Rhodes University students will be allowed to write supplementary exams next year, at no extra fee, to accommodate disruptions to studies during the #FeesMustFall protests.
Rhodes University students will be allowed to write supplementary exams next year, at no extra fee, to accommodate disruptions to studies during the #FeesMustFall protests.
In a circular to students Professor Chrissie Boughey, Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic & Student Affairs, said any full-time student registered in any faculty in any academic year that writes any exam in November and applies to the Registrar will be entitled to write the supplementary exam, at no extra cost.
In addition, students writing these exams will receive percentages, and not the pass or fail symbols usually given to students writing them. On Friday 23 October, President Jacob Zuma announced there would be no University fee increases for 2016. This followed a week of protests at tertiary institutions across the country, and a meeting with University vice chancellors..
Protests at Rhodes University began on Monday 19 October as part of the national #FeesMustFall campaign. During the early morning barricades closed off all the University’s main roads and all departments were shut. Students joined East Cape Midlands College to support their protest which had been going on for weeks. These drew some dramatic altercations with the police. For five days, academic activities on campus were stopped.
On Wednesday 21st more than 1 000 students and staff from Rhodes marched through town as part of a national day of action against fee increases for tertiary institutions. The campus shut down continued until Zuma’s 0% increase announcement from the Union Buildings. It was followed two days later by a moving night vigil for students injured in protests on other university campuses.
“I am really proud of the manner in which the protest unfolded here at Rhodes,” SRC president Zikisa Maqubela said this week. “Despite the way the media portrayed them, I am proud of the way the students conducted themselves. They were well disciplined and well mannered. And once their internal and the national demands were met, they turned their attention back to their studies.
“Of course, free education for all is what we want fundamentally” – but Maqubela says that is another battle for another day. In a statement on the day of Zuma’s announcement, Rhodes University Vice Chancellor Dr Sizwe Mabizela praised the students for their “courageous and heroic” campaign, saying it marked a turning point.
He said, it had drawn attention to the financial hardships experienced by students as they tried to access quality higher education. “We must hold fast to the ideal of ensuring that every young person who is academically capable is not deprived of the opportunity to acquire quality higher education simply because he/she is born into a family of meagre means,” Mabiizela said.
Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande recently released the Report of the Working Group on Fee Free University Education for the Poor in South Africa, completed in October 2012. According to Nzimande, the immediate shortfall resulting from a no-fees-increase in 2016 would be R2.6 billion.
After that, R19.7 billion a year would be needed to meet the shortfall, he has said. At the meeting with Zuma, university management were told the state would provide 70% of the funding for the hold on fee increases, and universities would have to find the other 30%.
NOW READ ON PAGES 8 & 9:
‘#FeesMustFall reclaims the University as public good’ by Higher Education Studies Doctoral Coordinator at the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University. Sioux McKenna, and the economics of #FeesMustFall by economics researcher and lecturer David Fryer.
sue@grocotts.co.za
