HACkers blog

Ironically, as I staggered back into my office from my HIV testing excursion, the email from the VC arrived urging us all to go and be tested. Too late, dude, I think the whole Campus and their dog have been, if those queues were anything to go by!

The queues were long. But, to stop you getting bored, the ACEs were handing out flyers and waterbottles and answering the same questions repeatedly with no signs of frustration or boredom. Once you got into the venue, it was like a conveyor belt - off for pre-test counselling, with chatty counsellors and forms to fill in; then one of those grad-type queues where just as you're getting used to your seat, you have to shift up... and then - the jab! Actually, I didn't feel mine, and was surprised to see red stuff leaking out despite no evidence of a puncture. Neat, no mess, then off to sit and wait the 15 minutes for the test to ripen. Which was where the conversation level was nervously loud, making it impossible for the poor post-test counsellors to be heard as they called people through for their results. All in all, it was probably around the 45minutes the ACES quoted at the door.

If you haven't been, then go. You'll get a waterbottle, some flyers, some information you might not have known and some peace of mind in exchange for the 45 minutes of your life you invest. Tell your students, your colleagues, and anyone you meet in the passages to go. It's free, it's convenient, it's confidential. And all students, staff, and outsourced contract workers are welcome. On our doorstep - how much better does it get?

And afterwards, if you're not queued out, you can join the queue at Nescafe for some caffeine.

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It started off innocently enough, proclaiming the importance of the creation of knowledge to a research-led institution like UCT.
But by the first sentence of the next paragraph it had slid into something else altogether.

"Research," it proclaimed (see more, below) "is not part of the job description of PASS staff". Leaving aside the offensive term "PASS staff", and focusing on the rest of the sentence, one is obliged to ask: is this descriptive, or normative?

Is it saying, "we've surveyed all the job descriptions of people on conditions of employment other than academic, and have found that research is not part of these job descriptions"? because this is patently not the case. I can, within a short space of time, lay my hands on several examples (including my own) to disprove this.

Is this then a description of the ideal world, such that "no member of staff not on academic conditions of employment should engage in research as part of their job description"?

Which raises two questions:

1) who picks up the research already undertaken / committed by these staff who are now banned from further engagement?

2) what does one do with these staff who may now no longer do that part - which, in some cases, is 100% - of their jobs which comprises research?

It seems a little as though someone hadn't really thought this through.

Still, one has to admire the ingenuity. The whole draft policy thrust approached the brilliance of the old Aparthed State: unsure how to classify the child of a cross-"race" couple, hit upon the brilliant idea simply to ban marriages across "racial" categories. What the law doesn't recognise, doesn't exist, after all.

(The convenient loophole of allowing the acknowledgement of research output by such staff, if they masquerade as graduate students, also echoes the extension of "honorary white" status to some under deserving cases...)

It did seem a bit out of step with other trends though - such as the acknowledgement of indigenous knowledge in the development of pharamceauticals such as Hoodia, the acknowledgement of the role of the Sherpas on all those Everest expeditions, and even the granting of an honorary degree to Hamilton Naki. But given the alternatives, isn't simply wishing it away the most sensible solution?

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There are two types of people: those who love predictive text, and those who abhor it. (A third type of people - those who don't send sms / text messages - doesn't warrant any further consideration.)

The frightening thing is... these groups tend to form along generational lines. People more likely to be sulking in the car seat about undone essays tend to be among the first category; people more likely to be muttering about those people sulking in the car seat about undone essays, delaying the commencement of the long, roundabout journey to work, tend to be among the second category.

And so it was that I found myself, terrifyingly, on the wrong side of the electronic fence. On the side with people who know who Divan Serfontein is/was, people who watch the news on TV, people who know the difference between a cabernet and a shiraz. None of which applies to me.

On the other side are those who know who Alex Kapranos is, people who think podcasts are far more interesting than anything on TV, people who know the difference between last.fm and MySpace. Important things like that.

I found it a very disorientating realisation. I was trapped on the wrong side of a generation gap!

But the prospect of learning to love predictive text eluded me. I find the very concept distasteful - like some spouse who thinks they know what you're going to say before you say it, or the salesman who's already answering the question you didn't ask. Predictive text is based on assumption, on presumption, on bias and prejudice and all those other horrors I spend my life decrying. How could I possibly love predictive text???

And yet... Most of the people on the scary side of the electronic fence were those most comfortable in their smug prejudice, polished to a smooth shine from years of care and nurturing. Those who knew what they liked and what they didn't and no one was going to tell them otherwise. Those whose minds would be easiest to predict, least likely to surprise.

Predictive text has never heard of the word "surd". It does, however, know "absurd". And perhaps that's ultimately appropriate.

I experienced what I'm reluctant to call "wistful nostalgia" recently on reading about the reception of Mary Beard's remarks about the "stamping out" of the "erotic dimension to (adult) paedagogy" in the 1980s.

The reception her remarks received was predictable. It unleashed a fury of denouncement for making light of sexual harassment, for implying that such behaviour provoked "ambivalence" instead of outright condemnation, and Beard was painted as some sort of defender of the indefensible.

I've blogged previously about the slipperiness around sexual harassment. As policy stands, from even an initial overture, an "unwanted" act can be harassment. The difficulty being, of course, that until one ventures there, one can't know if the overture is wanted or not. Assume not, then, to be safe. So then... however do _wanted_ (consensual, reciprocal, chosen) erotic exchanges get underway?

It would seem they don't. That even mutually chosen, fully consensual and intensely reciprocal interactions of an erotic nature are undesirable, and somehow out of keeping with the academic project - be they between "equals" or across any (or any combination of) of the myriad of power differentials that weave into social relationships. Learning and eroticism have, since the 80s, been forcibly uncoupled.

And yet, most learners of any age will agree that learning takes place best in the presence of passion. And, similar to Freud's notion of transference in the therapeutic relationship, an argument can be made that the process of education is itself erotic, that notions of desire and passion are central to its engagement.

The sterile model, desexed and stripped of its bodily dimension, sits like TS Eliot in a cold bath drinking tepid tap water while its fulsome cousin cavorts intoxicatedly like Dylan Thomas in the jacuzzi. It's hard not to see it as a loss.

Which is not to support, or excuse, sexual harassment, or any other abuse of power. But intelligent people - and surely, it is those we'd encounter in a university? - should have no problem making that distinction.

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