A potential shutdown at UCT for the rest of the year could hold serious consequences, vice-chancellor Max Price has warned.
|||Cape Town - A potential shutdown at UCT for the rest of the year could hold serious consequences, including a loss of income for the institution which could result in potential job cuts, while prospective first-years may have to start their tertiary education several months late.
Two weeks of the academic year have already been lost and the plan is to re-open the institution on Monday, but vice-chancellor Dr Max Price has warned that further delays could have an impact outside the university community.
“If it (the shutdown) goes beyond a third week then we cannot complete the academic programme this year. We may then have to shut down for the year and bring students back next year,” he said at a press conference on Wednesday.
“If these students do not finish this year and come back next year, then the universities are full for the first three months or so and the students who have left school at the end of 2016 can’t come into university and we will have a backlog of a potential lost generation of people who will leave and never get in or we will create a situation where all students end up having to spend a year after school before they can come into university.”
The delay would affect the future plans of hundreds of students .
He said there would be about 2 400 health science graduates in the country this year, including about 400 from UCT, who were all due to start their community service internships on January 1.
There were also students who had to write accountancy board exams and who would only be allowed to write these exams if they had finished their degrees.
Law students, who had articles lined up, would also be affected as well as students who had potential jobs lined up.
“If we cannot get support from the student body and from the protesting groups to open the campus, then we will have to bring security on in large numbers on October 3.”
This would, however, be done as a last resort.
Price said on average universities received about half their income from fees and half from government subsidies.
“We cannot charge students fees if they are returning to complete an academic year that they should have completed in 2016. So a significant share of income, perhaps 20 percent or 30 percent, we haven’t calculated it yet, will be lost to the universities and we will seriously have to ask the question, can we pay salaries or do we reduce salaries just to cope with that’.”
He said the fee crisis could continue for the next three years.
“We believe that part of the frustration from the national student body is that they don’t see a plan yet. The judicial commission (fees commission) is only going to report next June.
“We think it should be possible for the government to take extraordinary measures to resolve some of these issues now before the end of the year, if necessary, to ask the judicial commission for an interim report on the key issues by the end of this year so the Minister of Finance (Pravin Gordhan) in his next budget speech in March can put into the budget whatever it is that is required so that this time next year we are not in the same situation.”
Price said engagements within the university community would continue this week.
He appealed to protesting students not to “sacrifice their futures”.
ilse.fredericks@inl.co.za
Cape Argus