Universities on the brink

[Vrotappel]

Universities on the brink

The most glaring example lies with our universities. University councils are empowered and charged in law with the proper maintenance of their institutions, including setting fees for them. As the national state has, over the years, cut back its grant to the universities further and further so university councils have been forced to increase their fees.

Many of them have deliberately cross-subsidized the fees of poorer students by getting wealthier students to pay over the odds. But the state has pushed ever great numbers of ill-qualified students into the universities and then failed to increase student loan funds to match. The result was last year's explosion. It will be remembered that UCT demanded a 12% increase – widely echoed by others. The students marched. Blade Nzimande offered 6%, Zuma 0%.

At this point men somewhat braver than Max Price or Adam Habib would have said “No thank you, Mr President and Minister. There is no rationale for either 0% or 6%. In any case, it is the job and duty of our Councils to set our fees and after careful examination of next year's budgets we have done just that. University autonomy is very precious to us and we will not surrender it.

Moreover, the vice chancellors have compounded this foolishness with another, even greater: the campus staff unions had opportunistically sided with the students who in turn had them rewarding with “in-sourcing”. The vice chancellors might have pointed to the fact that “out-sourcing” was first forced upon the universities by an ANC Education Minister, Kader Asmal.

The result was an environment where positional politics was almost everything. In order to stay “onside” with a rapidly changing university environment the only safe thing to do was to keep open one's links with the Left, whatever gymnastics were required, and to try for roles as interlocuteurs and intermediaries, always negotiating change without ever taking up positions of principle. To play such roles a politically correct language was essential – words like redress, transformation, inclusive, non-racist, decolonization, previously disadvantaged, whiteness, alienation, exclusion, research excellence, a culture of learning, the legacy of apartheid, demographic representation, diversity, innovation in teaching and learning, interrogating historical values and assumptions, terrain of struggle, affirmation of dignity, enabling environment, capacity building, accelerated transformation, employment equity, emerging scholars, transformation imperatives, the global south, the verb “to mainstream”, mentoring, critical pedagogy, stakeholder involvement, marginalization by the dominant culture, to be “othered”, Eurocentric, Afrocentric and so forth: a whole new language of buzz-words and circumlocutions.

Great read.

 

[rrh]

Excellent !

 

[Crabby]

Enjoyed this one too

http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opin...-in-south-africa-can-be-avoided/#.V-0VtN_r3Og

 

[The_Ogre]

And here I'm just sitting busting my behind to earn a salary to save for my kids' tertiary education. That little thing called entitlement rears its head yet again.

 

[flippakitten]

And here I'm just sitting busting my behind to earn a salary to save for my kids' tertiary education. That little thing called entitlement rears its head yet again.

Send them overseas... As you are saving, you would be considered "rich" for having foresight... Therefore have to subsidize the entitled.
Spend your money in a better location, where education means something still.