The conversation with an acquaintance went like this: “Do you know that I discovered that one of my senior lecturers was making so much money teaching short courses that he outsourced his normal teaching load to one of his honours students?”
“You’re joking,” said I.
“Not at all. We picked it up almost by mistake. He was making about 25k a month teaching short courses and had no time for his university obligations, so he paid one of his students 8k to pick up his teaching load and still pocketed the rest of his basic salary at the institution.”
“That’s pretty smart delegation,” was all I could add.
I found the anecdote immensely depressing. There was a time when higher education was the last bastion of a moral order within a self-interested society. It was ingrained into the fabric of the institution. We provided the moral compass that stood in contradistinction to apartheid and 40 years ago in Paris we could produce chaos on the streets and poetry on the walls Je suis marxiste, tendance Groucho (I am a Marxist of the Groucho kind).
Once upon a time you could always rely on the academy to take a vociferous and contrarian stance on the issues of the day and because of the moral impetus driving them, they were more often than not right, and at the cutting edge of societal change. And now? Selling your core business to a student so that you can offer “Project Management in one-and-a-half days” seems as though some of our institutions have lost sight of the original point of dressing badly and calling oneself an academic.
Let’s face it, since the days of Bologna, the university has always been the clown to the crown. Like Shakespeare’s fools it has purposefully existed outside of authority. Like Lear’s fool, academic freedom and institutional autonomy gave it the freedom to critique the moronic machinations of democracy.
So you have to ask yourself, when last did one of our public universities assume the mantle of critiquing the social order?
It’s not as though there is nothing to comment on, but apart from student unrest — which is predominantly about relatively small interest groups who forgot to study — there hasn’t been a cohering rallying point since the early 1990s. Admittedly Rhodes University distributed symbols depicting Africa to students to show their disapproval of xenophobia and a few hundred lecturers and students protested at Wits, but these somehow smack of marketing campaigns.
These are not the involuntary rumblings of an institution uniting into a cohesive protest. If there are modern signs of a collective, they manifest tragically in events such as the aftermath of the Virginia Tech and Columbine killings and they are not united in protest but in grief.
No, if you want to find the institutions that are doing things differently you have to look at the privates.
The first instance of folly has to be in the guise of Monash South Africa. Costing about R240-million so far, Monash hopes to break even in 2012.
When they first opened they had 25 students; by 2004 they had 450. You have to admire their tenacity in the face of dubious strategy, daunting odds and, no doubt, an extremely irritated parent university in Australia. There’s a certain dogged optimism about the whole project that reminds me of a sentimental Kevin Costner espousing “build [the university] and they will come”.
If Monash’s folly borders on lunacy, St Augustine borders on the mystical. Largely funded by donations from Catholic organisations and yet to establish undergraduate courses, St Augustine has 168 master’s and 12 PhD students this year. That sounds about in keeping with a niche post-grad market until you realise that this disused convent has more post-grad research students than 13 of our 23 higher education institutions.
And then, of course, there’s Cida City Campus with 1 500 students enrolled for a virtually free higher education. Cida generates about R50-million from donations per annum, many of the lecturers give their time freely and although there is concern that it is too dependent on one man’s vision, its success still has to be admired.
Although these examples are negligible, they highlight something lacking at our public institutions. Things such as energy and determination, a dedication to post-graduate success and a real commitment to free higher education are examples of what can be achieved in higher education. Just not in our public universities.