No entry for Ms Reddy
MS PRAVINI REDDY, the brilliant young
Indian student — she got six As in her matric — who has been refused
admission to Natal University medical school is not the first Indian
student to be turned down despite her merit. Not long ago the daughter
of an Indian doctor teaching at the medical school was refused
admission even though she had better marks than at least one of the
whites accepted. The doctor resigned in fury from the school and most
of the Indian faculty took his side.
Under apartheid the medical school was the only one reserved for
blacks. Even when apartheid was abandoned many of the school’s Indian
staff were keen to keep it that way. While white medical students
favour UCT, Wits or Stellenbosch, Indian medical students, with their
strong family tradition, prefer to stay at home while they study. Given
that the medical school is in Durban, home to half the country’s Indian
population, the arrangement worked very snugly and there was great
resistance to its becoming non-racial and opening up to competition
from equally well-educated whites.
The solution — officially denied but always applied — is a system of
racial quotas. To have any legitimacy at all such quotas have to have
some relationship to demography. Indians make up only 2.5 per cent of
the population of South Africa yet have always been the largest group
in the medical school. The school found a way around this by taking
into account that there are slightly more Indians than whites in
KwaZulu-Natal. In addition, it argues that whites were the advantaged
while Indians were part of the previously disadvantaged population —
though many of the Indian applicants were the sons and daughters of
affluent professionals and not a few had been to top private schools
such as Michaelhouse and Hilton.
With these considerations in mind the school settled on a white quota
of 3 per cent, a Coloured quota of 9 per cent, an Indian quota of 19
per cent and an African quota of 69 per cent. Since it is always
difficult to fill either the African or the Coloured quota with
candidates who are likely to be able to graduate, the medical school
has adopted a policy of filling any shortfall in these disadvantaged
groups on a quota of six Indians for every one white, again in clear
defiance of demography.
The government’s policy, however, is to increase the number of African
doctors. To comply with this the school decided to expand its intake of
97 in 1996 to 186 in 1999, though this is more than either the
laboratories or the hospital wards can cope with. This expansion was
the only way to bump up African numbers without cutting back on Indian
entrants. It has not only allowed Indians to retain their dominant
position in the school but to increase their numbers from 50 entrants
in 1996 to 83 in 1999. The result is that Indians currently have 45 per
cent of the places (over twice their quota) whereas not much more than
half the African quota is filled. Despite all that, there are still
Indian students as well qualified as Ms Reddy being refused
admission.
No wonder the notion of founding a wholly private medical school is
often discussed in Durban, the assumption being that it would operate
on a strictly meritocratic basis and, as a result, be almost
exclusively Indian. This might not turn out be true however. With the
country’s other medical schools wrestling with affirmative action
admission policies, one that was run on academic merit would quickly
rise to the top of the league and attract the best and the brightest
from every community.