HACkers blog

And so I received an SMS from an unlikely source, telling me he'd just strayed across my blog, and it was buckling under the weight of all the spam! So, I dialled up, and sure enough - despite the best efforts of CET announced in Tony's message - there it was. Piles of the hot, stinking stuff.

From the same IP numbers as last time.

And, as fast as I cleared it away, more arrived. Faster than I could delete.

But it got me wondering - what is the function of spam? Is it just electronic junk mail - the stuff that goes from mailbox to rubbishbin unopened? Or is it the electronic equivalent of tagging - unsightly scrawl grafittied onto pristine spaces to reassure the creator that he still exists? Or is it electronic vandalism - like the arsonists who torch the mountain, the kids who phone the emergency services or the gangsters who trash a primary school, to get some attention?

And, whatever it is - what is the payoff these people get?

Eish! This morning, while most of us were still sleeping off our silly season hangovers, the spammers were hard at work. Targetting *our* blogspot, for a cheek! And so, instead of spreading goodwill and light, this morning I was cleaning all the spam out of my blogs, and noting down the IP numbers from where it purportedly came.

Spam is one of the unhappy consequences of letting everyone get their grubby hands on the Internet, rather than just the geeks or the killers, together with websites about Britney Spears, and prohibitive bandwidth pricing. Still, if bloggers keep an eye on their blogs and clean out the spam before it topples the server, we can avoid having to institute Firmer Measures like having people register before they can post comments, and stuff like that which could compromise the academic benefits of our blogspot.

Meantime, if the spam gets too much, join some radical grouping and wage war on capitalism to vent your frustrations....

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Just as there seems to be a bottomless market for books on Relationships, there seems to be a disturbing number of people prepared to spend good money on badly written airport books about management. Most of which is common sense dressed up in trendy terminology, more style than substance, and reducable to mantra form.

True, the shopping list format is prevalent on Campus too - we have the VC's 10-point plan, the 9 pelvic thrusts, the 7 planning objectives, the 5 action men, erm, guides... - and so it's obviously a popular format. Like the Boy Scout Law and the Defining Characteristics of Water at Room Temperature, it's probably easier to swot up and recite off by heart, checking them off ones fingers, if they're a known quantity easily summarised in a simple sentence.

And so, in the interest of World Peace, herewith three management homilies for the day:

* Don't shout at your line staff. Especially don't shout at them in front of other people.

* Tell your line staff the information they need in order to do their jobs. Don't expect them to hear from other sources, and then rage when that hasn't happened.

And, especially for this time of year:

* Don't get drunk and silly in front of your line staff, even at year-end parties. In order to function effectively, management needs to be sustained by the myth that the manager has good judgment.

Recently, CET hosted a couple of Show-and-Tell sessions, showcasing some examples in different disciplines across different Faculties of using technology in teaching. The technologies employed were different, the courses different, the applications different. Some useful conversations were sparked.

Of course, many of the people who ought to have been there, weren't. Inevitably staff meetings, research away days and conferences clash with any planned events. And so, some conversations which might have taken place were lost.

But some others happened on the fringes. And, interestingly, one point emerged quite strongly. "It's nice to see other teaching staff present," many agreed, "rather than experts. Experts always show you what *can* be done. Practitioners show you what *is* being done."

Which is an important distinction. What _can_ be done often doesn't elucidate fully under what circumstances it can be done - how much time, knowledge, experience or other resources needs to be harnassed for the successful attainment of the output. At what opportunity cost. For what practical benefit. With what trade-offs.

What _is_ being done allows one to see someone like, or unlike, oneself, to interrogate them on the unstated aspects, to demand evidence of costs and benefits and to hear first hand a judgment call on whether or not it was worthwhile.

And, reassuringly, it usually is.

Perhaps it's part of "adopting global best practice", this culture of performativity we've embraced. Or perhaps the inevitability of the neo-liberal gospel. But like other forms of false consciousness - ah, now there's a term no one can use without blushing anymore - it creates its own myths and disguises or obfuscates some less palatable dimensions.

One of its mainstays is the privileging of agency over structure. The cult of the individual that crawled naked into the psychedelic sunlight of the sixties has been coopted by The Establishment it sought, originally, to challenge - recast as the ultimate consumer, the Boomers have been proselytised into performativity. And blame.

By fostering competition - between institutions, between "devolved" organisational units within institutions, and between the individuals within the units - the focus has shifted from systems to people. People are rewarded, or otherwise, as individuals, based on their performance as individuals. They are weighed and measured against other individuals. Outcomes are deemed attained or not due to the performance of individuals. Systems are overlooked.

Performance can be improved - at individual, organisational unit or institutional level - the myth holds, through increased individual performance. Work harder, reads the subtext, and things will get better. And so, individuals work harder, burn out, work harder still... and little changes. Because looking beyond the individual would raise questions that can't be asked, provoke answers that shouldn't be whispered. Raise fears that are best left sleeping.

Occasionally, the trauma of restructuring bites. Usually within an organisational unit, or subunit. At a structural, rather than a process, level. And so no one questions the alignment of processes - particularly those beyond a single organisational unit - with each other, or the alignment of processes, policies and procedures, with core strategies or principles. Even AIMS baulked at doing this, restricting its role to PASS departments, bypassing the Faculties as if these simply clipped on like Lego bricks.

And so individuals are left with a distorted sense of their influence - an inflated sense of agency, which leads to implosion when it gets rightsized as it bumps up against the impenetrability of structure. The irresistable force meeting the immovable object finds itself less irresistable than it imagined. Disappointment, disillusionment, disempowerment. And, often, depression. Or departure. A sense, somehow, of failure, of blame. Followed by helplessness and disengagement. Demotivation.

And then, we wheel out the quality evangelists...

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I heard today that Beryl has been murdered. The news report also just happened to mention, in a footnote, that Steve Tladi was due to appear in court today. As if, somehow, anything involving UCT staff being killed must be related.

It's been a rough year on that front. Over a very brief period at the start of the year, a number of staff died traumatically. It seemed as if some bad energy had descended on Campus - like the ghoulish mist sweeping in with the Ringwraiths, or some Dark Side corrupting the Force. We picked up the pieces and got on with our lives and our work, but Beryl's death has brought it all back sharply into focus.

It would be nice to have something deep and meaningful to add, but in the absence of that, perhaps a permitted lapse into sentimentality: Spend a minute in the passage speaking with colleagues you encounter - just because they have been here forever, doesn't mean they will still be here tomorrow.

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It's annual feeding frenzy time - on two fronts. Not only is it the time of year where common sense yields to tradition and departments head off en masse to the UCT Club to drown their sorrows in Roesmoes and rock shandy, it is also the time of year where the budget barracudas go bos over bloated balances.

Based on the sound, observed, principle that if you don't spend every last cent (and then some) of your current budgetary allocation, your budgetary allocation for the following year will be significantly less, departments around Campus spend these last few days of SAP availability shopping up a storm. Those few hundred Rand remaining in the operating grant send secretaries scurrying for Waltons catalogues, while that non-recurrent staffing balance could employ some idle students, chilling while they await grad, to sort out the filing backlog.

For some, it's unavoidable - keeping back the last half-milion for the inevitable year-end emergency, only to find that this year it's running late so you may as well spend it and hope you can borrow ahead on next years allocation before its unleashing in March...

And, down in the accounting troll dens, the beancounters are getting restive because this behaviour - as predictable as the phases of the moon - doesn't conform to the spending plans submitted under duress. It means more meetings for them, more reports and more spreadsheets - more of what they enjoy, in other words - but it ruffles their virgoan desire for order, so it comes at a price. And costs, as we know, are those things that need to be contained.

Of course, there are those departments which deal with both problems simultaneously, translating unspent budget into kilograms of roesmoes through a simple journal entry, but for many, even that is not sufficient. At which point the creativity which has been steadfastly beaten out of everyone throughout the year is summoned for a final burst of glory.

Now, would I prefer the purple super-deluxe 500 page stapler with built-in coffee grinder, or the glow-in-the-dark letter opener with free flybook?

Some things are just too easy to take potshots at, but sometimes one simply can't resist. The latest incident in the ongoing hand-dryer saga is one such case.

Some time back, tearooms tittered with amusement at the wonderful project planning skills displayed that saw the ripping out of the towels from the cloakrooms before the installation of the hand-dryers... and the subsequent realisation, once the hand-dryers were installed, that - hey, these are *cloakrooms*, there isn't any power source to plug them into.... and the eventual return of the towels.

The amount of water flushed under that bridge in the interim is inestimable, but finally, the hand-dryers went live. Trouble was, no one used them. Whether this was simply because people were so used to the months of seeing them standing idle, that the possibility of their being more than decorative failed to take hold, or due to people not *wanting* to use them, was at that stage unclear. But the issue was forced - the towels were once more ripped out.

Confronted with the gaping holes in the tiles where one towels hung, the wet-handed stared at each other bemusedly, wondering whither next. They glanced up at the gleaming silver fixtures on the wall, before deciding in unision on their course of action. The headed back into the toilets and came out with hands swaddled in metres of toilet paper, dried their hands, and dropped the soggy toilet paper in the bin next to the door.

This practicce has continued. The bin is now overflowing with soggy toilet paper. The toilets are consuming as many toilet rolls as they do during lecture time. The hand-dryers stand, ignored.

The sample I questioned were quite clear about why:

"I don't have all day to stand around waiting for this thing to dry my hands! I've got work to do, and that takes ages - and it sits so high in the sky you have to hold your hands up like you're praying and then the water trickes down your arms and wets your clothing!"

"It's so noisy - like standing next to a jumbo jet taking off!"

"That blast of hot air makes you feel really sick!"

"Yuck - it doesn't dry your hands properly, it just leaves them warm and moist - perfect breeding ground for all kinds of ucky things!"

"It feels like being yelled at!"

And so, like other staff members, I'll now revert to keeping a towel in my office on which to dry my hands. The curtains are, after all, just a little too dusty.

And - I suspect - one day, whoever stole the brass footplates off the office doors will realise the scrap metal potential of the hand-dryers, and they too will be ripped off the wall, and no one will even notice.

The Trouble With UCT, I maintain (currently... ) is that the right conversations don't happen with the right people.

Last week, on several occasions, I found myself having conversations with people who had the most exciting ideas, and the passion and the energy to actualise those, to address some of the issues that cloud our fair horizon. Issues from income generation to curriculum transformation to increasing research output... and countless other issues. But the trouble was, in each and every case - the person with these wonderful ideas was doomed to die clutching at them. They had no vehicle for communicating these, no access to those whose ears should hear them, no chance of being heard out or taken seriously if they put their ideas on the table.

Why? Because of their placement in the hierarchy. Because of their classification on the wrong side of the thinking - doing divide. Because of their role as supporters of the visions of others, not as creators of vision. Because, crudely, these were not "academics", and not managers. They were rank-and-file "non-academic" staffers.

It's quite sad, really. But although tongues might click and heads might shake about this tragedy, it continues to be entrenched. University, and Faculty, research strategy documents currently circulating fail to consider that staff employed on conditions other than academic might contribute to research - even those whose jobs explicitly require them to do so. And there is certainly no conception of developing research capacity within the "non-academic" sector - either through inclusion in / eligibilty for programmes like the Emerging Researcher Programme (on which some "non-academics" have been known to teach...), eligibility for funding or mentoring or assistance with travel to present peer-reviewed papers at international conferences, etc. Wrong class, wrong classification, wait for the "non-academic" bus and don't even think to sit on the "academics only" benches!

Similarly, although January is academic leave month, "academics" can teach on summer term, or summer school, courses in December, during their core working hours, for additional remuneration. Yet ask a "non-academic" to assume an additional workload for one of these income-generating activities, above and beyond what is in their job description, and it is simply assumed to be "part of their job", for which no further remuneration would be warranted. Their motivation to participate in such activities, or to devise others, can't really be expected to soar, can it?

Curriculum issues are also beyond their input. These are discussed behind closed doors at staff meetings "for 'academics' only" and they are merely informed of such outcomes as are deemed necessary for their knowledge - to translate into instructions for them to carry out. Communication, to the extent that it happens, is a one-way street.

It's not that these "academics" are evil beings - in many cases they're very nice people, who react with shock and horror should one confront them with their "bad" behaviour. It simply doesn't occur to them that "non-academics" are more than a pair of hands to carry out the tasks assigned to them. And why should it - that is, after all, the institutional role assigned to this class of staff.

Given that this class of staff is more black than white, and more female than male, in an institution where the ruling class is significantly more white than black, and rather more male than female, is it any wonder that these inequalities start to take on race and gendered dimensions, shades of apartheid even?

A few minutes ago I stepped back into my office and found a missed call on my hellphone. The caller was a UCT staff member. I had not given my hellphone number to this person. My hellphone number is not advertised anywhere in my sig file, or anywhere else. Very few people at UCT have it - which makes it pretty easy to hunt down and kill the person who gave it out. It is not a work hellphone, and doesn't get used for that purpose - except in extra-ordinary circumtances. Most of the time, at work, it lies switched off in a drawer, unless it accompanies me to meetings in lieu of the watch it made redundant. In meetings it remains on silent - when I get that right - and gets ignored beyond the clock it provides.

Not everyone has that luxury. There are people who have to be on call - sometimes even after hours. Their hellphone numbers are public knowledge - usually included in their sig files - and they're paid a hellphone allowance, and occasionally even a stand-by allowance. These people are few, and typically supervise mission critical systems like the Red Button in the White House, or the SAP system at UCT.

But sometimes people get confused. They think that if you have a hellphone, they have a right to expect that you are simply waiting for their call, and that whatever you're doing cannot possibly be as important as whatever it is crossing their mind, just then. And so, they dial, and leave grumpy messages on your voicemail - grumpier, with each call. The possibility simply never occurs to them that they're using a system designed not to work as they intend.

But now, because some arb UCT staff has my hellphone number, and allowed it to trickle into the public domain, I'll have to retire it. I have two other South African SIMS, and one UK one which is fully operational here, which I could use as my primary SIM instead. Numbers which I would give to three people only - my spawn, my Lover, and my line manager. After all, what else could possibly be that urgent?

Today, 1 December, is World AIDS Day, an important day in this country given our HIV prevalence and incidence rates. 1 December also has a further, more local, significance though, as the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves at the Cape.

Slaves were officially freed in 1834, but were bound by indenture to their "former" owners for a further 4 years, and were thus only truly freed on 1 December 1838. Those of us who schooled in SA will remember from primary school history lessons that this gave rise to the Great Trek, and everything that followed from that.

Tourists passing through - or the 90% of UCT academics who have holiday homes in - the coastal town of Hermanus will have stumbled across the memorial commemorating the centenary of the Great Trek in 1938. While the rest of the world was finally deciding that fascism, and the extermination of Jewish, black, Romany and gay people was perhaps a bit crass, back here in SA there was a group of people with access to enough resources to stage a mini-rerun of the Great Trek to celebrate their frustrations with these verligte Ingelses who continued to emasculate them and threaten their economic survival.

So what does any of this have to do with us, here, today? Well, it probably doesn't take a rocket scientist to piece together the links between racism, slavery, and economic oppression. And just as the boere / voortrekkers were outraged at the "progressive" legislation which freed "their" slaves and threatened their economic wellbeing, so today there are those who benefited from a previous dispensation of unfair legislated privilege, who are feeling unhappy about a new "progressive" dispensation that they find threatening to their economic wellbeing. We're talking Employment Equity legislation / policies / plans / frameworks here, and so it's perhaps not altogether misplaced that today, as we remember friends who have fallen to the ravages of AIDS, and celebrate the final emancipation of slaves in the Cape, the Joint Consultative Forum on Employment Equity gathers to take forward, and reflect on, the new struggles.