It was one of the sneakiest sleights of hand ever manoeuvred by the former minister of education. No, it was not in the contrivance of the mergers. Nor, can you believe it, was it in the creation of universities of technology with the hilarious proviso that they continue to function solely as technikons; a rose by any other name.
What was very sneaky was that he introduced circular argumentation into higher education rhetoric. Like President George W Bush’s tautologies, he gave credence to a spurious logic that finally ushered in a policy so absurd that playwright Eugène Ionesco would have believed it implausible.
In other words Prof Kader Asmal tossed higher education, boots and all, into the post-modern. Everything was and was not what it seemed.
This confusion was recently and ably repeated by the prof’s latest attempt to create yet another set of mergers, this time to form the South African Commission on Human Rights and Equality. He seems determined, via his one (only) big idea, to merge everything into a lumpen, amorphous proletariat.
For higher education this must not be taken as a sign of imminent disaster. It is, if anything, a liberation into a post-modern world that is serendipitously redolent with new prospects. If we are not what we seem, we can be all that we dream. Now that we have lost our identity as institutions we can become anything.
So here’s my modest contribution to the future of South African higher education.
There are, at present, two popular ways of making money in a post-modern South African higher education.
The first involves the backgrounding of existing curriculums in favour of teaching short courses. These courses involve little or no preparation, can be Seta approved, can last anywhere between three days and six months and, most importantly, can generate revenue for the university as well as the lecturer concerned. Imagine an additional R90million a year for your institution and you begin to get the idea of the joys of this new kind of higher education. Related to this is ‘the academic third force” — those academics who turn their backs on the core business of research in pursuit of consultancy contracts.
The second even more salacious way of procuring funds lies in the field of tourism. I’m not talking about the kind of safari that has recently captured the imagination of YouTube viewers, but a formulation that acts out the pretence of being credit-bearing, academic and introduces foreign undergraduates to the joys of South Africa under the aegis of accruing knowledge within a gap semester.
The Americans would love it. Imagine a three-month stay in South Africa where United States students are wined and dined, sent to game farms to learn about environmental sustainability, day trips to Constitutional Hill to grasp the finer points of liberal democracy and the usual traipsing to Robben Island, rounded off with cocktails at Blues.
After this extended country tour, and to add a thin veneer of academic respectability, these students would be expected to churn out a 2 000-word report — in the last week — on a topic of their own choosing. Something like: ‘American iconography within the context of a developing country.”
Even better, we could export our academics on recruitment drives to the US. They could market the institution and bring back study groups, at $4 000 a pop, act as tour guides and split the profit with the home institution. Win-win.
Add to this already heady menu of attractions a dose of teaching English as a second language and a soupçon of cultural and linguistic orientation — What is a Hot Rock and how do you order one at your local Spur? — and you have, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, a veritable cash cow. I can’t wait for the Chinese to get wind of this.