Schools for scandal

From fatalities to favouritism, our campuses are portals to intrigue and infighting

So universities are hotbeds of politics and intrigue and scandal. Who knew?

The chaos simmering in at least three of the country’s tertiary education institutions reminds one of the Academy of Projectors in Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels.

The academy’s professors, who are thoroughly engaged in such groundbreaking research as attempting to turn ice into gunpowder, extract sunshine from cucumbers and convert human excrement back into food the original reverse engineering are also dirt poor.

Which sounds like modern academia the world over

a few Ivy League campuses for the kids of the 1% excepted given that teaching remains such a disgracefully underpaid profession.

But while the scandals at Fort Hare, Stellenbosch and Unisa lend themselves to satire, it’s important to remember that three people are dead at the first two in confirmed assassinations and the third in a highly suspicious hit-andrun accident while the others are seemingly bubbling away in a potjie of nepotism and corruption.

In a world where labour is increasingly drawn from a hard-pressed and exploited “precariat”, whose only constant is that their employment is precarious, is it any wonder that jobs have been given to suitably unqualified candidates at Unisa? Or even that the Stellenbosch vicechancellor allegedly sorted a couple of research posts for family members?

For some reason, we expect better from academia despite the miasma of corruption, theft, brazen rentseeking and jobs-for-pals that soaks every other level of society, with the possible exception of kids at preschools.

Not so much “dreaming spires”, then, as poet Matthew Arnold wrote about Oxford in 1866, but more “fleecing liars”.

At least back in Lagado, the profs were only hustling for more money for their research, not for their mates. And none was on trial for murder.