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/ 18 February 2008
The days following Heath Ledger’s death have swirled with speculation, with tales of hard drugs and prescription pills, of anti-depressants and sleeping tablets. Amid all the mutterings about heroin abuse and cocaine addiction, it is the sleeping pills that seem most startling. Ledger, plagued by the chronic insomnia that often accompanies depression, had apparently come to rely on medication to get him to sleep.
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/ 18 February 2008
In Ekurhuleni, Sibongile* supports three young children while clutching at a safety net of informally occupied land. After losing her employment as a domestic worker and the accommodation that came with it, she needed to keep a foothold in the city. Like most people in the Somalia informal settlement she is acutely aware of how tenuous her claim to the land is, but says: "It’s life, I borrowed it."
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/ 18 February 2008
Women remain massively under-represented in leadership positions in higher education. In 2007 only three (and one acting) of South Africa’s 23 vice chancellors were women. In addition, among top managers only 21% of the deputy vice-chancellors and 28% of the deans are women.
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/ 18 February 2008
The year 2008 marks 100 years of the pursuit of academic excellence for the University of Pretoria, a century in the service of knowledge. Let us reflect against the backdrop of the expectations that were created by General Jan Smuts in 1910 when he said the "University of Pretoria must become for this country what Oxford is for England".
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/ 18 February 2008
The KwaZulu-Natal health department has identified a quiet rural doctor as a troublemaker, charging him with misconduct for "wilfully and unlawfully without prior permission of [his] superiors rolling out prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission dual therapy to pregnant mothers and newborns".
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/ 18 February 2008
The definition of an “ideal employer” is very different for South African graduates compared with their European and North American counterparts, according to a new survey. Conducted by Magnet Communication, the survey reveals that graduates from Europe and the United States select companies such as Apple and Google as their ideal employers even though these companies recruit very few graduates.
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/ 18 February 2008
Public universities are expected to ask the government on Monday to exempt them from Eskom’s load-shedding, which has gripped the country in the past few weeks. The national outages have undermined the smooth running of university administrations, disrupted lectures and placed millions of rands’ worth of research at risk.
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/ 18 February 2008
On a recent trip to New York, I passed a pleasant afternoon watching a series of unsavoury males being violently separated from their penises. The movie Teeth is an entertaining enough comedy-horror update of the myth of vagina dentata, or the toothed vagina. It tells the story of the teenaged Dawn, leading light of her local chastity chapter but struggling to contain her burgeoning desires.
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/ 18 February 2008
It was the 1980s and Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution was captivating hearts and minds around the world. The olive-uniformed guerrillas had overthrown the hated Somoza dictatorship and were trying to build a more equal society by empowering women, giving peasants land and teaching the illiterate to read.
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/ 18 February 2008
If you’ve got ambitions to be a CEO, then it’s apparently time to toughen up. According to a recent study from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, soft skills such as listening, flexibility and treating people with respect aren’t valued nearly as highly as more assertive attributes when it comes to hiring decisions.