I was fascinated to read a newspaper report on Prof. Jonathan Jansen's address to the College of Education in Pretoria on 20 November 2013. But it wasn't so much what he said, which was as always erudite and logical, but his reference to the "study by a ministerial oversight committee on transformation" was eye-popping. The report allegedly states that it was "'difficult to transform privilege", especially entrenched white privilege, voluntarily and suggested "extraordinary measures are needed"."
I decided to look for the report to see how the ministerial oversight committee (or MOC for short) defined "entrenched white privilege". I couldn't find the report online, even on the Department of Higher Education's website. So I assume it means what such a statement usually implies: that the damned whites mustn't expect to go to university even if they qualify to do so because we hate the sight of whites being given the opportunity to work hard to earn degrees.
But while surfing to find MOC's report, I came across an astounding report concerning some of the comments made in the report, on the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal's School of Education website. The first comment was that the report found that racial change in universities was not happening with the speed and dexterity anticipated. The debatable assumption is that the desired "speed and dexterity" were in fact correctly anticipated. Perhaps the authors can explain what the report means by "dexterity". The mind boggles at the idea of "dexterous" transformation. By the way, the MOC included as its members Professor Malegapuru Makgoba vice-chancellor of UKZN (the head of the MOC) and Professor Kesh Govinder, dean of the school of mathematics, statistics and computer science at UKZN.
Then the real beauty was to follow:
"The research applied an ‘equity index' when examining the demographic profiles of students and staff across South Africa's 23 universities, and used race demographics from the 2011 national census as the baseline. The index, a quantitative measure based on the Euclidean distance formula, adopted the principle that the racial and gender demographics of a university should be as close as possible, if not equal to, national figures.
A joint statement by UKZN and the transformation oversight committee for public universities said the study showed South Africa's previously advantaged institutions had poor equity indices, but scored well as high-level knowledge producers. Correspondingly, universities of technology and several formerly disadvantaged institutions produced "little research, but have a good equity profile. UKZN created the equity index to measure the distance between organisational demographics and national demographics and the timeframe it would take each institution to attain transformation."