Violence-racked universities should be moved

The Times was right to ask the question in an online poll, “Should UJ and Wits consider moving premises?”

This was in response to the tragic death of a second-year UJ student in Braamfontein during a shooting apparently linked to the taxi violence in the area.

Three humans died, including the presumed targets of the killings.

Imagine going to campus and there are bodies on your way to class. This is not unusual.

During my term as administrator at the Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT) in Umlazi, I remember clearly a body metres away from the main entrance to the institution.

What really bothered me that day was how casually people walked over the body where even the face was not covered by plastic or something for the dignity of the victim.

It is true, as 57% of the polled said, that moving a university does not change the reality of violence in our society whether in the urban sprawl of Johannesburg or in the townships or suburbs.

But the question should at least be posed.

Can a university thrive when surrounded by violence? The answer is no.

You can exist and go through the rituals of administration, but a university requires a state of calm and a degree of predictability for optimal functioning to deliver on its duty to the academy and to society.

Part of the reason for our confusion about the place of a university in society is that we do not teach students, let alone the broader community, what higher education is for.

A university is not a soccer stadium with cheering crowds.

It is not a municipal office which you can burn to the ground when you are unhappy about service delivery.

It is not a church or a mosque or a synagogue where you have to follow and comply with holy writ.

It is something established by society to serve higher purposes such as scholarly teaching, advanced learning and groundbreaking research.

Accordingly, you cannot teach higher-order functions when students and staff are scrambling for their lives.

You cannot learn when nerves are frayed because of violence on or around the campus.

You certainly cannot do deep thinking in research when the timetable is unpredictable, load-shedding keeps tripping the lights, and at any moment a crowd of disrupters threaten to destroy the laboratory.

This is why some top academics leave the country, as I found in a recent study: they don’t feel safe on or off campuses.

I am an idealist, I confess, about things like having a university in the middle of a sprawling township.

What better way to debunk this notion of an ivory tower than to have a university make available its high-level research to improve sanitation through the engineering department or raise levels of adult literacy in the community through the faculty of education.

Nice. But there’s reality.

Many schools and some universities in our country no longer have evening classes because of the threat to the wellbeing of those who come to learn and teach.

Think about that for the moment.

MUT should be removed from Umlazi (this is not a novel idea) and be moved to Durban and given a state-of-the-art campus as part of a rejuvenation of the city itself.

Trouble, of course, is that the city fathers and mothers are so deeply corrupt that nothing is guaranteed.

It is time to say openly what others whisper, but the University of Fort Hare must be relocated to East London and built into a modern university campus.

You simply cannot sustain the institution in faraway Dikeni when students carve up a cow on the run and bullets fly through the local residences of the senior management of the university.

No, that is not what constitutes a university.

I too have dreamy images of a Fort Hare of the past where once taught great intellectuals of the calibre of ZK Matthews and which produced alumni of the stature of Julius Nyerere and Seretse Khama.

Wonderful, but wake up and smell the coffee. Those days are gone despite the truly heroic efforts of amazing vice-chancellor Prof Sakhela Buhlungu and his team.

It is time for many of our universities to reboot and the relocation of some to places of relative safety and security should be up for discussion.

There is another reason to move: the very location of a university should lend aspiration to young and ambitious minds.

Ask students at UCT who look up to the mountains from the downtown area or Stellenbosch which could easily be mistaken for a tourist destination with a botanical gardens smack bang in the middle of the campus (with great bobotie, by the way).