We have maintained for some time that universities are a microcosm of society. The occurrences in universities tend to mirror what has been happening in society (over time).

These occurrences serve to inform the broader society of events to come.

Racially charged violence erupted at the University of Pretoria and the University of Free State (UFS). That moment became a manifestation of chants like "we are done talking", "makuliwe" (let us fight), and "enough is enough".

Since the #RhodesMustFall movement last year, students have been chanting impatiently with growing intolerance for dialogue they deem meaningless.

There is a growing section of the South African populace that believes the fight against structural violence will have to take confrontational physical violence for it to be resolved.

Universities are showing us how ugly the struggle for social justice is going to be if we are to make any strides to restore people's dignity and generate sustainable livelihoods for all citizens.

Privilege and underprivilege take on a racial make-up. They continue to be well encapsulated in former president Thabo Mbeki's words delivered in parliament in May 1998.

He said, "A major component part of the issue of reconciliation and nation building is defined by and derives from the material conditions in our society, which have divided our country into two nations, the one black and the other white."

The significance here is the recognition that our material conditions expose our relative deprivation to well-off people. In this country, given our levels of inequality, the majority of people live in the squalor of poverty.

Mbeki continued, "One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographic dispersal. It has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.

"The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor, with the worst affected being women in the rural areas, the black rural population in general and the disabled. This nation lives under conditions of grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure."

What is currently happening at our universities is a clash of the white and black students - the former fighting very hard to sustain their privilege and not share it with "outsiders" and the latter having been spectators for too long and having not gained entry into the circles of privilege.

One solution remains and that is to dismantle privilege at all costs.

Even the developed infrastructure of the white nation can no longer render the black nation timid.

For some time after 1994, the majestic appeal of former white universities made some black people feel very privileged to be walking the corridors that their mothers and fathers could not enter by law. This wowed them to the point of feeling that true freedom had indeed arrived.

But the entire 1994 project and all the fallacies embedded in it were exposed by Mbeki as early as 1998. Some whites dug in their heels and charged that he was stoking the flames of racism.

When the #RhodesMustFall movement came into effect 17 years after Mbeki's speech, the white nation spewed its vitriol, suddenly finding symbols of colonialism too insignificant to be offensive to the blacks in universities.

Yet, ironically, they still found reason to defend these symbols and glorify their importance. Again they dug in their heels and did not acknowledge the core of the message of protesting black students.

Former white universities culturally alienate outsiders, from the type of activities that are done in residences to the content of the curriculum that is taught.

A lot of the professors that teach carry their prejudices born from their privilege into their classes. Their prejudices also arise from being secluded all their lives from interacting with the majority in this country.

Black students are no longer seduced by the "privilege of attending university". We are seeing a kind of boldness that has been missing in dealing with injustices in this particular sphere of our society.

Intellectual spaces have been reduced to violence. All the intellectual advances of blacks and whites have been found wanting, incoherent and unintelligible.

Black students feel like they are talking to a brick wall while the white establishment is impatient with what it deems an inability of the students to measure up to the demands of intellectual discourse.

Thus, our universities are succumbing to physical violence instead of intellectual sparring.

This could also be indicative of the fact that these highly praised white universities have never imbued their patrons - students - with intellectual sophistry, as we have been made to believe. It could be that our universities are hollow spaces of intellectualism.

Whatever the case maybe, what is clear is that this time around the developments at universities serve as a precursor of events to unfold in broader society.

Violent racial battles are imminent in this country.

Mnguni is a youth activist