One of the positive outcomes of the 2015/16 #FeesMustFall protests was its production of highly conscientised young people on their way to becoming game-changing professionals in their fields. I know of many former student leaders from that period who are now lawyers, academics, teachers, entrepreneurs, journalists and, indeed, parliamentarians.
But the struggle for free education and the decolonisation of higher education remains unfinished. Major gains have been made to democratise universities. We have organisationally managed to change the race and gender patterns of the senior executive leadership and the student profile to reflect how SA truly looks like. But institutionally, we still have a long way to go.
Many households still find the system unaffordable; our current student loan scheme does not cover every person who deserves it; our student life services and infrastructure continue to battle with the rapid pace of massification; and we are still unable to produce the critical skills needed for our times that will secure work or self-employment out of our undergraduate qualification programmes.
These institutional issues rally student discontent every year. Departments of student affairs at all universities try to strike a balance between allowing student activism while putting regulations in place to avoid disruptions that may threaten teaching and learning.
The search for this equilibrium is the grand question of our times in the developing discipline and practice of student affairs.
Three questions strike my curiosity.
First, what is it that student affairs departments must do to produce conscientised students who will contribute to meaningful and productive change in their universities?
Second, what conditions must be in place to allow for the authentic development of the type of student we need in our times who will have the curiosity to find creative solutions to the complex challenges facing their own university?
Third, how can we create a multi-sector environment of sociopolitical development that will surface a student body that is aware of the society it exists under, its role to change it, and how this can be achieved outside the parameters seemingly constructed by our formal political order?
Anyone with ready-made answers to these questions would be a genius. The answers require a process that will be led by an organised team that has appetite and competencies to bring academic departments, components of the student life division, and the external community under the same roof to craft a single paradigm of development.
The external community refers to the public sector, organisations, businesses, the media and members of the society that students interact with daily in the city spaces they live and learn in. The days when universities used to think that student affairs belongs to the on-campus precinct are long gone.
Students now reside in the city where they spend a larger part of their 24 hours, and they get shaped by these streets more than the classroom. In other words, the student development strategies, theories and practices that will be relevant for the future are the ones that will be embedded in community engagement.
What is also clear is that student learning seems to be a social function that is established in the residence space. Students do not learn in isolation. Rather, they are now learning from each other as a community in dialogue.
Academic excellence has become a social movement.They organise their own talks in their own safe spaces to speak their minds, learn and unlearn from each other. They breathe knowledge to each other in their own African languages, pray and inspire hope, and critique the Westernised poison they imbibe from the classroom.
What many departments of African languages have not yet realised is the number of black South African languages spoken in student residential spaces. This is an opportunity for decolonised student development and training that should not be wasted.
In essence, the student affairs themes of our times are changing drastically, and they require a leadership management with eyes and ears on the ground to package these matters into a dynamic project of student conscientisation.
It is through this engaged project of student development anchored on multi-stakeholder coexistence that a class of community-based leaders with wings to impact every sphere of institutional change and social transformation will emerge from.
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