Retroid Raving

Yes, the Kollectiv is back from its perambulations - Ireland, USA, Canada and Heathrow (twice), since you ask - and is refreshed physically, musically (more elsewhere), and philosophically.

We mused, we did, on the oft several-times stated differences between those North of Jammie Steps (NoJS) and those to the South (SoJS).

And then our son introduced us to the latest  XKCD comic - and all was made clear.  Enjoy...B-)

SoJS:

NoJS:

Enough said. Oh, except for "interdisciplinary studies"....

As many another UCT-employed parent has done, I am sure, I have had occasion to actually read what UCT - pardon, it MUST be OU^TM - sends out to those innocents who wish to come here to be indoctrinated learn.

It starts off innocently enough:

1. I have read and understood the Directions for Applicants. The information I have supplied is complete and true.

Fair enough!

If any of it is found to be incomplete, false or misleading the University may cancel any offer made, or my registration.

A little harsh...but OK!

2. If I am a minor, my admission to the University has the consent of my parent/guardian.
3. I undertake to abide by the rules of the University.

Yeah, yeah...

4. I hold myself responsible for the payment of all fees and other charges due and payable by me to the University for all courses for which I register. yadda yadda If I inform the Registrar in writing by the date prescribed in the rules of the University that I do not propose to return for the second term, yadda yadda ...

Fair enough...?

5. I accept, agree and understand that UCT keeps and processes data and documents In eIectronic format, including the data supplied by me in this application form; UCT may use and transfer such data and use such documents in electronic or other formats for UCT purposes including submission of data for the National learner record database as required by the Department of Higher Education; that records of qualifiers and academic records are placed in the public domain; and that electronically generated documents may be used in place of the originals signed by me.

Whaaaaat??  My kid's records are in the public domain?  Since when??  And they can use scanned documents instead of the originals??  How legal is that!?

But wait, it gets better:

6. I hereby waive all claims against the University for any damages or loss suffered while I am, or as a consequence of my being, a student of the University, for damage to any property belonging to me or any other person, howsoever such damage or loss is caused, including but not limited through the negligence of the University or any official, employee or representative of the University. [my emphases]

Really??  So I have no recourse if my child gets bent / broken / killed at the University, or if his property gets destroyed or stolen, however it happens??  I don't accept that as an employee of the University - sorry, OU^TM - so why should I accept it for my child, especially since I have consistently not done so throughout my childrens' school careers when confronted with similar get-out clauses??

I do not believe this indemnity clause is legally enforceable, and as a senior employee of the institution, I am ashamed that they would try.  I am going to amend this on the form, and I am going to seek outside legal advice if there is any come-back whatsoever.

Really, UCT!!! 

Saw this, and couldn't help myself.  Sorry, Scott Adams!

Here in the Greater Antipodes - for it is from Melbourne, Aus, that I presently blog (hi, Rob: great tour last night) - the Retroid Kollectiv (remember: >1 person in one body) is being pleasantly surprised by the sheer utility and user-friendliness of Gmail.

As opposed to the OU^TM-mandated offering about which we have blogged in a rather negative sense previously....

Consider: as I sit in my hotel room here in cold, grey, but otherwise strangely pleasant Melbourne, I can open both a remote GroupUnwise session, and a Gmail account -which is largely, but increasingly less populated by mail autoforwarded from the former unmentionable client.  The differences are clear: attachments in GW mail are slow and unreliable to open, often taking several tries to get hold of; they can also not be forwarded with the message without downloading them first.  Which is SERIOUSLY stupid!  In Gmail none of this is true.  The GW mailbox keeps filling up, despite the fact I organised a 1 Gb account - and I can only archive messages on my office PC, as everywhere else is "remote".  With Gmail, I can have 7 Gb of (free!) storage - and my Outlook accounts allow simultaneously opening Gmail and Gwise accounts so as to move things between them, and to archive on the Web or on any computer I like - in designated folders.  None of which is true for GW.

I am also told by my hosts that Monash University here in Melbourne - which probably has twice the user base that UCT does - is in the process of migrating their entire email account to Gmail - which tells you something, doesn't it??

So, brothers and sisters:

Emancipate yourself from digital slavery
None but Google can free our mail...B-)

And I leave you with Melbourne's famous Chloe, in the pub opposite Flinder's St Station:

- Retroid Antipodes

Given that I have a violent antipathy for the kinds of simperingly kitschy inspirational posters that are so ubiquitous, yet more than a passing fondness for the products disseminated by the wonderful despair.com, I had to give you this....

Hey, you gotta love ICTS: they define the definition of insanity (while doing good work), by doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result...I refer, of course, to the never-ending and fruitless endeavour that is fixing GroupSTUPID!!!  The latest offering:

Dear UCT staff and students,
 
We require a period of unscheduled maintenance time on the UCT GWIA, a part of the UCT email system that affects IMAP users and the external delivery of mail. 
 
Reason for the maintenance:
Troubleshooting an issue regarding the UCT email Disclaimer.
 
Date & Time:
Intermittent unavailability for the period: Tuesday 16 March, 17h00 - 19h00.
 
Affected services or groups:
Intermittent unavailability for IMAP users and interruptions to external mail delivery.
 
We will post a message to the ICTS website System and Service Announcements pane as soon as the maintenance is complete.
 
Regards,
ICTS Communications

So...outgoing mail will be affected...because of the UCT email disclaimer??  Really??  A simple solution, folks: DON'T USE GROUPSTUPID.  Ah, Gmail, thy virtues are plain to see....  And see here, for an earlier offering on how silly the disclaimer / datclaimer is.

I'm off to read my Gmail.  Which - thanks to ICTS and submarine cables - really works well.

Mail from ICTS on Friday 5th:

Dear UCT staff and students,

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the system of setting clocks one or two hours ahead of standard time so that sunrise and sunset occur at a later hour, thus artificially moving a period of daylight to the evening hours.  South Africa does not use this system and the DST setting is centrally de-activated on the GroupWise server at UCT.

This deactivation of DST did not flow down to all GroupWise users [! how surprising!  - Ret.] and as a result some people’s calendars will switch to DST at the end of March. If you are affected, a once-off configuration change is required.

Hands down.  Really: it is the most frustrating, clunky piece of sh1t I have ever had to deal with to get email - and I go back to the days of logging in via DOS to UCTVAX and UCTHPX!!

The latest insult is this - which I get after a banner which says my mailbox is corrupted, and needs to be rebuilt, and that this may take a few minutes:

It has been saying that for 30 minutes....

I have had enough.  I am already in the cloud (yes, looked at from both sides now, thank you B-), I have my Gmail account (retroid.raving@gmail.com, seeing as you asked - thanks, Vernon!), I have imported all my addresses and I autoforward my mail.  Frak Gwise.  FOREVER!!!!!

Graeme Bloch, that is - not the Retroid Kollectiv; they're just older.

But we do not mean to be elliptical (or pre-postmodern, or derridist, or other synonym for obscure): we refer to a UCT Daily News item, wherein said educationist bemoans, yet is not too depressed by, the state of SA schooling.

But to digress: if one delves into the Dark Past, one (of the Kollectiv) remembers a much younger Graeme, with longer and darker hair and a fine beard and a forbidding demeanour for those of us not Committed to the Struggle, shrilly announcing to all who would listen, up on the roof on Condom Heights Leo Marquard Hall that dark night (there was a blackout over most of Cape Town) in June 1976, "They're coming!  They're coming!", as the fires started out on the Flats.  "They" didn't, as it happened, and the lights came back on, and rain and the Fire Brigade put the fires out, and life went on.

But as we said, he is now much wiser.  And older.  And into education.  And has a book on the subject.  And lectures on it, publicly.

"It's going to take a concerted effort from many - teachers, government, society - to tackle the problems, he cautioned. "Given the complexity of education... it really is going to be called on all of us to get active."

Yes, well: ever since the bulk of the Kollectiv came to these fair shores in the mid-1970s, it has been obvious to us that the SA educational system was seriously flawed: kids were taught to rote-learn rather than to understand, the currciculum was simplistic and archaic compared to the then Rhodesian system used next door - and teachers seemed to be badly educated.  And that was the white school system....

Things have improved since then, from an end-user perspective (hey, we teach!) - but the poorer / wealthier schools divide is still obvious, with the former products being far more prone to falling back on memorisation, and really struggling with simple concepts that have obviously never been taught properly.

So yes, we do all have to become active: and how better than by using the Open Education Resource paradigm, and trying to get poorer learners into using it?  We have our eyes on the Biology syllabus....

It is not often that VftN is inspired to sing the praises of ICTS - we still hold the imposition of GroupSTUPID!!! against them - but this would be one of those times.

Enough said...B-)

Note added in proof (of the above):

Dear Surf40 user,

ICTS has increased individual Internet quotas as a result of the extra Internet bandwidth now available to UCT. 

Changes to individual quotas have been implemented as follows:

Staff members subscribed to Surf40:  Old monthly quota: 2 GB/month, New monthly quota: 5 GB/month

Undergraduate students - Campus Internet Quota (CIQ).  Old monthly quota: 200 MB/month, New monthly quota: 400 MB/month

Residence students - ResNet Internet Quota (RIQ).  Old monthly quota: 300 MB/month, New monthly quota: 500 MB/month

ICTS will review the quotas on a monthly basis to ensure optimum bandwidth availability on campus.

Regards,

ICTS Communications

Sometimes, history can be written by ordinary people.  Here's my little slice, 20 years on: I first wrote it for an Ithaca, NY, community paper back in about August of 1990; it has subsequently survived many PCs and hard drive purges, and one update (in 2000).  For what it's worth....

Were you there on The Day [11th February 1990]?

Were you one of the thousands who came to the Cape Town Grand Parade, expecting Nelson Mandela at 3 PM sharp, and stood in the hot sun from early on?

We weren't.

We read that it would all be televised; so we had lunch under the trees, mowed the lawn, then stopped gardening about 10 to 3, got out the cool drinks, and switched on SATV.

And waited.  And waited. 

It turned out we were waiting for Winnie.  So was Nelson waiting for Winnie.  And it seemed that the world-famous Victor Verster Prison, 35 miles from Cape Town, was perhaps the most beautifully situated prison in the world.  And it appeared that Clarence Keyter was not one of the world's better continuity announcers, even if he does drink from a tap with the masses.

And Mandela came out, looking tall, and dignified, and elderly, and awkward.  And the masses welcomed him, and the cars drove away, and it was 20 past 4.

We decided, then, that we should share in the moment; that we should feel a little of the history that was being made that day.  We said "there won't be any violence, people can't misbehave today, can they?".  So we put on hats, left the lawn-mower outside, jumped into the second car, and hit the N2 on the way to town.

So did the rest of the Cape Flats hit the N2 - and they were in minibuses and stationwagons and in old Chevvies and bakkies; and they all had their lights on; and they all had clenched fists and The Flag flying; and they were all over the road - and they were happy.

We met the richer, whiter pilgrims from the Southern Suburbs in their BMWs and Cressidas around Hospital Bend, and it was a Sunday Freed Mandela rush-hour all the way into town.  We peeled off early so as to get a parking away from all of the crush.  We walked for ten minutes through the old District Six to get to the Parade - and it was like a carnival all the way, with families carrying picnic bags and blankets, and kids running around all over.  We passed an elderly man in a Free Mandela T-shirt, selling sew-on ANC patches, R5 each.  We thought of the Weekly Mail "Who's Left" cartoon, about people cashing in on the struggle, and we laughed.  And the crowds were happy, and we didn't feel like ousiders, not at all.

Close to the Parade on Darling Street we met people walking the other way, looking tired.  Closer still we met the Young Lions toyi-toying the other way, with a bow-wave of people following.  We asked a UDF-shirted man what was happening, and he smiled, and said "they are just exercising, you must go that way", pointing at the Parade.  We went up as close as we could to the front of the City Hall, where we could see the microphones, and we waited.  The crowd got thicker, and we waited.  People were excited, happy, and they waited.  There was a loud series of pops, and people laughed nervously, and said "firecrackers", then settled down, and waited. 

A volley of sharper bangs, gunshots they sounded like, rang out, echoing shockingly between the station and the City Hall.  People ran about, nervously.  A young white girl in front loudly and firmly told her mother that it was all right, we were all safe.  Eventually her mother believed her.  The crowd calmed down, and got thicker still, and we waited.  Allan Boesak appeared, and told us it could be a very serious situation, and that we must all keep calm, and that we must sit down.  "Sit down, comrades, sit down.  Sit down, comrades, sit down.  Sit down comrades..."

The crowd was very good-natured, where we were.  They had to be - we were packed so tight that to sit was a co-operative effort between you and all six or so neighbours.  Slowly a large section of the crowd was induced to sit.  Then came the "pop-pop-pop" from the station again, and everyone surged ponderously to their feet.  Allan called us "Comrade" again and again: he seemed mainly to be addressing the crowd directly in front of him; our bit was very civilised in comparison.  It was also the bit with all the people who had come late, and parked in District Six.  And we were all still happy, even if a little scared, and everyone made jokes, and laughed.

The people were amazing.  All ages, all colours.  Mostly T-shirted, most with sun visors or hats.  There were the worker contingents and UDF stalwarts; there were the radical shabby elements from the politically aware student communes.  There were the radical weirds from who knew where (one had a pseudo-camo Noddy hat, complete with bell, and pantaloons to match); there was a radical chic element from the Southern Suburbs and the University.  There were ANC flags in abundance.  There was one beautiful SACP flag, flying proudly with the sun shining through the red-and-gold; and I remember thinking "never thought I would see that, here".  There were three little girls who would have looked more at home in the mall in Cavendish Square, with designer-radical shirts and jeans, all with home-made approximations of the SACP flag.  There were their bigger brothers and sisters too, all white, all very well-groomed and coiffured, all hammer-and-sickleing, and "comrade"-ing everyone in sight.  There were beggars and bergies; there were bleary-eyed youngsters with tattoos pushing aimlessly through the crowd ("gangsters!" muttered the woman next to me).  There was the smell of too many people in one place, of cheap wine and cigarettes; and occasionally, of dagga.

The people around me were getting  a little despondent.  They had mostly been waiting since 2 or so, many since 12.  One marshal passing by said he was sick of this, they must bring Nelson on now.  Even Jesse Jackson was waiting, he said.  I told them I had seen Mandela on television, that he had already left Paarl, that he was coming.  "How did he look", they implored, "how was he?".  "Like a thinner, more handsome Matanzima", I said, and they laughed.  The crowd was very thick now, and the marshals were trying to help Allan Boesak move people out of directly in front of the Hall.  We blocked people from pushing forward, and the press got very tight.  "Are you someone special, comrade?" said the designer radicals in front of me, unofficial marshals all, again and again.  Allan kept imploring us to move back, to move back, to unblock that car, to get that car out of here, now! now!; no, not to do that, comrades, not to provoke.  Helicopters kept appearing, and the crowd kept muttering "he is coming now", but he didn't.  We smiled at our neighbours, and said how bad it was, that these youngsters thought this was a concert or something, that they could keep pushing to get to the front.  And we were not unhappy, mostly, but voices were raised occasionally, and people were pushing back at the shovers-through.

"I am very tired" said my now-longtime  crowd associate from Langa; "they must bring him now".  Later he asked "what is this place?", and I told him, realising that this was a foreign city to him even if he lived near it.  Allan talked to us again, and an elderly thick-set man in front of me said "Fokkoff Boesak!", then shook his head, and said "We are waiting too long now, I want to hear Nelson".  There was a rumour that Nelson would only come at ten; another that he wasn't coming, that "they" had stopped him.  Allan said "if I had organised this, he would be here by now", and later: "you all think I'm keeping him from you" ("Yes!" they shouted).  Later still, it was "believe me, when you see me again, it will be with Nelson Mandela", and of course, it wasn't.  Now we were resigned, and people didn't speak much any more, and nobody laughed.

People were leaving in droves now, as the sunshine on the face of the City Hall turned golden.  Soon one could actually move around without standing on people.  Still the occasional "pop-pop-pops" came from over at the station, and now, out of the press of people, we could see the little figures on the station roof running to and fro.  The helicopters came back: one police, two military.  A shabby radical (white) took aim at one with his (SACP) flag, shot it down, and smiled around at a job well done.

Finally, with the sun nearly gone, a buzz - he was coming now, they said.  They thronged back into the now-familiar press; we took our places once more.  Allan spoke to us again, and again nothing.  I heard someone saying "what amazing timing!", and I asked why, and he said he'd been leaving two minutes earlier, and behind the City Hall a car had pulled up, and this grey-haired guy in a suit had got out right in front of him.  So he came back, and waited, and we thought "this must be it now!", and it was after seven.

Suddenly, he was there: tall, grey-suited, bent over to listen to the advisers pressing him close on the balcony.  The crowd roared, surged, short people got onto shoulders, and jumped up to see.  But most had gone home already, and we were thin on the ground now.  And they stood on the balcony, and they stood, and they stood.  Then it was announced that Sisulu would introduce Mandela, and he did, and suddenly, in the growing dark, here was The Man, and here was The Speech.

"He definitely has a gift for this", I remember thinking.  We moved back in the now-thin crowd, because you could actually see better from there; the PA system was working well, and we could all hear the powerful, slightly gravelly voice, rolling out over the so-silent crowd.  My friend the marshal was entranced; eyes shining, he watched the tall figure reading his speech.  The crowd "VIVA!"ed all the catchwords: Umkhonto we Sizwe got a big "Viva!"; the SACP and Joe Slovo also; the Young Lions got a roar and  a "Viva!".  But the Black Sash was passed over; so was NUSAS, and the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses.  We didn't salute for the "Amandla!s"; we didn't know the responses to the other calls. 

Our friends from the crush had dispersed now; people were looking around to see if you "Viva!"'ed, if you saluted.  Suddenly we felt like outsiders, us from the suburbs, from liberal academia, and we were a ittle depressed.  We were not part of His audience; we were not the people he was thanking; we were not really His constituents.  We started drifting back, out of the fringes of the crowd.  We paused, at the edge, near the first police I'd seen all afternoon.  We heard the commitment to the armed struggle; the call for continued and increased sanctions, and the second or third "Viva!" for Umkhonto, and we quietly left.  We had seen the Man, we had caught the atmosphere, we had our piece of history.

We caught the rest of the speech on TV later on: but it wasn't the same; my mind kept drifting off to what I'd heard and seen *there*; to what it had been like, *there*. 

The next day our char told us how taxis and cars had been hijacked in Crossroads and Khayelitsha; we read and heard how people had run amock and looted, and had been shot at all afternoon (no, not firecrackers after all); we heard condemnation of the appalling organisation of the whole event, and we agreed whole-heartedly.  We listened to others feeling despondent; we discussed the imminent collapse of academia as we know it, the certainty of dwindling support for academic excellence.  We discussed where there was left for us now; whether The Speech had been just rhetoric, tailored for The Masses.  The stock market, buoyed up by De Klerk, fell like a stone with Mandela.  People asked if we were crazy, didn't we know it was dangerous, and how was it anyway??  And yet, we left on sabbatical in August of that year, to the States (where I wrote this) - and we came back, which we hadn't been planning to do.

And the years have rolled on, twenty (20!) since those heady days, and some things have got worse (violence, theft), and some have got better (the economy, international acceptance, tourism, wine sales...I’m sure I should be able to think of more...), Mandela has gone, to make way first for Mbeki, then for Zuma; the Young Lions of the UDM are largely sidelined, while the MK vets seem to be rewriting history, and we are almost as uncertain now as we were then.  But we are still here.  And people say: “Why?”  And the answer is: because of That Day.

What could we say then, and now, but "I tell you, comrade, you had to have been there...".

Ed Rybicki

February, 1990 and 2010

So, comrades - as this is what we unionised co-toilers in the dark and satanic mill that is our degree factory University must learn to call each other - we are going to:

1. proceed to the next step in  arbitration, and
2. also take industrial action,  

are we?  Said industrial action to include not doing any committee work, but not to extend to disrupting actual teaching - and which may extend to a formally-garbed protest march to The Belly of The Beast, aka Bremner.

Oh, there was some wild talk of rolling sit-ins at Bremner, but there was little enthusiasm for this activity.  Good thing, too: it would interfere rather in web-surfing and drinking coffee (with Marmitey biscuits), after all!

But seriously now, the VftN Kollectiv as a real collection of people (the Retroid Kollectiv being a loose grouping of characters in one person) is very excited by the new-found inustrial activism of their UCT comrades: why, we should have songs, and take lessons in how to toyi-toyi (arthritic joints allowing), and get T-shirts!

Hasta la victoria siempre, comrades, to take a line from the man with the cigar on the Retroid office wall - who would make a fine T-shirt logo - and we will refer you to a previous Raving for a song.

Viva academics, viva...or as some pedants might have it, "Vivat academia. Vivant professores!"  We may even get better paid after all....B-)

Dear new students:

Welcome to UCT!  Or as we more experienced folk know it, Our University^TM (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 OU^TM experience to the fullest.

Yours,

The Retroid Kollectiv

Marmite.  Wheat biscuit.
Filter coffee: Blue Mountain.
It's the little things....B-)

It is with great interest that the Retroid Kollectiv read Jonathan Jansen's plog (=print blog) in The Times this am - and the one that preceded that, in fact.

For they touch squarely upon the button that gets us going on about equity: actual equity, that is, and not the politically correct kind.  For those too lazy to websurf, the executive summary is that the good Prof Jansen, the Rector of UFS and an almost-DVC here, is using the medium of his weekly column in the tabloidish rag to ask the readership whether or not he should accept into his University, needy people with low to average matric marks.  Two young black women and one young white woman, as it happens.

So here it goes: an open letter.

Dear Professor Jansen;

I read with great interest your two recent columns in The Times, dealing with your dilemma over acceptance of what is now three young women - because the issues that underly your dilemma have been vexing me for some time.  I applaud your decision, by the way, to take in the two young women you wrote about recently, and your apparent decision to personally mentor them: this is exactly the kind of thing that is needed to help deserving young people escape from the vicious cycle of poor marks condemning people to povery, forever.

Now you write, concerning the young white woman:

My initial inclination was to deny the student access; after all, I had announced that we planned to raise the academic admission standards and take only the best black and white students into the university.

The problem is her compelling story. She comes from a broken home. Raised for the most part by a single mother who is unemployed, this young woman is desperate to break the cycle of poverty in her family.

Some commonality with your previous story, surely?  Pretty much exact parallels with stories that could be told of many young people in this country, mainly black?

But you go on:

Here is a white student. Her parents were advantaged under apartheid. She had access to a solid education in a white, well-resourced school.

Really?  Do we know anything other than her being white, for a fact?  By 2010, presumably she will have had her 12 years of education entirely under an ANC-controlled Education Department - and she MAY have been to a well-resourced school, but may not have, also.  You say yourself, further on in your column, that the apartheid government also produced a white underclass: any advantage they may have had surely went out fo the window in 1994 or even earlier, when this child could only have been a toddler.

You say further:

Must she now be punished for the sins of the fathers? It is not her fault that she was born with a white skin, and she did not perpetrate the terrible laws that oppressed black people. And who knows what kinds of struggles she had to survive in her domestic situation as her mother battled day after day to keep her in school?

As I have had occasion to say in another blog (concerning nuns), amen, Brother Jansen, amen...!  For here you hit squarely upon the head of the problem - which is that need knows no colour bar, unlike our previous government, or even - sadly - our present one.

So, Professor Jansen: I commend this prospective student to you as just a student - and not a white one.  Look at her background; look at her prospects if she doesn't get this break - and make a decision that sets a precedent for you and others to follow.

That is, that need trumps colour.

Respectfully,

A UCT academic