Ulrike Kistner on the world of work and the world of learning the making of a beautiful fit
If job ads are anything to go by, hirers of educated free labour power in plentiful supply are looking for adepts in management, policy, strategy, service and leadership. Sought-after virtues include initiative, self-motivation, innovativeness, “enthusiasm for transformation”, “deep understanding of policy”, fundraising and communication skills, energy, ability to work under pressure, the ability to complete projects on or ideally below budget, the ability to develop corporate image and identity, and responsiveness to customer needs.
Luckily, our excellent universities have in recent years streamlined their programmes to produce graduates fitting these bills. Companies placing the adverts can be assured that there are tertiary education institutions increasingly responsive to the “needs” articulated by the business, or the science, technology and information “communities”.
So responsive are they that they dovetail their “outcomes” with the sought-after skills and virtues listed in the adverts. In this way, the shopping lists on both sides can be connected. Universities want to be able to promise graduates jobs to reward them for their financial sacrifices and educational growing pains, while hirers want them to acquire the requisite degree of higher-educational polish.
Their arrival is celebrated by the tertiary institutions’ graduate programmes into which they are being received, the ideal student the fee-paying student. The student becomes the customer and, as a rule, the customer is king. Academics render a customer-service in return for a fee.
What is particularly cost-beneficial are fees paid to the university for courses staffed with outside funding. First prize is an endowed chair with added extras. In return for his tax-free money, any mogul is given the chance to immortalise himself, and have generations of students buckling under the strictures of higher learning at the feet of his patron-saintly name.
Consider, by way of a factual fiction, this example. Just the other day another new postgraduate programme was launched at the university (that could be anywhere in South Africa). It goes under the name of the Helena Rubinberg Chair for Human Beauty. After Harvard and Yale had politely declined the honour, it has finally found a fitting place in the developing world, where its presence is hoped to attract graduates from disadvantaged communities and non-traditional student constituencies. In this way, it is likely to reach out to the community to whose upliftment and connection to international markets, brands and “imagineering” it aims to contribute.
The programme was launched with big fanfare, smoke and mirrors, make-up artists painting student faces, demonstrating anti-ageing pharmacology to the professors, offering partnerships and internships and marketing placements to promising able-bodied students with good presentation skills.
This hands-on demonstration was accompanied by the yummie bits and bites of Watering Mouth caterers and bottomless glasses of wine served by young in-sourced men of Helena Rubinberg, who replaced the usual in-house university caterers. The blessing to this new academic development was given by the honourable university vice-president (holding the portfolio of Partnerships and Transformation), whose dress sense and adroitness had been applauded by the Sunday papers, relying on a statement drafted by the university’s public relations department in an attempt to facelift the university’s image tarnished through bad press following student protests and various other misdemeanours.
Now that the carnivalesque festivities of the launch are over, the hard work begins. The number of students signing up for the course next year is increasing by the day, so that the faculty moved to declare this a growth area that could cross-subsidise ailing departments (now amalgamated into schools). The Higher Degrees Committee, together with another faculty committee, making concessions to growth while downplaying the habitual rigorous scrutiny of new academic developments, has issued invitations to all departments in need of precious student numbers to make use of the opportunity to earn brownie points.
The initiative was seized by the Department of Historical Studies, which is making revolutionary departures from its time-honoured curriculum. A professor with volumes to his name, on variations on the theme of “Patterns of Proletarianisation in a Southeastern Polity, 1880-1920”, has now propelled himself to embrace the new spirit by contributing a course component on “The longue dur of bodily posturing”. The Performing Arts School, claiming that this is really its domain, has outstripped its competitors by offering two courses components, “Body Language” and “The Body in Performance and Performativity”.
Anthropology, contesting performing arts’s claim to the domain, and wanting to institute its own discipline as the rightful home of this course, is proposing a component on “Beauty in the Cultural Field”. Modern language and literature studies, which does not want to be left out of the picture, has offered the novel Perfume, which, though originally written in German and set in France, can fortunately be taught in English translation. Applied Linguistics has thrown in a course on “The Body as Sign System Sign Systems of the Body”, by way of an application of its own home-spun semiotics and discourse analysis.
Large and varied as this assortment of courses is, members of the committee felt that it still does not cover the entire domain that, in fact, there was a big gap amounting to serious lack of representivity, concerning issues of blackness and beauty. In order not to lose sight of the ethical and practical aspects, the Animal Anti-Cruelty League will be brought on board with some lectures on “Beauty Without Cruelty”. And the entire course will be accompanied by demonstrations of beauty treatments. It is hoped this will transform the otherwise rather scholarly atmosphere of the School for Graduate Studies into a hive of lively interest and activity.
While the details of the academic programme are still being hammered out, to be hopefully ready for implementation next year, a pilot course is already in process, with participants making good progress in practical aspects. Of some difficulty here is the deciphering of instructions and product specifications printed on the package inserts of beauty products. However, the English Language Proficiency Centre has been mobilised to give support in this area.
So all is in good hands and under control. All the participating departments have shown great eagerness, so that the programme can run without additional costs to the university. Only the chair still has to be appointed. This is a sore point. Several applications were received last year when the establishment of the prestigious chair was first mooted and the green light was given to advertise it.
However, none of the suitors were found suitable. While they were all brilliant in their own specialised fields, none was found able to straddle and bridge the divide between the theoretical/historical and the practical/performative side of human beauty, which is one of the specifications of this endowment.
Until the next round of advertising which has not taken place this year due to an oversight on the part of the committee a student, radiant with eagerness, is coordinating the programme. She feels very honoured by this task, which will enormously benefit her CV and not accrue any major costs to the university.
To provide the course with academic credentials, a sub-committee has been tasked with developing a core course that somehow integrates all the different components of the programme into a knowledge-base with specifiable outcomes. No easy job this is, considering that there are no canons or precedents for this new exciting field of academic inquiry that redefines the face of knowledge.
On a different level, the core-course designers face a serious dilemma. They have to make sure that the screws of academic excellence are not being pulled too tight in developing able-bodied, managing, co-ordinating, marketing, promoting beauty experts, who are good enough but not too good at their jobs.
Only in this way will we ensure that they and those following in their footsteps will continue to be sent to tertiary institutions for training, thus keeping the metabolism between the world of work and the world of learning going. On it depends the longevity of our benefited, bonused, performance-appraised, tenured academic staff, and the possibility of stabilising unendowed chairs gone wobbly.
In this way, we realise the bigger picture of a happy harmony between the requirements of excellence, which is our mission, the requirements of the market, which academic service-providers and their clients have to be responsive to, and the requirements of a service to the community dictated by the developmental needs of our rainbow nation.
While we are defining the cutting edge, and can demonstrate rising standards, we are truly an African university of the 21st century. In all of this, we are doing our patron saint, Helena Rubinberg, proud, thus setting ourselves up for attracting more investments in knowledge-production.
Ulrike Kistner is a researcher and a passionate reader of university publications