Money makes the University of Cape Town go round

Money makes the University of Cape Town go round

http://www.biznews.com/wef/davos-2017/2017/01/18/tim-crowe-max-price-davos/

Emeritus Prof.  Tim Crowe

Well, it’s wide in the open.  A (THE?) primary driving force behind the University of Cape Town (UCT) is money!  Where does its leader VC Dr Max Price go to learn to save it?  The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

‘Davos’ is about three things – business, making profits and doing so on a global basis.  The costs of attending it can approach R 1 million.  Who’s paying?  Since this is his third trip, who paid for the previous two?  With him will be:  Vice President Ramaphosa, Ministers Radebe, Davies, Gorham, and Patel and BEE million/billionaires Surve, Manuel and Motsepe.  They will meet with a bunch of other politicians and extremely wealthy people.

A "Davos Man" is typified an alpha-male member of the global elite of wealthy ‘internationals’.  They are kindred spirits with ‘Masters of the Universe’, applied to influential Wall Street financiers.
Davos men self-identity as self-made men, not products of group-based ideologies or political/race-based ‘nationalities’.  Institutional loyalties and national boundaries are obstacles that thankfully are “vanishing residues from the past”.

What’s Price going to learn from his fellow Davosians?  Probably not much that will benefit UCT since, following last year’s Davos theme - “revolution”, UCT collapsed academically, financially and socio-politically, guided relentlessly by him, his (now mostly departed) DVCs, some of his Deans (some also on to greener pastures) and of course lawbreaking Fallists, into a “chaos” that at least one of his remaining Deans want’s the UCT Community to embrace. 

Indeed, based on his recent announcement, Davos-Chancellor Price’s current solution to UCT’s sad financial situation did not require deep education in Switzerland: 

UCT alumni and current donors: Please give me another billion rand.

Maybe this year will be better.  The theme of this year Davos is “Responsive and Responsible Leadership”.  But this requires providing a vision and a way forward, so that people can imagine a better future. 

Strangely, there is a useful warning from Prof. Klaus Schwab, the founder and still host of Davos.

“The pervasive crisis in identity formation that has resulted from the erosion of traditional norms over the past two decades through the practice of globalization has made the world smaller but more complex, and many people have lost confidence in institutions.”

If anything, self-identification and rampant erosion of traditions have become de rigueur at UCT over the last two years.  Who’s benefitted, who’s suffered as a consequences of this?

Lesson learned

One frightening ‘lesson’ Price and many neo-staff of all persuasion at UCT seemed to have learned during this millennium is money-power based edu-politics.  First and foremost, “show me the money”; “don’t bother me with truth” and “make me a professor”.  How that happens is a matter of detail.  Rather than learn a subject in depth and be prepared to form their own hypotheses and defend them in print and oral debate, too many millennial academics learn a little about lot of hypotheses generated by others and defend their ‘legitimacy’ irrespective of supporting evidence.

At the other end of the spectrum are the crypto-colonist academics who persist with outmoded programmes that also fail to equip today’s graduates.

The graduates produced are, too often, unthinking profit-makers and fad-followers rather than thoughtful citizens.  Many of these are technically competent, but do not know how to criticise authority from a scholar’s perspective.

What’s to come?

In less than a week, the still un-named and undescribed members of the Steering Committee for the all-powerful Fallist-dominated(?) Institutional Reconciliation and Transformation Commission will meet for the first time.  After attending this meeting, Price will leave UCTs reigns to someone else (Dr Russell Ally?) for a month while he takes vacation.  I hope that he passes on his Davosian knowledge before departing.