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Ihron Rensburg, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Ihron Rensburg, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Johannesburg, shares his opinions on the South African government’s response to the Fees Must Fall protests and what African internationalisation could look like.

The PIE: What is the latest with the protests at South African university campuses?

"The leadership style we have adopted at my university is what I call an activist proactive leadership style"

IR: The state has responded quite robustly to the issue of funded access for the poor. I use funded access for the poor as opposed to free education for the poor, because the demand is for free education from the Fees Must Fall movement. The state response has been to treble the loan scheme which is a significant improvement.

In the last decade the economic profile of our students has shifted. The political, economic, social cultural elites had backed the system with their children in the period of the 70s until the 2000s. And so really from 2010, slightly earlier, we’ve seen that shift as more places were opened up in the public university system.

“This revolving door phenomenon results in significant drop out rates of anything between 15–20% from first year to second year”

Just to give an idea, the growth we are seeing has been from levels of about 600,000 enrolment close to 1.1 million – two million in a matter of 12 to 13 years. It’s a big shift. Most of those new places come from the poorest in the South African nation. As that was happening the state’s loan scheme did not keep pace; it meant that you had a revolving door scenario where a child coming from a school of the poorest in our nation enrols and doesn’t have a loan or adequate funding to carry them through the first year and drops out. Alternatively, they may just get into the second year, but drops out at the second year. Hopefully they come back later but it’s not going to happen.

So this revolving door phenomenon then results in significant drop out rates of anything between 15–20% from first year to second year – that’s massive. And I would say two-thirds of that could be accounted for because of absence of finances. So, obviously universities have been trying their best within their means to respond to the challenge.

Just to give an example, the University of Johannesburg is setting aside a part of our operating income to support about 5,000 students to finance their initial payments – which is about a sixth or seventh of their fees.

The PIE: The protests were also against the universities raising their fees significantly during that time. 

IR: Yes, on the one hand we have seen this massive growth in students in the system that it can’t afford. But secondly, universities have also increased their fees in the last decade – almost doubling fees, because state income had not kept pace with inflation nor the growth of enrolment.

So over a decade we’ve seen almost 30-40% more students enrolled in the same institutions. Demand then for faculty staff, resources – all of these have pushed up costs significantly and state income didn’t keep pace with that. Typically universities increase their fees at the rate of inflation plus four or five. What then happens is in a matter of decades is fees double. So that’s another trigger for mass protests.

And in that context, the more sophisticated argument in the Fees Must Fall movement is not just for free education, it is an argument that says ‘slow down.’ What we are seeing is mass commodification of an essentially social service. The push back from treasury ministers is to say that unlike primary and secondary education or high school education, the returns to university education is predominantly private, at a push it’s 50/50, and therefore you have to make some fee contribution.

“What we are seeing is mass commodification of an essentially social service”

Historically in South Africa the understanding was the private contribution to university income would be 20% and the public contribution would be 80%. That shifted during this decade I’ve just referred to.

Two years ago, it was 40% state and 60% private. In three years, because of the Fees Must Fall push that has shifted from 40% state to almost 58/60% state, a big shift in a matter of three years. So big gains and significant accomplishments for Fees Must Fall activists. And I constantly argue with them – claim your victories. It’s by no means finished, but claim your victories.

The PIE: And how do you classify “poor” students?

IR: Typically, from what school they come from. So South Africa’s sophisticated system of categorising schools is by quintile based on economic income. Quintile 1 the poorest 20%, quintile 2 the next poorest 20%. Quintile 3 – the middle. Quintile 4 – the second most affluent. You’ve got 6-7,000 high schools that fall within these upper quintile.

The PIE: So the poor kids only learn alongside other poor kids and the rich kids only learn alongside the rich kids?

IR: Typically, yes – that’s what unfortunately happens. What happens is that a small percentage of working class kids whose parents are able to mobilise funding through loans or whatever, are able to move their kids out of school. Let’s say Soweto and into the so-called better schools in the suburbs.

But of course the vast majority of poor kids still remain in the school that’s nearest to them because of financial reasons, convenience and so on.

I should say that many of the poor schools have changed their game significantly because of a range of initiatives – non-government, government driven, private sector driven. So you’ll probably find now, for argument’s sake, there’s a thousand schools serving the poorest in our nation. Out of the thousand, there’s probably 150 top schools that fit into the top five of our country that sit in that group. But still the majority of those schools are not in good shape.

“The vast majority of poor kids still remain in the school that’s nearest to them because of financial reasons, convenience”

When we started the new University of Johannesburg 12 years ago, only 8% of our first year undergrad class came from schools serving the bottom 40% in terms of economic income – that has now changed to 31% by design.

So almost from one in 12 to almost one in three of 42,000 undergrads come from the bottom 40%. That’s 14,000 students. So that’s great.

But what that means is you can’t just have a revolving door because the school experience is not entirely the same as the school experience of quintile 1 than of a quintile 5 kid. At UJ, we’ve invested a lot of resources – almost 3% of our operating expenditure goes towards supporting this one in three of our kids who come from the poorest. We’ve transformed our tutor system. We probably have the largest tutoring system in a university in the southern hemisphere – 3,500 senior tutors work with our students.

The PIE: Because students from those backgrounds need more academic support? 

IR: Intense academic support – intense tracking. From the two weeks of a first year graduate seminar to a four year undergraduate experience program. We have now expanded it to senior students as well beginning last year. So it’s all focused on support, support, support.

Our undergraduate course success rate has improved from about 76% in 2009, when it was at its lowest to about 90%. It’s improved significantly.

Also at UJ, because of its shift of economic profile and because poor means black – the student body in terms of demography by colour has also changed from 60% black to 93%.

The PIE: How have you found the financial solutions to offer more funding?

IR: The government has dug deep in a context in which there is hardly economic growth. It has had to take its contingency reserves, and push it into the student funding scheme or loan scheme. At UJ, we have moved from 8,000 undergrad students on that scheme in 2015 to 12,000 last year and this year it’s 19,000.

Our university also supports 5,000 students on top of that. What we then do is mobilise funding, to help as many of them to fully pay their fees. Just to illustrate, we raised R101m and we were able to help 3,800 students to pay fully their fees. These are initiatives we do in the eye of the storm of protests. You can’t sit back and say it’s the state’s problem.

“My view is the poor is the first focal point for such free university education”

The leadership style we have adopted at my university is what I call an activist proactive leadership style, which is combined activism with what we call ‘tough love.’

The PIE: And ‘tough love’ being that they are grants and loans and not aid?

IR: Activist meaning it’s an engaged leadership – every fourth week we are engaged, with 500 or so student activists leaders on our campuses. We try to do 12 visits on each campus each year, so every campus gets a visit about every third or fourth week and we engage robustly. It’s tough at times. But that’s ok, as I say to students, focus your militancy.

Your militancy must be focused on this idea of a free decolonised university education – quality, decolonised and free university education. My view is the poor is the first focal point for such free university education, hence the idea of converting the loans into conditional grants in the next two or three years – that’s definitely on the cards.

The PIE: What would a conditional grants system look like?

IR: At the moment about 25% of all university students are on conditional grants. The idea is that out of these 25% which is almost 300,000 students, the hope is that those will be converted to conditional grants. Conditional meaning you must complete your qualification with no more than time plus one year. So if it’s a four-year degree, in five years. After which you have to pay back all the money.

If you finish on time, you get a 40% conversation to a grant and then 60% remains for you to pay once you start working. That’s how it works at the moment and we’re looking for a progressive scheme at the moment that if you finish in the allocated time you get a full discount.

The PIE: How does UJ start the decolonisation conversation with the students?

IR: We have developed a new undergraduate first year level course which all undergraduates have to complete before they graduate – it’s called Africa Insights. It’s a 13-week course and uses the great books of Africa as a way into the African cannon – African philosophy, language, culture, traditions, sights, knowledge and so on, from North Africa, West, East, Central and Southern Africa. It’s about 30 or so books.

“We are challenging each one of our academics to go and rethink their curriculum”

They may only read key excerpts during the course but hopefully in the next twenty years of their lives we would have stimulated, whether they are an engineer, a medical doctor in humanities or in social sciences, or in management, we hope that those books become the basis for them to expand their appreciation and understanding of African thought, because they need to have a grounding.

Alongside that we are challenging each one of our academics to go and rethink their curriculum because those curricula can – to be quite blunt – a cut and paste jobs of Western thought, philosophy, science – natural and social. The key message is agency and to be conscious of what you do in your class. We hope a bold charter for decolonisation creates a framework for all of our academics to engage on this issue.

The PIE: So how does internationalisation play into that? What does an African approach to internationalisation look like?

IR: I use the issue of curriculum development for climate change as an illustration of the importance of regional and international collaboration, bringing the important issue of discrete knowledge into the conversation. Bringing innovation into the conversation, bringing indigenous knowledge systems into the equation.

That’s how I foresee a far more productive internationalisation – an internationalisation which draws from each other whether it is of an Asian kind or whether it is a European – Western in the broader term– or whether is it Latino or Central American. It is about being open and conscious. Conscious of being aware of what’s going on around us.

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