Thierry Luescher

#FeesMustFall: an internet-age student movement in South Africa and the case of the university of the Free State

ABSTRACT How can we begin to make sense of the diversity of hashtag student movements that sprang up in South Africa in the course of 2015? In this paper we start by presenting key elements of Altbach’s empirical theory of student movements and Castells’ conceptualisation of internet-age networked movements to propose as conceptual point of departure the notion of ‘internet-age student movement’. At the case of the campus-based #SteynMustFall and #UFSFeesMustFall student movement at the University of the Free State (UFS), we illustrate the richness of data available for empirical analysis and reflect on related methodological challenges when seeking to understand internet-age student movements and the dynamic relationship between the campus-based and the country-wide movement, the territorial space and the cyberspace. We conclude by reflecting on some elements of a possible research agenda for engaging with the 2015 South African hashtag student movements.

Towards an intellectual engagement with the #studentmovements in South Africa

Every night over the previous week, black staff members were taking turns to conduct seminars with students [... ]. The quality of the discussions was not anything I had seen at the University of Cape Town, Cornell, Harvard or any of the universities I had attended. [... ] My biggest fear is that black people will not take the racist abuse any longer and we will find ourselves in the racial civil war we averted in 1994. I don’t say this lightly. [... ] Between us and that outcome stand the students of the University of Cape Town. They are the best antidote to racist psychosis. They are the miner’s canary that is foretelling us of racial war. (Mangcu 2015, 2) Over the past few weeks, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of words have been written or spoken about the student protests and marches that led to President Zuma’s clearly panicked response, declaring that there would be no fee increases at South African universities in 2016. [... ] And then there is a further challenge, lurking in the shadows of the future. Demands, backed by protests (some violent), that are so rashly and ignorantly acceded to, produce the understandable notion that the next round of demands will also result in acquiescence. [... ] Either or both consequences will result in the move from the decline to the fall of South Africa’s universities. (Butler-Adam 2015, 1–2)

Altbach’s Theory of Student Activism in the Twentieth Century: Ten Propositions that Matter

Student activism is ‘a highly complex, many-faceted phenomenon’ for which serious systematic efforts at understanding it only emerged as a scholarly response to the student revolts of the twentieth century. Until the mid-1960s, student activism was thought of as more characteristic of developing countries than the industrialised countries of Western Europe and North America, even though students had historically been part of the political equation there, for example during the Bourgeois revolutions of the 1840s. The student activism of the late 1960s stands out, however, as perhaps the most significant student political period of the twentieth century in Europe and North America. Philip Altbach was there. As a student at the University of Chicago, he was part of the anti-war Student Peace Union (SPU) from its establishment in 1959 and served as national chairman of the SPU from 1959 to 1963. In the early 1960s he turned his attention to studying student politics rather than actively participating in it. During this period he produced his PhD thesis, Students, Politics and Higher Education in a Developing Society: The Case of Bombay, India, and began to make a name as an emerging scholar on student politics in America, India and the developing world (working on related topics with Seymore Martin Lipset), and he tried himself as scholarly commentator on matters such as the civil rights movement in the US. This chapter sets out to order Altbach’s theoretical contribution systematically, by formulating ten propositions for understanding student activism in the twentieth century based on his work.

African university presses and the institutional logic of the knowledge commons: University presses and the knowledge commons logic

This article investigates the current status and challenges faced by university presses in Africa, looking particularly at the institutional perspective. Four case studies from Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa show how different presses adapt their practices and adopt new technologies. Interpreted through an institutional logics perspective, the status of the university presses is described according to established editorial and market logics, to which a third, hypothetical logic of the knowledge commons is added. The logic of the knowledge commons accounts for changes advanced by the digitization of content, peer‐to‐peer networks as the basis for production, the rise of open access, and an emerging social capitalism. In two cases, we find university presses constrained by traditional editorial logics, while a third one exhibits a hybrid editorial–market model with the purposive adoption of new technologies. Only the fourth, recently established press has embraced the new logic of the knowledge commons wholeheartedly. Thus, if there is a second transition of the academic publishing industry underway, it is in its early stages, partial, and limited in the African context. We thus show that the logic of the knowledge commons provides a useful theoretical lens for studying the far‐reaching and rapid ongoing changes in international academic publishing in Africa and further afield.