"Universities are seats of excellence not violence"
GQEBERHA - Professor Jonathan Jansen has emphasised how critical it is for a peaceful and stable environment, to be created for universities to thrive and fulfill their academic mandate.
You fool yourself if you think you can run a university that is always under threat from violence, that's the word from Jansen.
This after the latest arrests of suspects linked to murders and an attempted murder, at the University of Fort Hare.
He said, "The important thing about a university anywhere in the world is you need a few things to make it a university, one of the things is peace and quiet, you know you need Professors to do advanced research in relative calm, you need to be able to teach the relevant discipline in relative calm, but when your campus is constantly under threat from violence from the outside but also instability on the inside."
"I don't know if you can still call it a university, unfortunately universities with great legacies like Fort Hare for example, that has had to put up with this constant assault on its leaders, on its staff, on its students in Alice but also in the surrounding areas and you simply fool yourself if you think you can run a university anywhere in the world in that kind of context."