Dear new students:
Welcome to UCT! Or as we more experienced folk know it, Our UniversityTM (Pty) Ltd, in keeping with its newly business-like image.
If business-like means unnecessary massification, as the good people at the Education Ministry are wont to call overcrowding, and cynically negotiating in bad faith on academics' salaries, that is!
Don't worry if you have been assigned to one or more venues at the same time as one or more other classes: this is a temporary glitch, and should be sorted out in time for the June exams. It is caused by our very expensive and state-of-the-art neural network booking software, that requires a breaking-in period to learn how things work - much as you do, but hopefully more successfully!
Worry not, also, if you find yourself sitting on the floor in one of the lectures that isn't sharing a venue: we have taken a leaf from the airlines' book, and have routinely over-subscribed venues by between 5% (EBE lectures) and 50% (Humanities), based on the expected number of no-shows. If the situation persists, simply get there earlier!
Please do not be concerned if, in the near future, you become aware over the course of some weeks, that the annoying scruffy person who stands up in the front of the lecture theatre between the top of the hour and some 45 minutes later, and disturbs your newspaper reading or inconsiderately interrupts your conversations with your neighbours, is not there. This will be part of an exciting new teaching-and-learning activcity we like to call a "scheduled industrial action". Which, in this case, means no action by the lecturers. The situation may require you to do what we call "reading the textbook", as an alternative to catching up on third-hand photocopies of someone else's half-remembered account of what may or may not have been the lecture notes for that course - but please regard this as an expansion of the multimedia possibilities of the new pedagogy, rather than an irretrievable breakdown of trust between the academics and the administration.
In fact, once you have got used to this new way of learning, we recommend that you do it at home: this will save you from the dreadful commute via crowded buses up to campus, and will in fact free up lecturing space for more useful activities - such as union meetings and movie sessions.
So again, we say welcome - and now go home, to enhance your OUTM experience to the fullest.
Yours,
The Retroid Kollectiv
03/02/2010, 15:45
Frankly, I thought that's what new staff members were told - well, certainly experienced. You go through the process of interviews, finally receive a phone call congratulating you, a few letters which still sound hopeful - and after that you're on your own. Welcome to UCT - now go home because we don't really help you find a place to live, and we probably won't have an office, and may have a rolled-down PC: seems a common experience. Thank's Comrade Kollectiv. I'll happily go home.
03/02/2010, 20:10
Hey Borg:
resistance is futile, you have been assimilated...and you may HAVE to go home next week, if the AU gets all radical and votes to strike.
04/02/2010, 09:37
The Borg is unable to respond to your correspondence as The Borg has left the building and returned to the Hive. The The Collective has recognised that Species 189 (Species OU(TM) Managementus)do not require assimilation as they are not a sentinent species.