Newly elected Student Representative Council (SRC) president at the University of the Free State, Asive Dlanjwa, has ticked off one of the items on his long list of “to-do items” as he managed to get the deregistration of over 82 foreign students at the school earlier on this year reversed.
Dlanjwa revealed that students were reregistered after interventions and a series of meetings with the university’s management, including the establishment of an ad hoc committee. The committee sat last week Friday and began its work over the weekend to ensure that the matter was resolved swiftly.
“Earlier on in April this year, after the deregistration of local students, we had an agreement with university management that no student would be deregistered from then on. However, we had not necessarily specified whether these students would be local or foreign. On that basis, the students were not supposed to have been deregistered in the first place,” Dlanjwa said.
He also revealed that the SRC “woke up to the news” that the students had been deregistered and no consultations with the SRC had taken place leading up to that point. “Our argument again was that there is not one single person or division at the university that can decide to terminate students’ careers without a collective engagement on the matter. This is why we had been calling for a Financial Exclusions Committee which would sit and preside at these types of sittings so that these kinds of decisions are taken on a case-by-case basis,” he added.
According to Dlanjwa an ad-hoc committee was established last week Thursday and its first meeting was held on Friday 15 September. On Sunday all international students were requested by the SRC and this committee to return to class, following a meeting with the university management that was to convene in the following week.
Dlanjwa said earlier on this week students were reregistered onto the system. While he also revealed that no tests or lectures had been missed during the two weeks, special provisions would be made for those who might have encountered problems.
“We have not received any complaints within this regard. There was one such case, which we sorted out. The principle here is that it was not the student’s fault, so special provisions would have to be made for these kinds of students, even if it meant additional assessment work,” Dlanjwa said.
Speaking on whether the university has set down any timelines with regards to the sorting of issues that led to the deregistration process in the first place, Dlanjwa said “it was the university’s prerogative and responsibility to ensure that they communicate with students to find out what is happening and why are there are delays in paying the fees.”
While he admitted that the university was in fact in communication with students defaulting on payments, Dlanjwa said sending a student a reminder to pay his or her fees is not doing enough. The university should rather adopt an interventional approach find the root cause of the problem rather than simply reminding students to pay.
“What we’ve done is, we have now agreed on a permanent committee that will be established that will preside over these cases, inclusive of the university’s counselling department. In fact, we are strongly lobbying that the counselling department is a part of that committee,” Dlanjwa concluded.
– PULANE CHOANE
