We would like to express our disappointment and concern over the decision made about the academic year for the music students of UP. We were recently informed that the music students of the university will only be having their practical modules (MEI, MTI and GHO) on campus, while the theoretical modules remain online, as it was last year. This decision makes no sense for many reasons, which will be addressed below.

Firstly, we would like to state how impractical it is. Many music students do not live in Pretoria, coming from different cities, provinces and even countries. While the first and second year music students will still have two one-hour classes of GHO each week on top of one hour of MEI and MTI each, many of the third and fourth year music students who do not take second instrument (MTI) will only have one class of one hour per week. Considering the cost of travel or rent for res, this seems rather ridiculous for one hour a week. It is also important to mention that many of those staying in res only get to go home and be with their families about three times a year. Referring to the experiences from last year, some of the jazz students did not even get the opportunity to have contact classes for their first and second instruments, as their lecturers refused to do so. If that happens again this year, some of the jazz students will be completely online. This is working against and not for these students.

Secondly, the tuition fees being paid to the university have not changed. It makes sense for an on-campus university to be more expensive than one that is fully online (such as Unisa), due to the on-campus facilities available to the students. However, in light of the Covid pandemic, the fees remained the same, despite the fact that the students had either no or limited access to the facilities at the university. It looks like the university is planning to continue this trend this year with a hybrid learning system. We would like to point out that the students of the university did not choose UP for nothing. We would not have been willing to pay the tuition we are paying if we did not think the facilities available would be worth it. If we wanted to study online, we would have gone to Unisa. To put this into perspective for you, the average student at Unisa studies between 4 and 6 modules per year, which each cost between R1 743 and R6 722. That means a Unisa student pays a maximum of R40 332 per annum, which is less than the tuition at UP.

This leads onto our next point. By remaining online, students are being deprived of developing the necessary skills needed for employment once graduated. We are not getting the chance to develop our social skills by interacting face-to-face with our colleagues and lecturers, which is important in the workforce. We are also not getting a chance to apply our knowledge through on-campus activities, such as staging classes, jazz improvisation classes and live performances. I would also like to add that these aspects are part of our MEI module, which have been online the whole of last year (this is not helpful). Training students of the arts to apply their knowledge through work experience is just as important as training medical students to apply theirs. Also considering the fact that loadshedding is a reality in this country, remaining online for theoretical modules is not ideal. Connection issues add to this problem. It becomes quite frustrating for us students to keep up with our lecturers in online lessons, if we cannot have a lecture in its entirety. Many of us do not have the time to go back and watch online lecture-recordings.

Fourthly, we would like to state that the current Covid regulations for gatherings easily allow for the music students to return back full-time. The regulations of alert level one state that indoor gatherings may not exceed 1000 people, while outdoor gathering may not exceed 2000 people. For venues that are too small to accommodate these numbers, 50% capacity. Considering the music degrees contain one of the smallest number of students per class (at most 25 people), it is possible for music students to return to campus full-time and still adhere to social distancing regulations in the Musicaion lecture rooms. It is also important to note that the Covid-19 virus is becoming endemic. Many European countries, such as Spain and England, have declared the virus as endemic and have lifted Covid regulations and restrictions. Although our country is not at that point yet, President Ramaphosa announced at the SoNA Conference, which took place 10 February 2022, that he intends to end the national state of disaster as soon as he finalises certain measures. He also stated that most of the restrictions on social and economic activities have been lifted already. In fact, it has been stated in the Government Gazette that schools and their teachers have no choice but to go back full-time, as many schools and students do not have the proper facilities to continue online. Many children would be robbed of an education otherwise. As we have witnessed, life is starting to go back to normal and university should not be an exception.

As seen in the points stated above, this decision is unnecessary and more problematic to students than it is good. It would be a serious shame if UP does not return to the fully on-campus system it once was, especially considering that this was a reason for our decision to study here.