Top academic warns against a second 0% fee increase

Professor Jonathan Jansen has warned that another 0% fee increase for tertiary institutions will be a death knell for universities, writes Lauren Kansley for the Mail & Guardian.

Jansen was scathing in his opinion of the current Fees Commission and the fact that Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande is expected to make a suggestion on fee increases for 2017 in September. The fact that politicians, and not university councils, will be making announcements on fee increases along with the fact that the Fees Commission is managed by a panel of judges, and not academics who have a vested interest in the crisis, remains a sore point for Jansen.

Speaking at the third Cape Peninsula University of Technology public lecture, Jansen told the audience that Africa is littered with broken universities that held great promise a few decades ago but are now essentially defunct as a result of state interference. “Today, the same things that took down those universities are the same things that will cripple ours. State interference is politicians deciding what fee increases should be,” he said.
Full report on the Mail & Guardian site