A senior lecturer at UCT has spoken out about the chaos plaguing the institution as student protests over fees continue.
|||Cape Town – A senior lecturer in the physics department at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has spoken out about the chaos plaguing the institution.
Gregor Leigh said he taught first year students on Monday morning, and while between eighty and ninety percent of the classes showed up, the lectures were disrupted as a mob entered the building and set off fire alarms.
Leigh told the African News Agency (ANA) that many of the students were not against the protest, but recognised that “if we don’t get started and finish the year, then all so called narratives will cease. There will be no further dialogue at any point”.
He said the students who attended two of his lectures on Monday burst out clapping, they were so relieved that an effort was being made to resume classes.
But he predicted serious implications if protests continued. “The university will be bankrupt by June” if the institution submits to the demands for no fees.
And as UCT vice-chancellor Max Price has already warned, the university would not be able to accommodate a new intake of students in 2017.
“This is not protest, it’s intimidation, in some cases terrorism. These people have long been outside the law.”
He believes there needs to be more security. “Many of us think that we can avoid security confrontation, those people are smoking their socks.”
Leigh said the demands were unrealistic in the short term. He said this is not just about fees, the issues were multitudinous with the term “black pain” featuring strongly on campus.
“The born frees are unhappy with the state of the nation. They are kicking out in frustration.”
But he was hopeful the university would be able to “dig itself out of this one way or another. We love this place dearly”.
African News Agency