Sunday 30 April 2017

"Gutless" 'white' students at UCT



Are white students at the University of Cape Town gutless

https://rationalstandard.com/white-students-university-cape-town-gutless/
 


This is an e-mail to a colleague at UCT who complained about the absence of ‘whites’ in the forthcoming Students Representative Council (SRC) election – describing them as “gutless”.  My position is that the ‘race’ of the candidates is of no consequence.  The real problem is that 90% of the candidates apparently are apparatchiks of PASMA, SASCO or the EFF and thus not seeking office (let alone tertiary education) with open minds.

Dear …..,

You need not "beg to disagree" with my views on candidates for SRC election.  We simply disagree.  That's what should be happening on a regular basis on our 'horrible Moscow on the hill'.  The reality is that, 60 years ago, VC TB Davie stated, and, two decades later, 'Prof' Robert Sobukwe and Science Faculty Dean 'Jack' de Wet reiterated that, South Africa is an "African" country and UCT's Community must reflect that in their ‘lived experiences’.  Simply using ‘race’ (or any other indefensible self-identity) criterion to achieve the necessary transformation is biologically meaningless, socially immoral and, especially, socio-politico-economically fruitless.

During the 1950-60s, UCT missed the super tanker (not just the boat) when it failed to back AC Jordan and literally betrayed Archie Mafeje.

During the 1970s, VC Luyt et al. failed to take cognisance of the Black Consciousness Movement and heed [let alone embrace] the pleas of ‘transformers’ like the young Geoff Budlender.  This dismissal embittered Budlender, sending him and many other towards the pathway of radical transformation of UCT.  This has culminated in today’s extreme Fallists and others who are little more than hateful, hooligan anarchists, bent on ‘racial’ isolationism and destructive decolonization.

Then, also in retrospect, the generally highly admirable VC Saunders made several great mistakes during his administration. 

From the early 1980s, he [perhaps on the advice of Martin Hall] ‘outsourced’ Chris Brink’s brilliant idea for academic support  for Bantu-Educated ‘black’ students to employ largely short-term contracted within an Academic Support Programme (ASP), neophyte lecturers led by centralized ‘educators’ with little or no experience in academic support.  Saunders should have shunted the funds/posts to Core Departments and, if necessary, forced their academics to adapt what they teach, how they teach and how they conduct research to embrace the needs of appropriate numbers of these kids. [This in no way should be interpreted as “dumbing down” the educational process and “lowering” academic standards.  It required a well-thought out, strategic, punctual transformation.]  Moreover, the academics in the then Faculty of Education should have been at least drawn into the process, if not required to taking the lead. At best, they remained at the periphery.

Instead of nurturing/mentoring these knowledge-hungry kids, UCT marginalized them into the ‘special’ gap-filling, slow-streamed programmes.  Had this opportunity been grasped then, we’d have many more competent (if not brilliant), Afro-relevantly educated ‘black’ academics so desperately needed now.   
Furthermore, their contemporary ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Asian’ colleagues in training would now be leading the university side by side with them and be far better attuned to the needs of today’s far-worse-off kids, much more poorly ‘prepared’ by the current totally dysfunctional Basic Education system. 

When the ASP strategy failed, Saunders pumped more money into it, made many of the failed [yes, there are noteworthy exceptions] contract lecturers permanent, and then (under VC Ramphele) morphed it into an even more useless ‘faculty’ – Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED). 
Current leaders of CHED will try to counter this argument by focusing on their limited successes.  But, the bottom-line is that ASP/ADP/CHED has not promoted the timeous and high-quality education and subsequent career success of Apartheid- (and now ANC-) oppressed ‘nie-blankes’, especially ‘blacks’.

While this was happening, the now downgraded School of Education ceased to educate undergraduate teachers, contributing to the current dearth of outstanding school teachers and, especially, principals.  With regard to teacher training, this is restricted to bachelor’s graduates or unemployable Ph.D.’s, many of whom are not appropriately basically educated in their disciplines or see teaching as a ‘Plan B’.

At the same time, back in Core Departments like yours and mine, perhaps in an attempt to produce the next generation of academic ‘heroes’ with high NRF ratings, curricula became biased towards educating more specialized bachelors/honours graduates, better suited for continued post-graduate research than to become school teachers.  This culled most of the remaining ‘nie-blanke’ kids from the system who carried the academic impedimenta from the Apartheid Era.

Then Saunders let the politicians populate and start to control UCT by capitulating to the ANC-led academic boycott when he cancelled Cruise-Obrien’s lecture series.  The laid the first paving stones of the path leading to the current toxic Students Representative Council and Black Academic Caucus situations.
While all this was happening, after their academic support ceased, these educationally marginalized and still ‘disabled’ kids were thrown into the academic ‘deep end’ and taught in an “ego-centrifugally” manner by NRF-rating hungry people who were ill-equipped to cater for their needs and deficiencies.  Hence, most of them ‘sank’.   

Equally harmful was Saunders’ probably inadvertent development of the ‘central committee’ at Bremner.  This started the process of what has been described as hyper-centralized ‘managerialsim’, emasculating academic leadership within departments and faculties.  As outlined in a report Matters pertaining to heads of academic departments at the University of Cape Town by former Science Faculty Dean Cliff Moran published in 2007, this process dates back to the 1990s.

Then came VC Ramphele.  She developed some of Saunders’ many achievements: restructuring faculties, demanding academic excellence across the board, resisting the ‘basification’ of undergraduate education and resolutely dealing with sexism and general ‘indecent behaviour’ (including impractical demands for academic transformation) by students.  She also accelerated the recruitment of ‘nie-blanke’ academics like Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan.  But, then again, she was a big fan of the malicious Mahmood Mamdani who clashed with malevolent ‘Old Boys’ like Martin Hall.  Sadly, as outlined in the Moran Report, she also put the pedal to the metal with regard to managerialism.

If Ramphele had stayed as VC for a decade, there may have been rapid, progressive, meaningful transformation (including constructive decolonization and ‘inclusivication’).

Then came VC Ndebele, a brilliant and kind man bent on academic ‘peace’ and political correctness.  He embrace massification (with inadequate financial and other support), promoted Bremner ‘managerialism, and allowed the introgression of radical left-wingers into Council and the academic emasculation of Senate.  He commissioned, but took no action on, the Moran Report and lost an enormous opportunity to heal UCT when Brian Hahn was brutally murdered by a disgruntled affirmative action employee [now an associate professor at University of Limpopo].  He effectively laid the logs on the hearth for the current conflagration.

Then came VC Price, the populist transformational Messiah.  For the first six years of his Reign, he mimicked Ndebele, providing the kindling for the conflagration.  He made no significant efforts with regard to adaptive transformation, pandering as a multifaceted populist to all sides.  When the faeces inevitably literally hit the fan, he jumped ship to the Fallists, abandoning the “silenced” multi-‘racial’ majority to fend for themselves.  If this were not enough he’s set in motion a chaotic IRTC-process.  While it, at best, limps along, he supports: formal recognition by UCT of the Broederbond-like Black Academics Caucus; the advertisement of the Mafeje Chair (restricted to a black South African who professes Critical Theory; and inviting Mahmood Mamdani (who described a UCT curriculum as “Bantu Education”) to give the TB Davie Lecture on Academic Freedom.
With regard to ‘white’ and (you fail to mention) non-Fallist, political-party-independent, ‘nie-blanke’ students not having “the guts” to challenge for seats on the SRC, maybe we should also look to the Democratic Alliance [I’m copying this to the DA’s Belinda Bozzoli] and current academics (especially professors) for their displays of courage.  Their silence is deafening.

Ultimately, what is going on at UCT is not ‘blacks’ vs ‘whites’.  It’s about:

1.       admitting large numbers of educationally ‘disabled’ students who are not adequately supported financially and neglected by UCT’s administration;
2.       Core Faculties/Schools/Departments and academics who evaded (and still evade) appropriately educating these kids;
3.       these kids feeling marginalized by the people who should be educating them and treated shabbily by ‘outsourced’ academics and uncaring administrators;
4.       illegitimate ‘protesters’ (students/staff/outsiders) who care nothing for anything (least of all oppressed/’disabled’ students) other than destroying UCT without offering any viable (let alone preferable) alternative solutions;
5.       demoralized staff and students who just want to engage in unfettered education and research;
6.       radical, left-wing staff/students/Councillors/administrators who want to dictate whom to admit/employ/promote within UCT and what should be taught and how to teach; and
7.       centralized all-powerful administrators who are bent on creating a ‘pluriversity’ populated by academics who are “organic intellectuals” and not internationally respected scholars.

If the nefarious individuals mentioned above have their way, bye bye UCT.  To stop them, concerned academics, students, alumni and donors need to take conjoint action.  UCT will not “weather this storm”.  The “buck’ has to stop somewhere.  Invoking racial ‘unity’ has nothing to do with this.



Friday 28 April 2017

Race: a myth created by ‘white’ supremacists



23854 reads  #44 when compared to articles published by University of Cape Town based authors in The Conversation

The Conversation 20 November 2015 - Race: a myth created by ‘white’ supremacists
Subspecies and race
I am a Ph.D.-trained taxonomist and have acted professionally locally and internationally for 35 years.  Taxonomy is the biological science of classification.  Scientifically, the term subspecies is equivalent to race.  Subspecies are the least inclusive entities that warrant a name.  They are geographically distinct, anatomically and genetically homogenous, populations who interbreed and produce fertile offspring with other subspecies. 
‘Scientific’ racism
The use of race in human ‘taxonomy’ has a long, disgraceful history.  To promote their ‘superiority’, highly respected philosophers, sociologists, biologists, historians, and politicians used race to divide and denigrate,  people from different ‘nations’ (the Irish, British, French, German, Chinese, Japanese)  or continents (Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Americas).  The eminent philosopher Immanuel Kant, the first “scientific racist”, maintained that dark-skinned people from Africa are: vain and stupid; only capable of trifling feelings; resistant to any form of education other than learning how to be enslaved; and lacking in “drive to activity” and “mental capacities to be self-motivated and successful.” With regard to history, they show no talents or produced anything of praiseworthy quality in art or science. Light-skinned Homo sapiens europaeus is active, acute, and adventurous. Sub-Saharan Homo sapiens afer is crafty, lazy, and careless.  Scientific racism played a pivotal role in ‘justifying’ chattel slavery and colonialization of areas occupied by “inferior” races. 

‘Scientific’ racism reached its pinnacle in eugenics, a social philosophy  advocating the improvement of humanity by promoting reproduction between people with desired traits and reducing reproduction between (or sterilizing) people with less-desired traits.  People unfit to reproduce included members of disfavoured racial groups.  Eugenics played an integral part in the race-related laws of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.
Creation(s)
There are two views on the origin(s) of human races.  Polygenism maintains that races were created independently by God or derived from different ape/monkey/baboon-like ancestors.  This view was referenced by some prominent South Africans in the media in response to the announcement of the discovery of Homo neladi.  It persists in Creation ‘Science’ and in anthropologist Carleton Coon’s book The Origin of Races (1962).  The other view is monogenism: that all modern humans have a single, common origin, perhaps even a single mating pair, Adam and Eve In his The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin ended the polygenism vs monogenism debate in favour of mongenism.

Human ‘taxonomists’ have proposed a range of human races with little agreement as to how many and their geographical provenance.  Based on skull anatomy, Johann Blumenbach divided the humans into five races: Caucasians (Europe and western Asia), Mongoloids (eastern Asia), Malays (south-eastern Asia), Negros (sub-Saharan Africa) and Americans (North and South America), but emphasized that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them".  Skull anatomy was also used to support racism by Samuel Morton, who claimed that inter-racial intellectual variation is reflected by the interior volume of the skull.  These groupings remain used today in anthropology and forensics.  Additional studies including other aspects of skin colour, facial type, texture and colour of hair recognize as many as 12 human races. 


Genetic evidence
A range of genetic studies have examined ‘racial’ variation.  A pioneer in this regard was one of my early mentors, Richard Lewontin.  His research on protein structure suggested that 90% percent of modern human genetic diversity is due to differences between individuals WITHIN populations, and that the tiny balance is due to variation BETWEEN populations.  This view was confirmed by studies based on DNA structure. Indeed, the DNA amongst all human populations is 99.5% similar.  Populations of the geographically much more restricted chimpanzee (our nearest living evolutionary ‘relative’), exhibit more than four times the variation found between human populations.  Furthermore, the geographical distribution of many human anatomical traits reflects that of genetic variation.  For example, about 90% of the variation in human head shape occurs WITHIN continental groups, and 10% BETWEEN groups, with a greater variability of head shape among individuals within Africa.   To summarize, when humans from around the globe are studied from genetic and/or anatomical perspectives, the pattern discovered is not geographically discrete clusters.  The norm is gradual, geographically uncorrelated, variation in traits and genes, even within peoples traditionally thought to be racially homogeneous. Therefore, there is no evidence of evolutionarily significant subspecific/racial variation. 

The exception to the common geographically gradual anatomical among humans is skin colour. Approximately 10% of the variance in skin colour occurs within groups, and about 90% between groups.  People from near the equator have darker, more melanin-rich, skin than those who live at higher latitudes, indicating that it has been under strong selective pressure. Darker skin is strongly selected for in equatorial regions because it is a natural sunscreen that limits harmful effects of high ultraviolet rays.  One of these is the stripping away of folic acid, a nutrient essential to the development of healthy foetuses.  Recent genetic studies indicate that skin colour may change radically due to natural selection in 100 generations (about 2 500 years).

Genetic ‘racism’
Contrary to the message above, some studies based on DNA allele frequencies claim that there is a geographical structuring of human populations which has been used, e.g. by newsman Nicholas Wade in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, to justify the validity of races. Wade then asserts that natural selection between ‘races’ has led to differences in I.Q. test results, efficacy of political institutions and levels of economic development.  These studies are flawed for three reasons.  First, taxonomic studies should be based on CHARACTERS, features that are invariant within populations, rather than TRAITS (e.g. eye colour and gene alleles) that vary within populations and even families.  Second, the DNA samples used in were “cherry picked” geographically to maximize inter-population differentiation.  Third, the evolutionary racial ‘trees’  were generated by a statistical technique (cluster analysis) designed to produce tree-like patterns of “average”, not absolute, differences between sampled items.  This technique formed the basis of an approach to the construction of evolutionary trees called “phenetics” which has long been discredited and thus generally abandoned by evolutionary biologists.

Evolutionary origins
DNA- and anatomy-based findings support the Out of Africa theory that modern humans originated in Africa. This theory states that archaic African Homo (erectus) immigrated into Eurasia 200 000 to 100 000 years ago.  About 60 000 years ago, after it also had evolved in Africa, a second form of humanity, modern H. sapiens, also emigrated out of Africa, replacing populations of Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis already in the north.  Some studies support that the second emigration resulted in limited interbreeding between H. sapiens and neanderthalensis, with 1 to 4% of the genes currently within the non-African H. sapiens coming from neanderthalensis.
 ‘White’ people are therefore evolutionary ‘refugees’ from Africa who, after settling in Eurasia, lost much of their epidermal melanin in an evolutionary heartbeat.  

To close, during the turbulent 1980s, my 9 year-old daughter attended a racially mixed school.  Knowing this, when a family friend asked her how many of her classmates were blacks, my daughter’s reply was: “What is a black?” I guess that makes my child a poor human taxonomist.

Emeritus Prof. Tim Crowe – Newlands – tel. 021-674-3835 – e-mail timothy.crowe@uct.ac.za