We must fight for Fort Hare’s unique project - The Mail & Guardian

Any disruption to the teaching, learning, and research enterprise of a university should unsettle all of us. The agitation at the University of Fort Hare in Alice in the Eastern Cape, though, is taking on rather strange developments — heightened in the main by political calls for the vice-chancellor, Professor Sakhela Buhlungu, to resign.

• Financial: higher education’s underfunding by the state post-1994 and the massification of no-fee, underprivileged, undergraduate student enrolments into a system that was designed for a small, privileged population has placed operational pressure on university resources. In addition, the neglect of the university by private sector funding and alumni contributions handicaps it further.

• Epistemic: the slow pace of knowledge transformation and the stubborn geopolitics of publications’ ownership patterns — including the persisting racialisation, hierachisation, and commercialisation of universities’ imageries — all reproduce and accelerate existing apartheid inequalities between urban-white-wealthy-research universities and rural-black-poor-teaching universities, which plunges Fort Hare’s foothold on discourse further south.

This is the university Buhlungu inherited in January 2017 and he has been on a difficult and noble mission to overturn its appalling situation. Moving on, there was a heightening of expected accountability measures for staff and students that would be standard for any university — this included the enforcement of admission and exclusion policies, disciplinary measures, payment of fees and collection from those who are expected to pay, and adherence to normal duties and expected performance levels for staff.

In this regard, it is important to remind the public that a university is not a municipality: it does not owe any grouping political favours and it does not account nor submit to trending sensibilities. The mandate and purpose of a university remains the production of knowledge.

Political calls that are mainly driven by those who benefited handsomely from years of endemic corruption and dysfunction the UFH

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