OUT TO LUNCH

A column in last week’s The Spectator magazine stated that more than a third of UK universities are “in financial doo-doo” and that staff cuts, cancelled courses, slashed research budgets and possible bankruptcy cannot be far off.

Part of the problem is that domestic students who pay £9 250 in fees actually cost £11 750 to teach. The domestic rate for students was last raised in 2017 and has not kept pace with inflation.

However, that differential between what is paid and what it costs to teach adds up to a collective annual £5 billion loss. Previously that loss would be partly made up by international students paying £20 000 each but UK government bans on foreign students bringing dependants with them has led to dramatic falls in non-EU students.

I am pretty certain that our own SA universities are experiencing similar financial problems but for very different reasons. We don’t rely on lots of foreign students paying higher fees to subsidise the locals; our universities simply aren’t good enough in the world rankings to edge out the natural choices of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge and their ilk.

The highest ranking I could find on the timeshighereducation.com website was University of Cape Town at 160 and Stellenbosch not far behind but most of our universities are way down the list among what might generously be termed ‘the also rans’.

However, I suspect the real problem with our universities (and many elsewhere) is that they are no longer doing the job for which they were originally intended, which was to select students with an acceptably high level of intelligence and turn them into responsible and productive members of society. That quaint old fashioned idea went out of the window long ago.

The demise of the university as a place of learning and of a free exchange of ideas has been greatly accelerated by the Wokist infiltration of academia, the ‘de-platforming’ of controversial visiting lecturers and speakers, the ‘cancelling and sacking’ of those whose views do not accord with the Woke narrative and the introduction of the ludicrous Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity ‘so called’ experts into university life. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Last week, at the height of the Pretoria High School for Girls saga (so lucidly explained by Richard Wilkinson on this website) the mainstream media trotted out several grandly titled ‘academics’ to pontificate on the subject, particularly on the point that none of the twelve white girls who were bullied by the Gauteng Department of Education and suspended from the school have been found not guilty of the racism of which they were charged.

One of the academics interviewed claims to be an expert in ‘critical race theory’ and ‘critical whiteness studies’; both bullshit faux academic studies. The academic in question is very white so one must assume that she is just hedging her bets should things get ugly in the future.

It really wouldn’t be a bad thing if many of our universities went bankrupt and ceased functioning. Many, like University of Cape Town, have become pale shadows of their former selves under the disastrous leadership of Max Price and then the even worse Mamokgethi Phakeng.

Discipline went out the window and students were free to express themselves by destroying artworks and smashing statues on the strength that they were painful colonial reminders. If they hadn’t been free to destroy them then the poor darlings would have suffered who knows what psychological damage?

Max Price, instead of imposing discipline and punishing vandalism appeared to support the student activism and, predictably, things got steadily worse and worse. If you just happened to be a student at the university who wanted to go to lectures, study hard and earn a decent degree before launching yourself into the workplace then you would have found life very difficult during the Fees must Fall years.

The obvious result of this negligence is that the quality of education has dropped as standards have to be lowered to allow radical students (many of whom aren’t too keen on the studying part of university) to pass the necessary exams which will allow them to remain as campus activists for a few more years, sometimes well into their twenties.

Dropping standards in the arts subjects probably doesn’t have any deleterious effect on society at large but dropping standards in subjects like medicine or engineering just to satisfy the pass mark quota clearly isn’t a great idea. We would all prefer our young doctors to be fully conversant with the workings of the human body and our young engineers to be sufficiently knowledgeable to not build bridges that are likely to collapse if a gust of wind hits them.

But the decline of academic standards and the walking on eggshells that many academics are forced to do to avoid being labelled ‘bigots, racists or Nazis’ by their Woke contemporaries must definitely affect staff morale. If you risk being spat on by students (as I have heard happens) because you happen to hold an unfashionably biological view on the great trans/non binary issue then you are almost certainly not experiencing job satisfaction. This applies equally to those dedicated schoolteachers who are victimised on social media and who have to contend with the EFF-luent thugs shouting at them at their place of work.

A sensible minister of higher education would recognise the problem and be prepared to subject the tertiary education sector to some drastic surgery. After the disastrous term of office of Cde Blade Nzimande (now mired in all sorts of controversy involving money moving in unusual directions) it would be great if incoming minister Dr Nobuhle Nkabane decided to axe nonessential degree courses like gender studies, diversity studies and theory of whiteness. None of those are going to qualify anyone for the workplace.