Universities in violation of Act
WITH reference to your leading front page News (Cape Times, March 5) on job racism at UCT.
Job racism is endemic in historically white universities. An example is that recently, Wits advertised for a senior research post, funded jointly with iThemba LABS in Somerset-West. They interviewed two excellent candidates, both with some years of the required post-doctoral experience.
One was a foreigner from Europe and the other a “black” South African national.
The post was offered to the “white” foreigner in blatant violation of the Employment Equity Acts of 1998 and 2006, and in transparent contradiction of the publicly expressed EE policy of Wits.
After I pointed out to Wits that the appointment they had made broke the employment law, they reconsidered their decision but continued with the appointment.
As a sop to the local candidate, she was invited to meet the Dean of the Wits science faculty who asked if she would be interested in applying for a lectureship. Clearly, Wits realised it had transgressed.
The local candidate had a similar experience at UCT a couple of years ago for a post of senior lecturer in the physics department. The technique of excluding her at UCT was to offer her the lower post of lecturer, which she was already at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), and at a lower salary. This was a manoeuvre to ensure she would refuse the post.
UJ has had its racist problems. The physics department there was run by elderly professors steeped in pre-1994 attitudes.
About six years ago, they reintroduced de facto apartheid by splitting into a “physics department” at the old Rand Afrikaans site (“white”) and an “applied physics department” at the Doornfontein campus near Soweto (“black”). Recently they have remerged after I took this up this matter with the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP).
Old guards in our so-called “research universities” (HBUs) need to be stripped of any influence and pensioned off. years ago and, through fantastic efforts, is now less than 15%. Cape Town must continue these efforts and reduce leakage to less than 10%. This would save at least 25 million litres a day – far more than all the new wells coming up.
Another enormous source of water is the millions of litres of untreated sewage that is dumped in the ocean. We need to divert some of this water, treat it minimally to remove bacteria and use it for irrigation of parks, forests, farms and golf courses, as well as for fire control.
Surely, we we can do better than dumping raw sewage in the ocean that land up our beaches.