HACkers blog

Martin Hall, in his blog used the term "Human Capital". Wits advertised recently for an executive director of Human Capital. Is this a trend, or merely the uncritical deployment of Harvard Business Review discourse - a kind of logical next step in the terminology inflation that followed the move from "Personnel" to "Human Resources"?

The use of the term generated the predictable fallout. The aforementioned "human resources" grumbled in their passages and parking lots about being reduced to quantifiable entities on a balance sheet - "mere numbers" - and saw sinister connections with the plan to move network user identities to staff numbers.

It went further. _Human_ capital, they muttered, went beyond claims on one's intellectual, or social, or cultural, capital - the University was laying claim to one's entire being. So this, they murmured darkly, was where the Private Work Policy was headed. Not content with claiming the right to determine how one spent one's "free time", they were in fact claiming it. "Free time" no longer existed. It was all the University's time, you were merely excused from being in office for a few hours each day to go home and sleep, eat, procreate or whatever else was best not done in your office.

Of course, the "Human Capital" concept raises interesting questions about assets vs liabilities, depreciation models and disposal...

The first call came through as I was pulling out of the Beattie parking lot. "Tell me, is the Humanities fileserver down?"

"Not that I know," I answered truthfully. But then, since I don't log in to the network, I wouldn't know. Still, one of the hundreds who do would have made it my business to know, with some expectation that I take a SWAT team across to ICTS to make them fix it immediately.

I suspected something else was at play, though. "Did you follow the ICTS instructions and confirm your user account?" I ventured, and the reply sighed through loudly. "No. It didn't work and they're never there when you phone. They seem to think we all work secretarial hours. Don't they know that we teach, we sit in meetings, we do research, we supervise graduate students, and by the time we get to our office to read email they've gone home to feed their cats?"

I made a note to log a call, suspecting there would be others. There were. "How are we supposed to log a call if they've gone home and unplugged our network access?" I pointed out gently that one could still use the web interface without logging on to the LAN, but frayed tempers wanted sympathy rather than solutions, so I cranked up the volume on my iPod and let them rant.

Yes, of course "we" all would have done it differently, and I'm also sure that this isn't the only Faculty where several HODs were too busy during the two-week-odd window to follow the instructions with an ICTS consultant on the other side of the phone line so that they could report the error messages as they popped up, and I also doubt that the theoretical seventh of academic staff on sabbatical, the unknown percentage of women staff on maternity leave and the others away for various other reasons at this time all managed to make alternative plans to have their details captured by the system. But, this having happened this way, we now have to deal with the fallout.

Horse tranquilisers, anyone?

Back at the Transformation Seminar the other day, Melissa Steyn made a comment about Institutional Memory. Her point was something along the lines of questioning the argument one frequently hears against losing white men from institutions because of the Institutional Memory they embody - she was questioning what is *in* that Institutional Memory, and might it not be a good thing to lose.

Which reminded me of something I'd read in my dim and thankfully distant undergraduate past, and I hope there are no psychologists reading this to take issue with my clumsy paraphrasing: Freud somewhere said something along the lines of "what cannot be remembered, cannot be forgotten". If I recall with any accuracy, he was referring to traumatic events which are suppressed by the conscious mind, which need to be surfaced through analysis so that they can be worked through.

Institutional Memory is important. We need to know why we do what we do, so that we can reflect on whether it is what we should still be doing. But institutional forgetting is also important. Practices become policy through repetition, and not always for the right reason.

Institutional Memory resides in all of us. We make it daily, live it and forge it and fashion it all the time. it encompasses that which was not done as much as that which was. Bourdieu spoke of "The Law of the Conservation of Violence" - a kind of sociological karma that cannot be evaded. In order to understand what is happening in our institution, we need to remember where we are coming from and what has gone before, not only the glories which we dust off and hang with the portraits of the past, but also the infamy and the shame and that which we choose not to parade to the public gaze. For as long as it cannot be remembered, and cannot be forgotten, its ghosts will continue to haunt our halls and its karma continue to play out.

Earlier today I attended the Transformation Seminar (these things need to be capitalised) which problematised The White Male (whether or not dethroned) in the wake of the Makgoba article from the Weakly Mail.

There is, of course, much more which could be said about it beyond what is said here. But what struck me within minutes was Robert Morrell arguing that Transformation went beyond the usual numerical measures and touched on qualitative aspects - and then appeared to conflate two entirely different "transformations", viz. the "democratic" (for want of a better word - the one that we all agree is good and desirable and a worthy goal) with the "managerial" (the one that most people think is evil and contrary to what we are as a University).

The former is a particularly South African issue - though parallels have been drawn with other countries, such as Malaysia - and the latter a global phenomenon, albeit rather late in manifesting locally. That the two occured simultaneously in SA had to do with Apartheid isolation, and post-Apartheid conscious embracing of "international best practice" as it was naively dubbed. That's where the link ends - the one is neither necessitated by the other, nor conceptually linked... It's an accident of history that they should coincide in this way.

Arguing that "universities are less democratic than they were ten years ago" is probably true, from the vantage point of being a white male academic, if one is thinking in terms of the managerial transformation. Decision-making structures and processes have been refashioned and reshaped to allow more executive decision-making, more upfront management and greater "professionalisation" thereof. However, at the same time, the restructuring has also led to greater levels of transparency and accountability - at least on paper - and the inclusion of previously excluded estates, notably students, and to a lesser extent the subordinate estate ("non-academic" staff). Is this less democratic? Well, for the previously excluded, not.

Similarly, the argument that there has been an "increase in authoritarian practices" in universities is also probably true from the white male academic vantage point. For the rest of us, excluded from the collegial circles which previously made decisions, practices have often felt authoritarian, and the ranks closed of who is party to those practices. The "Golden Age of Collegiality" was Golden only to those on the inside, the (reputedly) dethroned white males; to the rest of us, it was just so much ore we hacked out of the rock to earn our wages.

A flurry of panic mail hit my inbox earlier. As the threatened cut-off of "unclaimed user accounts" draws nearer, techies are in a froth about systems which are "not working" - the "system" being the identity verification system, the means by which staff confirm their details on a database of network user accounts.

Very clearly "the system" is not working. Aside from the technical glitches that the techies were focusing on, the social aspects of "the system" are clearly also "not working". Someone, somewhere, thought that simply asking all staff to follow (reasonably) simple instructions to confirm their identity before a cut-off date not too long in the future would allow for ICTS to distinguish "live" accounts from dormant, duplicate or deceased ones.

That might have worked, had this been Stellenbosch or Pretoria. Luckily it's not, and so things didn't work out quite as planned. Some people complied immediately. Some people tried, and then discovered that because they did not use the Prescribed And Supported Browser, it did not work. Others tried and discovered that for some reason the system did not think they existed. Others tried, but were unable to interpret the instructions in a manner that led to a successful outcome. And then there were others who didn't try. And a significant number who were away, and didn't even know to try.

Which led, the day before Doomsday, to there being almost 3000 "unclaimed" user accounts. I've no idea of the number of *claimed* accounts, but 3000-odd unclaimed accounts is surely at least as many as those claimed. This is, after all, not the public service - we don't have _that_ many ghost employees (though students queuing hopefully outside locked doors during posted "consultation times" might be led to think differently...).

What was interesting to me on the list of "unclaimed accounts" was the presence of both of the VC's accounts, at least one DVC and a couple of Deans, and several HODs. And some entire departments. I had some thrilling moments entertaining fantasies of ICTS disabling all these accounts... rather like the Rene Clair film, where the factory runs itself and the workers sit out in the sunshine on the riverbank, fishing. Only the factory wouldn't be running itself. It would be standing idle, aside from the coffee outlets which would have long queues.

Exams would not happen. Books would not be able to be issued in the Library. The issue of the "national" anthem at Grad would be spurious, as Grad wouldn't happen. Applications for 2006 wouldn't be processed. Budget would remain unspent. Planning and preparation would cease. Research output would dwindle. Relationships would end.

Even Osama's best choreographed plans would not lead to such an efficient shut-down.

Some people would stress, and move from their offices to rubber rooms. Others would relax, and move from their offices to the tables outside the coffee outlets, or the beach, or the Bahamas. Angry parents would phone, but no one would be on hand to answer the phones. Cobwebs would form over the windows. Virginia Creeper would grow over what were once doorways - and the cornerstone of the Library commemorating its laying by the "honorable" DF Malan. Like Herculaneum, but without the people, Campus would be covered in a shroud of silence, preserved intact for future generations of Lara Crofts to explore, imagine, record in scholarly publications.

Sadly, though, at least one rational mind was still in operation. The disabling of accounts was put on hold. But instead of reviewing "the system", the remedy invoked was... to devolve it. Push it onto the laps of people in departments and faculties, who were closer to the source of "the problem" and thus - in theory - more able to address the "non-compliance". Again, had this been Stellenbosch or Pretoria, one could have predicted the response. This not being the case, the response was variable. How many accounts remain, at the time of writing, "unclaimed", I've no idea. I'm not sure if the VC is still among those, or how many departments are still "in default".

But the fact that it happened this way fills me with hope. Despite the death of a culture of debate, and despite the increasing levels of apathy, there is still a high level of "non-conformity", of critical resistance and questioning, across the Campus. We're not yet the technikon predicted by JM Coetzee, not yet the slavish automatons feared by the opponents of flying-the-flag-and-singing-the-anthem, not yet the worker-clones resisted by the critics of Managerialsm. Somewhere, buried deep in the silence and passive aggression, are the seeds of hope that we might again become a Real University.

A proposal currently doing the rounds to increase research output in the Faculty involves the creation of yet another layer of hyper-remunerated academics, to be known as Research Professors, who would be relieved of their burdensome teaching loads - giving, perhaps, one or two graduate seminars a year, and for the rest, thinking deep thoughts and creating knowledge. And publishing it, of course.

In the retelling, a certain amount of cynicism crosses the lips of those who survived the imposition of Extinguished Professors, as well as those diehard adherents of the Humboldtian relationship between teaching and research who see this as the next step on the Road to Perdition (the first steps have been taken long ago through the increasing intrusion of administration into time which should have been used for teaching and research).

There are those among us who believe that the first step in increasing research output should be to record, acknowledge and support the research which currently happens. Currently this is only partially done - staff on academic conditions of employment in academic departments are asked to declare their research output. Staff on other conditions, or located elsewhere, are not routinely or regularly or comprehensively included in such exercises, with the result that much of this research activity is invisible within the University. Research policies at University and Faculty level are silent about research not conducted by staff on academic conditions of employment located within academic departments. Because of its invisibilty, the extent of this research is unknown. Is precious income being lost, as a result - and if so, how much? Might it offset the additional costs of including all categories of staff, in all locations within the University, in the gathering of research output data?

Might it even justify extending support to these excluded, invisible researchers, whether through allowing them to participate in programmes to develop and support "new" researchers, or allowing them to apply / compete for funding to present papers at international conferences, or help them applying for funding from research funding councils or other funders? We don't know. Like the elephant in the dark, we keep bumping into it and we know it exists, but we have no idea of what it looks like or the size of it, for now.

But a University that purports to being "Research Led" should perhaps show some interest in finding out. Possibly even before further affirming the affirmed.

I was walking past a noticeboard earlier and spotted a poster advertising FW de Klerk and Tokyo Sexwale "Living Together". I hadn't realised either of them took reconciliation *that* seriously, but I suppose politicians will do anything for attention.

A more lasting impression was made by the notice alongside - another one of these "Let This Be A Warning To You" type notices sent out by the Registrar's Office, about student plagiarism. It seems that the miscreant in this case was a BA student who was found guilty of using Internet sources without accrediting them, and referencing sources that didn't exist.

Huh?? "Sources that don't exist" are plentiful in the Library, as the long list on the Humanities Reference Desk attests - books that borrowers liked sufficiently to weasle into their private collections permanently - but I suspect that it wasn't these that the student concerned was referencing. After all, these ones do exist, somewhere, albeit on the other side of Alice's Looking Glass.

I suspect that the sources she referenced were imaginary. Fictitious. Such was the implication from the notice. (It does rather make one wonder whether expulsion was the apprpriate sanction though - perhaps relocation to a rubber room may have been more suitable?) Why go to the trouble of inventing sources, and referencing those, rather than just referencing the sources one did consult?

But what if the sources were more than just figments of a tortured imagination?

The Internet is at best ephemeral. A source one consults and references today may well not exist tomorrow - which is why most reference management software packages have a field for "date accessed" in their internet resources forms. (Perhaps students should print off a screenprint to hand in as proof, in case they find themselves accused of similar crimes?). What if... those sources come into existence in the future? What if... the student herself were to create those documents, register those domains, upload those pages...? Linear time is not the only construction of the concept, as anthropologists will tell you. Is our student tribunal culturally biased?

A related argument has been made elsewhere against plagiarism, that the private ownership of "knowledge" (or "intellectual property"...) runs counter to warm fuzzy communalism, but no one bought that, either, iirc...

Each year, as students traipse out of their last lecture, an invisible signal alerts the Universe, and the hammerdrills power up. Before the last forgotten cellphone has been retrieved from the lecture theatre, the noise reverberates across Campus. A thick fog of construction dust hovers over Devil's Peak like Van Hunks' pipesmoke, and all who can, retreat to a safe distance.

This particular construction heralds a new computer lab - a desperately needed augmentation of our current undergraduate discretionary use facilities for currently registered Humanities students - and, as such, no one questions the necessity of the construction.

But that doesn't make the pain any easier.

Humour becomes increasingly brittle, and fractures. Goodwill frays. Public relations dissolve as prospective parents shout into thunderous racket down fragile phone connections to stressed staff unable to hear, understand, help, communicate, or - ultimately - maintain sufficient tolerance. Dante's Inferno gains another level.

And then, just as the ambulances are carting off the last of the bittereinders to join their colleagues in a comfortable rubber room, the noise stops, the dust settles and the overalls disappear. Builders' holidays.

But don't hold your breath just yet - four weeks lie between now and then. Rather, get a Michael Jackson mask - you'll need it for the construction dust.

The door bursts open with typical teenage respect for space, and Chapter Six is interrupted once more. "Ma," he fixes me with big blue eyes which signal request mode, "please can I lend your fokofpolisiekar CD to Mev de Bruin?"

"My fokofpolisiekar CD?" I repeat, bemusedly. "That's not the kind of CD teachers typically want to borrow..."

Eyeballs roll dramatically. "She's an _Afrikaans_ teacher!"

Right. I'd forgotten. Afrikaans teachers are, as a breed, cool. Their begripstoetse are about road rage, their opstelle about social problems, their briefopdragte Dear John letters. Instead of Totius, they analyse Brasse vannie Kaap and Kobus!, and their cultural reference point is Corne en Twakkie.

Afrikaans, they all agree, is cool. Unlike Xhosa, which they shed after Class 10, which embarrassed the home language Xhosa speakers with its reification of "traditional" culture, its dressing up for orals, its focus on rural life. Urban kids feel as close to life in Cala as they do to life on Mars. Despite Tom Cruise to put them off the latter.

Unlike English, too. Unable to shed English, they continue to suffer under Departmentally Approved setworks, deconstruction of advertisements, formal grammar of an ossified language no one speaks any longer. In fact, rather like the way we were taught Afrikaans at school (except without the phonetics...)

Different generation, different baggage. There goes another comfortable hypothesis, blown out of the water by the data....

Yesterday the Humanities Academic Computing team was on display in the latest Teaching Humanities with Technology seminar. Numbers were low, owing to scheduling clashes - the review of introductory courses, Yom Kippur, meridian lectures, etc all conspired to keep a number of interested people away. I've been approached by a number (that number being greater than zero) of people who were unable to be there, requesting that we do a rerun. This is a possibility.

We're also planning on developing the powerpoint slides into something more comprehensive which could be put on a website for ready access by interested people.

We were also discussing the possibilities of "next step" activities - workshoppy rather than seminar format, hands-on in some of the facilities we mentioned. (See "more" below...) Obviously this all depends on the levels of interest and availability - please give it some thought and let us know what (if anything) you think you may be interested in. Some of the facilities (like the radio lab) have limited capacity, so those would need to be rsvp'd (and preference given to serious potential academic users, rather than budding rap artists or pirate radio stations...)

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Since posting the last time about the empty condom dispensers in Arts, I was rather taken aback to walk into the women's toilets in Arts and find men in there. Double checking that I was on the correct level, I queried their presence, and was told that they were filling the condom dispensers! Yes!!

We now have condom dispensers all over Upper Campus stocked with condoms, and condoms loose on the basins where no condom dispensers exist, courtesy of the DA Youth. I always knew HIV/AIDS was political, I just didn't realise it was party political. Nonetheless, our coffee-drinkers can now safely do what coffee drinking predisposes them to do, if they can find a dark stairway on which to do it.

On which note - no one has explained to me why the condom dispensers are located in the toilets. Why not, given the link to coffee, at the coffee outlets?

A friend recently asked me why UCT named its AIDS programme for staff the "Die" programme. It turned out he meant the DAI programme, which probably would be pronounced "die" if one was Welsh. While I had to agree that the acronym spelled an unfortunate word, my head was still trying to get around the notion of nested acronyms - if at least one of the words making up the acronym was itself an acronym... and how far could one take this? It is of course complicated by the recent journalistic practice of writing aids without capital letters, creating confusion with the common noun (pl) and the verb, as if it was a word and not an acronym.

Recent information circulated by Organisational Health indicate that the prevalence of HIV infection among UCT staff is very very low. Far lower than the local population, among whom we live. Why? Does working at UCT predispose one to a life of sexual abstinence, in pursuit of higher ends? Or are people just not testing - or testing elsewhere, and not making use of the programme should they be positive?

A couple of people have recently expressed to me their willingness to test - but not down at Cambria House. "What if," they worry, "the test did come out as positive? Would HR provide the counselling? Would the people at Cambria see, and know?"

Having tested there myself a couple of times, I can assure people that it is very confidential - you can book online here - and when you arrive you'll be greeted by the counsellor (an outsider, bound by strict ethics of confidentiality) and the sister who'll draw your blood and do the test. UCT's involvement, beyond providing the premises (and the hot water for the coffee) is zip.

Oh, and it's painless. No more stabbing with metre long needles as thick as hosepipes. The new procedure is so uninvasive you barely notice.

If you've not had an HIV test recently, go. You owe it to yourself, your dependents, your lovers, and your friends, to know your status.

I've been watching with interest which posts get read - and how quickly the hits collect. A post titled "The Naked Savage" will collect many hits in a short space of time, as will "Cycling and Impotence". "What women want", on the other hand, will take far longer to scale the same heights, and something on "Abstaining" is just too scary a thought for anyone to want to read. Even if it's only about voting behaviour....

So it was with trepidation that I considered blogging about Transformation. It's one of those topics that both opens up and closes down debate - lots of people have lots to say about it, but somehow the real issues seldom get touched on in amongst the posturing, defensiveness and caution.

It's rare that someone feels safe enough to come out and say that they think transformation is a bad idea because a "critical mass" will be just that - critical - and will change the Institutional Culture in ways that are bad, not good... ways threatening to What It Is We're Proud To Be. Which generally means some kind of liberal notion of academic freedom and institutional autonomy and thank-god-we're-not-that-place-in-the-winelands-where-everyone-thinks-exactly-the-same relief. Part fear, part Afro-pessimism, part paranoia - and part observation as the culture of silence takes hold progressively. (Or retrogressively.)

It's equally rare that someone else feels safe enough to speak about transformation in a way that acknowledges complicity, without overdoing the self-flagellation and indulging in guilt trip. And this isn't only applicable to white staff - coloured labour preference policies in the Western Cape have led to "historic disadvantage" being far more nuanced than current corrective legislation provides for.

And, when it comes to those who were - and who remain - most disadvantaged, who speaks for them? Mostly, in seminars, meetings, public gatherings, it's the more erudite, more confident, more practised and more acculturated voices which are heard. Academics rather than staff on other conditions of employment; higher payclasses rather than lower; English first (or English-confident) rather than English second, third, or more, language speakers.

Black staff who speak up in such gatherings - whether with the confidence of their position, their Union or their education behind them - are often harshly critical of those who remain silent. They grumble about how much more vocal people were under Apartheid; how "lazy" they've become now that the discourse has moved from protest to reconstruction; how unwilling they are to engage and shift from their comfort zones.

So we all say less - even though some of us don't stop talking.

We say the same things again and again, even though the last several times we said them, nothing happened. Someone defined insanity as doing the same thing under the same conditions and expecting a different result. We're really good at that.

And so, before I repeat myself for the howmanyeth time, I'll stop.

Earlier today we had a fire drill in the Beattie Building.

Or rather, Health and Safety had one for us. Most of us simply cranked the volume on our PC speakers louder to drown out the wailing of the sirens, and stayed put.

Maybe it's an issue for people who're visiting a building, or for students who're only on Campus for a flicker of a celestial eyelid, but for staff who live in a building, the idea of some Skinner-like behavioural programming really just doesn't work. Most of us have enough brain cells to remember where the door is without having to practice.

So while some people bravely went and exposed their CRT-tanned faces to the spring sunshine on University Avenue, I sat in my office and wondered what would happen if it was a real fire.

Would I diligently shut the window, shut stuff down and switch it off and quietly and calmly leave my office, locking my door, filing out of the building...? Forget. My window takes an army of very tall and very strong people to shut - on a good day. On a bad day, the insect life from the virginia creeper would kill them before they could get anywhere near it. Shutting down my PC takes anything from a second - if one plucks out the power cable - to three lifetimes, if one does the Windows-is-shutting-down-your-PC thing. There are simply too many cables to be able to disconnect anything before the building burned to the ground. So nope, if I wanted to get out alive, I'd simply walk out and shut the door behind me. So much for that, then.

I've been through a real building burning down around me episode before, and contrary to the myths, people don't panic. They realise it's a fire, rather than a drill (the billowing smoke might be a clue) and do heroic things like waking up sleeping neighbours and going back for forgotten canaries, but calmly and sensibly. They file down the stairs and out of the doors and make a mental note of anyone missing, and ask around to ensure that there are no grilling bodies left behind. Not because of being drilled, but because of being sensible.

If it was a bomb scare... Would it make much difference if I was sitting in my office, shielded from the bomb by walls so thick that a cellphone signal stands no chance of squeezing through, or standing outside separated from the bomb by a couple of metres and some brittle glass? Hmm... the former sounds like a better bet to me!

Ultimately though - should it not be the individual's choice whether or not to comply? Marshalls (where they exist...) can recommend, assist or monitor, but if someone chooses to stay put in spite of the information, should they try to do more? In the same way that I willingly take my life in my hands every day by driving a car on the Cape Town roads, should I not have the choice over my own risk exposure when the siren sounds?

Yesterday I had occasion to flit through the rarified atmosphere of the Law building, and found myself wondering, "If I was ('were', says the grumpy ex-English Professor) an average black law student, where would I find myself reflected in this building?"

Leaving aside whether or not "average black law student" is a contradiction in terms or not, or the nuances inherent in such an identity, I puzzled long and hard over this. The answer was certainly not in the rows upon rows of funereally framed photos of the previous generations of legal ghosts lining the walls. Nor, unless my medication had run out, would it be with the past president of the ANC, whose name and portrait adorn the Moot Court (see "more", below).

So where else might a black law student look to find themselves reflected in the law building? Well, if one walks around on level five, to the stairs on the northwest side of the building, one will pass a couple of rather interesting old maps of, I think, shipping routes. One one of these the legend is displayed as if on a banner, held up not by those lions or antelope so popular in heraldry, but by two naked black men.

These "Aethiopians" - beads around wrists and ankles to signify that they are savages, not merely nude gentlemen posing for the artist - stand openly displaying their nakedness without shame or modesty (see "more", below). Civilisation has yet to be presented to them as a gift by the seafaring Europeans whose skill crafted the map. The banner, with which they could more usefully have protected themselves against the mapmaker's gaze (or fashioned into a noose and dispensed with the mapmaker once and for all) is instead held aloft to bear the map's legend.

It would be naive to whitewash the past and the intentions of the mapmaker in adding the illustration of the "Aethiopians", but the uncritical juxtaposition of this image amongst the other images of learned, pale civility in the law building raises the question of whether the assumptions of the mapmaker are not being perpetuated by its placement and its framing.

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