So, I doubt most of you are aware of this but there's currently a pretty big shitstorm going on about university fees in South Africa. Three of the largest universities in the country have been shut down over the last couple of days, and at least one more is probably going to be shut down in the next couple of days.
The whole thing got kicked off when the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) announced a fee increase of ten percent as of next year. People got pissed off about this and started a massive protest and shut down the varsity for a day, until there was some kind of agreement to a renegotiation. Which might have been made under coercion, because the people who made it might have been locked in by the protesters.
I'd be okay with that. People make themselves heard, and things change. That's great, and I hope people carry on like that.
Then people decided to do the same thing at Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town (UCT). I can't speak for Rhodes, but there are a number of things about the UCT protest that really tick me off. First off, there was a fucking negotiation. The SRC agreed to a 10.3% fee increase from 2016. If you have a problem with that, go talk to your SRC. Second, the only reason people are doing this is because it worked at Wits. There are a lot of causeless rebels here after the struggle ended but we carried on idolising the struggle heroes. "The born free generation is proving themselves" - actual quote. Well damn, have you considered that
maybe this isn't on the same scale at all? Third, basic mathematics. Student subsidies are being raised by 13% from next year. The people complaining about this aren't going to be hurt by it. Fourth, there aren't that many people actually protesting at any given time. Out of a corpus of 26 300, some few hundred people are shutting down the whole university. Some people actually want to get the education they fucking paid for - who's wasting who's money, here? If your boots aren't on the ground, you clearly don't care that much. Oh yeah, and fifth, this is
fucking illegal. Literally against the law. There are ways of doing it that aren't, but those weren't good enough for our parents, so why should we use them? Oh, right. Because this isn't a problem on the same level.
And the other issue, that applies to UCT, Wits, Rhodes, and
UP: this isn't how you get long-term sustainable change. This is how you cut the salaries of professors so their income can't keep pace with inflation. There are actual channels for achieving this stuff without having to fuck over other people who actually want to just get on with learning. Those channels will let you work out a deal that
definitely won't end in all the lecturers ditching the university because it can't pay them and the university falling apart so you don't get
any education.
The last thing? Of course this has to be racialised. 'University of the Rich-whites-with-rands." "The white-owned media is hiding the truth." You know, I normally tell anyone who thinks South Africa is going the way of Zimbabwe they're an idiot but sometimes I can really see where they're coming from. And there's a very easy Godwin here I'm going to refrain from because whilst evocative it's neither honest nor entirely accurate. Sometimes I think I should just give the Black consciousness radicals what they want and leave the country, because I'm fucking sick of being the demon responsible for everything that goes wrong.
Oh, and I just found out that students at
Sun prevented lecturers from leaving at some point today.
TL;DR
"Do the words 'political shitstorm' mean anything to you, Shepard?", people who feed on political shitstorms, racism, idiots.
I shall conclude with this:
Yes, I'm a little irritated.
* Arx puts the profanity back in the cupboard.
Right, now I've said that I can go back to not caring.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9704366 times)