It’s unlikely that student protests are directly affecting South African universities’ rankings. Instead, decades of government underfunding in higher education may be at least partly to blame.
South Africa’s higher education minister has dealt with fee increments for 2017 but sidestepped students’ fundamental issue: an ongoing call to make higher education free for all.
South Africa’s universities have been told to set their own fee increases for 2017. That’s good news for institutions, but it hasn’t been well-received by many students.
The podcast has emerged as a promising medium for facilitating ongoing debate about issues that need more time than mainstream, profit-oriented media or the changing tides of hashtags might allow.
South Africa’s university students have shown that they can have an impact on the political landscape. That’s why it’s so important that they exercise their right to vote.
Decolonisation of the curriculum doesn’t have to mean the destruction of Western knowledge, but it’s decentring. Such knowledge should become one way of knowing rather than the only way.
Sections of South Africa’s student movements regard transformation as a complete failure. Responding to this perceived failure, some have adopted an anti-democratic stance.
Anti-rape protests at a South African university have far bigger implications for the country’s ongoing fight against rape culture and patriarchal gender norms.
University students in South Africa tend to fall into a “single story” trap, ignoring other individuals’ experiences to construct an understanding of the country’s political realities.
Many people dismiss the idea of free, quality public university education out of hand. But there are many ways to make it happen - and it all ties back to the idea of education as a public good.
The way in which one group of South African student protesters has acted and engaged with university managers shows how valuable a feminist approach to protest can be.
Professor of Architecture and SARChI: DST/NRF/SACN Research Chair in Spatial Transformation (Positive Change in the Built Environment), Tshwane University of Technology
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State
Chief Director: Tshwane University of Technology – Institute for Economic Research on Innovation; Node Head: DST/NRF SciSTIP CoE; and Professor Extraordinary: Stellenbosch University – Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology., Tshwane University of Technology