HACkers blog

With the recent advent of GropeWise, some people have been getting less mail. Some have been lucky enough to get no mail at all, and others have been unlucky enough to get mail sent to other people. But through all of this, one constant remains. Spam.

While anecdotes abound about academics unable to receive mail they've forwarded to their home email addresses because of UCT being blacklisted by Spamcop, real spam seems to wriggle its way into inboxes resiliently. And so, that pinnacle of journalistic excellence, the Grauniad, decided to spend some electronic inches examining how to reduce spam.

The solution ("Delete them all. Unread.") seems eminently sensible. Pity that GropeWise addresses have stripped out the servername and rendered us all equally @uct.ac.za. It makes it so much more difficult to automate a solution that deletes, unopened, mail emanating from Isengard.

It thudded into my mailbox like albatross guano, where it lay festering for minutes before the Urgent! on the end of the subject header lost its power to incite.

It was, predictably, yet another bureaucratic invasion, yet another assault designed to neutralise efficiency and to distract from the activities we'd been employed to undertake. This time, forms collecting information for HEMIS and the SA Survey of Research and Experimental Development.

The mail itself was framed in the exasperated tones of a Dean caught between a rock and a hard choice, uncomfortable as Beelzebub's messenger, but mindful of the subsidy implications of waving the finger of her choice back at Isengard. And so, dutifully, I opened the attachments and surveyed the damage.

Bad move.

Someone had decided that there needed to be two forms, one for The Colleagues, and one for the underclass. And that each of these should offer as choices only those activities deemed suitable for the relevant class. Academics, thus, were allowed to report participation in certain activities, and staff on other conditions of employment, others (see below). Given the recent reception of the proposed research policy for non-academic staff, one might have imagined it to have penetrated the consciousness of Someone that there are certain classes of staff not on academic conditions of employment who conduct research, or teach - sometimes exclusively. What they'll fill in on their forms to account for their time will be interesting. But clearly I was overly optimistic about the potential to learn of Someone.

Clearly it's an exercise in compliance, rather than some striving after positivist notions of "truth" or "reality" - but, given the resource implications of the exercise, one can't help wondering why Someone wants teaching and research activities underreported when those are - reputedly - our "core business" and surely the basis on which subsidy is bludgeoned. It's a mystery which defies me, perhaps happily. The day I understand the mind of Bremner is perhaps the day I ought to hand myself in for recycling.

Then, of course, there's the neat assumption that jobs all add up to 100%. If one interprets the 100% as being equivalent to our contracted 37.5 hours per week, clearly some people's percentages will be far higher than 100; some may be lower. If one interprets the 100% as being the total of all time actually spend on activities in service of the academic project, or the University - depending on one's orientation - it would be almost impossible to categorise and total this reliably. Does a debate accompanied by clinking ice which develops an idea into publishable output count as "work" if it takes place on a weekend? Does an email sent from an internet cafe? It all attests to a last-Century, Fordist notion of work - the kind of work Castells would term "generic labour" rather than the "knowledge work" that most of us here ought to be engaged in.

And then, of course, there are the voluntary additional activities, such as committee work, involvement in staff bodies or peer mentoring - the sorts of "institutional support" activities that oil the machine but don't show up on balance sheets. Does one declare these - and have some beancounter fretting that they're happening at the expense of one's day job (since the percentages add up to 100, any percentage allocated to this category is a percentage taken away from the tasks of one's day job) or does one leave these invisible? Or report them as additional percentages, since they occur above and beyond the contracted hours - and leave the beancounters to worry with the arithmetic?

Another problem with such forms is the assumption that each activity belongs to one, and only one, category. How one apportions activities among the various categories becomes very arbitrary - but, given the resource implications, it's a very political issue.

Of course, the _real_ outcome will be that everyone will simply take the easy way out and lie. The road of least resistance, make the numbers look pretty (or at least credible to the Someone who designed the form) and hope it goes away for another year. Meanwhile, Deans will sit with the fallout of having certain activities under (or over) reported at the expense of others, and will be beaten over the head with that in their budget slices. And will pass this beating on to Departments.

And, future users of HEMIS data (or the SA Survey of Reseach and Experimental Development) will sit with numbers which are largely meaningless, all relation to "reality" successfully destroyed by overzealous bureaucrats, and someone somewhere will pass judgment on the state of Higher Education in South Africa, blissfully unaware that the lying numbers are all due to Someone being too far removed from the real activities of the University to know what it is they should be asking, how, and from whom, to elicit the best and most accurate data, and how to present that to The System to derive the most beneficial resource allocation.

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Parking is supposed to be the one issue on which the staff of a University find common ground. Unfortunately, at UCT the ground is not findable as it's covered metres deep in steel and glass, often shiny and German, exuding the affluence that marks it as "student" rather than "staff".

Arriving at 07h00, one has only to fight off the drunkenly parked toilet roll trucks and the cars of illicit boyfriends visiting Fuller, still steamed with last nights promise of passion. Five minutes later and the last spot has gone, leaving the difficult decision of whether to risk the last of your petrol doing one final lap of hope, or conceding defeat and bumping some Cambria staffer.

This privilege of reconnecting to one's primitive hunting instinct will, from next year, cost the Shaikly sum of a thousand bokke. Pith helmets and binoculars will still need to be purchased separately.

In the crannies of my memory lurks the recall of a public appearance some time back where the Campus Access Management Plan was deburkahed. Amidst all the excitement that such occasions generate - it isn't every day that visitors from Bremner find their way to Real Campus - we were promised carrots along with our sticks. Parking fees would increase, we were told, but there would also be alternatives. Off-Campus parking would be made available, connected by the fleet of Jammie Shuttles, absolving us of the need to bring our planet-fryers into our Historic Precinct. Parking that would be accessible, safe, and sufficient.

Which it may be to serve the needs of the three staff who live near Rochester Road. Or those driving in from the Overberg, for whom a few additional dozen kilometres are neither here nor there. But for those of us battling our way in from the Deep South - and, as a visit to Capricorn Pick 'n Pay on a Sunday will reveal, there are *lots* of us - that additional distance stuck in rush hour traffic edging past our ultimate destination just don't make sense. Neither in the additional damage to the planet, nor in the refried engines overheated still further. But parking south of Campus remains a wet dream.

So no carrot then, but plenty of stick.

Which makes us pretty lucky, really - imagine what we'd be paying for such services through the Adult Personal Services smalls in the Argus.

What would you do if you won the Lotto? Not the big, millions and millions prize, but say... half a million? If you were an academic HoD, say...

Well, you could buy a house. And if you didn't insist on living where your neighbours were white, you could maybe even buy more than one house, with half a million.

Or you could hire in a number of industry experts to teach sessions on your courses, augmenting your Non-Recurrent staffing budget. Or even an army of graduate students, as teaching assistants. Or a Chief Technical Officer, right at the top of Payclass 10, for two years.

You could buy 80 new computers for a computer lab, plus a fancy new printer.

You could put it into the salaries budget, so that increases stood a chance of keeping up with inflation.

If you felt really generous, you might choose to spend it on building repairs, so that each drop of rain didn't wipe out yet another piece of expensive electronic equipment in some office or lab.

Or you could hire the Vineyard to induct new HoDs...

No one is suggesting that functioning HoDs are not important. No one is suggesting that mentoring is not important. No one is suggesting that _some_ resources shouldn't be allocated for this.

But in a resource-limited environment, is it really necessary to choose an expensive, off-Campus venue when we have plenty of (free, bookable) on-Campus venues - especially if one times it right and goes for the first day of swot "week" rather than the last day of teaching? Is it really necessary to spend so much on feeding, and feeding, and feeding the captive group when lighter refreshments and a more active programme would have left participants feeling less bloated and comatose at the end?

Is it really necessary, when admin staff are sitting wondering how they'll pay for another printer cartridge for the departmental printer, to replace the last one that just ran out, with still two months left on the calendar.. to hear that the University chooses to allocate so much resourcing that way? When cleaning staff borrow yet another R5 they can never return, to get home, because the money ran out long before the month did? When undergraduate tutorials are being cut back from two to one because of pressure on the non-recurrent staffing budget?

At the same time that other initiatives seek to transform problematic aspects of organisational culture, is it really necessary to bloat management expenditure at the expense of "core business" expenditure?

Having spent the whole of yesterday with "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead" playing in my head, I was rather bemused by some of the media responses to the death of PW Botha.

Anyone who lived through the 80s in South Africa will remember that he was toxic waste. Unless, of course, they supported Apartheid, but who would possibly admit to that, now?

Surprising, then, to see that bastion of good liberal values, The Cape Times, offering such sycophantic drivel on yesterday's front page. Reading it, one would picture some ardent reformist, thwarted in their every attempt by a confoundingly resistant mass of opposition, rather than the violent and pugnacious bloodletter who ruled with an iron fist.

Interesting, too, that News24 played it quite differently. Former lapdogs of Apartheid like Die Burger came out with headlines like "Even Colleagues Feared PW" and the focus of the text was not on how PW had "opened the door" to kill Apartheid, but instead on how he was "a diffiult man to like". Recognisable descriptions, not revisionism.

Is this all due to superstition, some fear of speaking ill of the dead, on the part of the English-speaking press?

I suspect it goes deeper than that. That the Afrikaans press feels a need to prove its bona fides under a new dispensation, to counteract the Apartheid fawning of their history. And to continue their noble tradition of fawning to the new regime.

And the English press? Perhaps the revisionism is merely a mirror, a reflection of the trend toward recasting the past in a new light, against the harsh, Afropessimist glow of the present. "Were things really that bad, back then?" mutter the erstwhile opponents of Apartheid from their polite suburbs. "At least crime was less. And the trains ran on time..."

The wagging finger wags, and having wagged, moves on...