Vice chancellors should embrace dialogue

By Kipkirui K’Telwa

Threats by students from three universities to demonstrate on Monday to protest against the planned interrogation of their 35 colleagues at Kenyatta University should send out a signal to national leadership. The message is that vice chancellors live in the past while students have left them as they seek to live in the future.

Decisions to shut down the university and expel or suspend students in order to instil order are practices associated with dreaded Kanu disciplinary committee. Expulsion and suspension of students or disbanding their unions are wasteful, archaic and inhuman ways of resolving conflicts in the society. It is akin to extra-judicial killing of criminal suspects. In any case, has failed in the past to serve its intended purpose. Renown persons including James Orengo, Mwandawiro Mgangha, Hassan Omar and Chelagat Mutai were expelled from campus for their activism. But they sought learning institutions in more pluralistic societies where they flourished. And because of the authoritarian regime in our public universities, even professors who agitate for better salaries or working conditions risk being expelled as their students. And many of them are at home after challenging regimes unwilling to change.

In the recent past, two Egerton and Kenyatta universities have been rocked by student’s riots leading to closures. In Kenyatta’s case, the Vice Chancellor Prof Olive Mugenda shut down the institution when students who had not been registered to sit the end of the semester exams due to fee balance, staged "a not so peaceful protest march" that resulted in damage of property worth Sh17m.

Even though in an advert carried in the local media the vice chancellor said only 500 out of 17,000 students participated in the protest, the university administration decided to charge every student a fine of Sh1,000 before carrying out any investigation or addressing any of the issues raised by the students’ body. At the end of the re-opening exercise, the institution would have collected Sh17 million. How did the authorities estimate the penalty?

Isn’t the administration over-flexing its muscles in a bid to suppress students from seeking meaningful dialogue?

I am not trying to say the students acted rightly when they howled and threw stones at motorists along the busy Thika highway. They know the Vice Chancellor never operates from the highway. The students misdirected their anger and "miscommunicated" their raw rage on motorists who neither register students nor administer semester examinations. In fact, many a matatu crew has not been to the university, except to pick or drop passengers.

Therefore, the action of both the students’ union and university senate lower their dignity before the eyes of the public. Parents neither close down homes when they differ with their children nor call in area chief. As he clock ticks towards Monday, it is hoped that national leadership will step in to avert more destruction of property and careers as students face off with their vice chancellors.

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