Missing the mark with ‘militarisation’

YOUR contributor’s op-ed piece “Militarisation of UCT’s exam venue” in the Cape Times on Friday, November 17 refers.

I feel that every rational member of the UCT community must take exception to NX Nyembezi’s grossly distorted views of the purpose and effect of steps presently being taken on the campus to allow exams to be written.

The massive student support for exams to go ahead is a given.

The record shows that without precautionary measures being taken, exams will again be derailed, compromising thousands of students’ academic programmes, career prospects and throwing UCT’s staffing, residences and associated administration into chaos once more.

So, UCT management’s decision to pre-empt such disruptions by providing controlled exam venues, albeit at unlooked-for extra cost, is a completely sensible one.

Your contributor, for all his human rights activism and council membership, has to concede the rightness of the above.

However, where his rhetoric becomes shrill and his arguments untenable is when he avers, first acceding to demands for free education “is part of an adequate preparation for all students to write these exams”.

Secondly, how can writing these all-important exams in a controlled environment free from threat of attack and harassment be part of “the brutality of the apartheid regime”?

How can such an environment produce “intense levels of anxiety leading to increased numbers of student suicides and unattended mental health problems”?

Nyembezi over-eggs his case to a ludicrous degree, with wild assertions of intimidation strategies, colonial-era tactics, reprisals and, curiously, UCT “having to oblige privileged white students”.

Let your contributor abandon language which is inflammatory and continue to seek the middle ground, which, in the present UCT context, is an entirely laudable aim. Neil Veitch Kenilworth