HACkers blog

To answer a few questions, and correct a few misunderstandings:

• I'm leaving because my post is being restructured in a way I can't live with. This is legal; it was also procedural; I was also offered the new, dumbed down version - I declined it because I consider myself prejudiced by being asked to leave my brain at home each day.
  
• I was not dismissed - neither summarily nor unfairly nor unprocedurally. Retrenchment is a "dismissal based on operational requirements" but it is not the same as a dismissal based on capacity, performance, misconduct or dislike. Operational requirements have changed - the Faculty chooses to spend the money with a more operational service delivery and administrative focus than previously - this being a somewhat belated alignment with global  neoliberal trends towards managerialism. I'm "old guard" - I fit obliquely and with difficulty into the new order, so it is best all round that I find a better fit elsewhere.
• I am not moving to the Wits (despite the trend - both ways) and nor am I moving to the private sector (skypixie forbid!). Nor will I be consulting, in a private capacity, to UCT. I have no immediate career plans - 16 years and 8 months at the Knowledge Factory on the Hill has bought me some time off before I need join the UIF queue, which I intend using for those neglected, outstanding matters (handing in my dissertation, completing the half-written papers on my HDD and writing up the soap opera.... )
• I am not rushing off to breed frantically before my biological clock autodestructs. Whoever started that malicious rumour has been reading too much science fiction!
• I am not looking to emigrate because I think the country is going down the toilet. I don't. Nor am I fleeing the Knowledge Factory because I believe it has gone down the toilet. I am not an Afro-pessimist and I do believe that black people are capable of running the country - despite whatever lessons in corruption they learned from the white people who preceded them.   

Right: back to the topic in hand....

Things I will miss about UCT:

4) Walking up the hill from a meeting at Bremner, and watching the light embrace Devil's Peak in a halo. The location is a blessing, whether looking up towards the honeyed heavens, or out towards the hazy horizon from the vantage point of gluteus-freezing Jammie steps.

Things I won't miss about UCT:

4) The petty politics. Particularly how everything ultimately comes down to which Martin's flag you fly.  Can we move on to issues for their own sake, please?

37 days to go, and counting....