinstitutionstodie …

And all of it expressed without any backstory, or any vague intellectualization of the situation. (They are university students, right? You’d think they’d be able to dredge up a historical reference or two.)

But the worst of it is that all of this sets us, but more importantly them, back decades, these silly, silly students.

Actually, the very worst of it is the mayhem and destruction and the thoughtlessness of the violence and rioting and general bad behaviour. It’s shocking. And I have just about had it!

A friend showed me a picture taken this week at Fort Hare University, alma mater of Nelson Mandela and Chris Hani and Oliver Tambo and Norma Therese Maharaj, my lovely mum. The image could have been a photograph taken in a burnt out, bombed out, ravaged war torn town in Syria; the utter destruction, from smashing and bashing and from burning was actually so appalling that once we’d made the Syrian connection, my friend and I shook our heads and clucked out tongues. There was nothing to say.

This same friend (who is more sympathetic to the student’s cause) said his concern was that the students, who last year had the ear and support of a very large majority of South Africans, have overplayed their hands. They’re losing the moral high ground, he said. They’re losing their voice – it’s become shrill.

He’s right. Last year, I punched the air and said loudly to everyone who would listen #feesmustfall. I was a little less enthusiastic when I heard that that fees were to be frozen for 2015.

My university lecturer friends were cautiously wary – the money that was to come from fees, that now wasn’t, was going to mean some serious cutbacks; not least in that hallowed university institution, the library, the seat of all knowledge; subscriptions to crucial, but non essential, journals would have to be suspended for the year.

So when South African police began firing stun grenades and arresting students as the wave of protests hit universities across the country, I found myself on the side of the students who wanted to go to classes, who didn’t want to burn books and buildings or throw stones.

I was worried for those students who wanted to actually get their degrees so they could start their young lives. I wanted them to be safe, and not hauled out of lecture halls and shamed for wanting to learn.

It’s September, with literally weeks to go in the academic year. Wasted time now could mean a wasted year.

I’m disappointed in a man I usually greatly admire, Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande. When he lifted the fees freeze by announcing that universities will be allowed to increase fees by a maximum of 8%, he left it up to the universities to decide on how much they would increase their fees. This considerably weakens the position of those vice chancellors at the larger universities who will have to implement the maximum fee increase. They will be (are being) vilified and excoriated by the students.

The 8%, many point out, is higher than the 6% inflation rate, and will make university education unaffordable for many students. Demonstrating students say price increases discriminate against black students with low family incomes.

But the truth of the matter is this: rich black and white and brown parents will simply pull their children from the universities and send them to independent tertiary institutions – most likely overseas – and the poor, working class students will be left at shockingly underfunded, and therefore badly run, universities earning degrees that are not worth the paper they’re printed on.

The other sad truth is that we will not only have lost the fee revenues earned by our august universities like Wits and UCT and UKZN and Tukkies and Maties and UOFS… we will have lost, probably for ever, those fine young brains who, once they have been educated overseas, are likely to stay there. It’s just a crying shame.

When I was in what was then Standard Nine, about to go into Matric, my headmaster dad had me doing the equivalent of training for a triathlon (with my brain).

Often, the very smart son of a working class neighbour, Rajan, would join me as Dad took us through our paces: History, literature, poetry, Geography (never Afrikaans or Zulu, languages that perplexed my dad).

Rajan was smarter than me, by a long shot. His grasp of the war poet Wilfred Owen’s work was delicate, tender even. His ability to name world capitals was legendary.

And then Rajan’s father had a heart attack and died. He’d worked a menial job as a green grocer’s assistant, offloading crates of fresh produce and helping aunties test the ripeness of tomatoes and melons, and carrying their veggie filled cardboard boxes to their cars.

Rajan’s parents had spent a lifetime skimping and saving to send him to university – the University of Durban Westville where we Indians were allowed to go. But when the shop assistant head of the household died, money for such luxuries as a university education and his son’s dreams of being in the halls of learning died with him.

I saw Rajan at a funeral a few years ago, a self-made prosperous man, unbowed by a lack of a university education. He’d apprenticed with a plumber and has spent his life as a tradesman.

Of course education is critical and we all need to be educated. But not all of us need to be university educated and not all of us need to be university educated for free.

One in four South Africans are unemployed, a very large portion of those without work are young men and women.

Its time for us to take a serious look at alternative ways of being educated, and of finding employment. Not everyone has to have a university degree.