Global student stories – 25 April

This week’s global student stories cross four continents: from a student protest success in South Africa, to a Chinese social media scam hitting Vancouver students, Arthi Nachiappan takes a look at some of the most interesting things happening to students across the world this week.

Crowds in Cape Town celebrated the removal of the statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes earlier this month.

Rhodes, who was a 19th century South African politician, was a British colonist and had a strong colonial outlook.

Students had been running the RhodesMustFall campaign for the removal of the statue from the University of Cape Town for months. One student had poured a bucket of excrement over the statue in protest.

Nombulelo Nyathela, a spokesperson from Equal Education South Africa, suggested that the legacy of Rhodes was the reduction of the Black population to cheap labour.

Ms Nyathela stated: “University campuses dominated by white academics, neo-liberal curricula and symbols of racial oppression are expressions of this crisis.”

The removal was allegedly met with a “festive atmosphere” as protesters gathered to see the statue removed from the University.

Vancouver students are being targeted in an international scam involving a Chinese social networking app called ‘WeChat’.

The app is used as a means of meeting people in public areas to trade food, cosmetics and toys, according to the National Post.

However, students have recently been tricked into thinking that the service also extends to “trading” sex in return for iTunes credit.

The scam involves the con-artists approaching male students on the app with the avatars of attractive female students and convincing them to meet in public.

When they arrive at the agreed meeting place, they are then called by a man, claiming to be the female student’s boss, who threatens to assault the student unless they purchase iTunes credit in a nearby store and transfer it immediately.

“Come on, white guy, give me a break!” is the new campaign by students at the University of Brasília, the country’s first state university to implement quotas to combat racial discrimination in university admissions.

The passing of this new law has seen a backlash on university campuses, allegedly directed mainly at black students.

Student and founder of the campaign Lorena Monique dos Santos explained to the BrasilPost that she started the campaign to highlight the subtle racism directed at black students in Brazil.

She argued that racist systems of admissions were “more visible” in examples from the USA or South Africa, but in Brazil, day-to-day racism isn’t always overt: “It makes black people very confused.

It feels like we are walking through a minefield without knowing exactly what is happening to us.”symbols of racial oppression are expressions of this crisis.”

Students and teachers in Delhi, India, have been protesting the Central University Act, a centralising policy by the University Grants Commission (UGC), according to the Indian Express.

Protestors gathered outside the Human Resource Development Ministry on Wednesday 22 April to express their opposition to the Act, which they claim will reduce the autonomy of universities and therefore stifle their uniqueness and individual strengths.

Organisations at the protest included the ‘All India Students Federation’, a national union working with the Communist Party of India, as well as the ‘All India Students’ Association’ (AISA) and the ‘Students’ Federation of India’.

The vice-president of Delhi University’s AISA unit, Ankit Pandey, said CBCS “offers only an illusion of choice, and will be yet another experiment on students”.