Dear psychology students,

We are understandably concerned about the impact that the continued suspension of lectures will have on learning, while also conscious that access to higher education is a national problem that requires urgent attention if the country is to meet its constitutional obligation of social redress. We can only hope that the conversations that have taken place yesterday and that will continue today will yield consensus and that lectures will resume soon.

In the meantime, we will do whatever we can to mitigate the effects of the suspension of formal teaching activities and will make speedy arrangements when lectures do resume. Some lecturers have made various materials available online. Since the slogan is ‘protest and pass’, we encourage you as far as possible to make use of all of the course material that you can access to stay abreast of the curriculum. Please feel free to contact your lecturers or your course coordinators if you are anxious about the missed work. If you cannot access material that is available, then please feel free to call on the assistance of the support and academic staff of the department.

The Heads of Departments have started a petition calling on government to increase its spending on higher education from 0.75% to 1% of GDP – which would increase the HE budget to approximately R38 million and would go a long way towards free and quality higher education for the poor. If you would like to support this petition, then please follow the link below:

https://goo.gl/forms/XCcBuNPdIM1Lmc7l1

Please also feel free to share the link.

Course coordinators will be in touch as soon as we know when lectures are likely to resume.

All the best,

The Department of Psychology