Jesuit support for student fee protest

The Jesuit Institute South Africa has supported students’ rights to protest peacefully against a mooted 10-12 per cent rise in the cost of tertiary education. South Africa’s universities were disrupted for more than a week by student protests over the planned tuition fee increase. In a bid to defuse the protests – the biggest student demonstrations since apartheid ended in 1994 – President Jacob Zuma has frozen the increases for a year. But three universities – University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where the protests began, the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape – have remained closed, with students demanding an end to alleged racism at previously white institutions, and free education for the poor.

“We support students whose protests have put the serious issue of access to tertiary education firmly on the national agenda, and are heartened to see that many students have rallied across racial lines,” Annemarie Paulin-Campbell, head of the Jesuit Institute School of Spirituality, and Grant Tungay SJ, a lawyer at the Jesuit Institute South Africa, said in a 23 October statement. “To deny the problem of financial exclusions is a grave injustice to the many who have struggled through the material and intellectual poverty of an imprudent school system [but] prevailed to get into higher education,” it said.