Questioning ‘fees must fall’

Abstract

In 2015, A CLUSTER OF NEW STUDENT ACTIVIST GROUPS emerged at South African universities. Their initial names differed across campuses, reflecting the institutional particularities of their concerns. While the language of tuition was the principal focus of groups at Stellenbosch and the University of Pretoria, catalysts for mobilization elsewhere included student housing shortages and the presence of colonial iconography. By late 2015, through campaigns to establish unity of purpose, student movements mobilized behind a common demand: free higher education. The name attributed to the movement, “Fees Must Fall”, captured this commitment. For the first time in the post-apartheid era, students marched on campuses, to Parliament, and to the seat of government in Pretoria, to protest against the rising cost of university fees. Between 1994 and 2011, the number of students enrolled in higher education in South Africa almost doubled, increasing from 495,356 to 938,201.1 However, state funding for higher education as a component of total university income decreased from 49 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2012.2 Universities sought to make up the budget shortfall through private fundraising, but during this time the contribution of student fees to total university income increased from 24 percent to 31 percent. In the third decade of South African democracy and under a constitutional order that guaranteed the right ‘to further education, which the state through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible’, higher education became more expensive for students and their families.3 The Fees Must Fall movement conveyed popular, collective frustration with these rising costs, but students’ anger was directed not solely at government. The state's failings to serve the needs of its polity and to drive an agenda of democratic redress were ascribed also to the academy.4 Universities came to exemplify the failure of “transformation” and the lasting legacy of institutional racism and Eurocentrism.5