THE BLACK AND WHITE DEGREE SHOW
Cape Town I FIRST went to the University of Cape Town in 1967 to study physics and then went back in 1984 to study mechanical engineering. I saw two vivid changes when I returned: there were many more black students, and all public debate had ended.
In the 1960s I attended raucous mass meetings of students arguing for and against apartheid, and heard visiting Mem- bers of Parliament from all parties being loudly cheered and heckled. In the 1980s these public debates had been replaced with what seemed like prayer meetings, in which a student leader would pay homage to the pro-ANC, socialist orthodoxy before a small, respectful audience and which would end in a murmur of assent. Only speakers who obeyed the party line were allowed on campus: Alan Boesak and Trevor Manuel, ANC supporters, could speak; Chief Buthelezi of the IFP was banned. In 1986 the visiting lecturer, Conor Cruise O'Brien, was howled down and driven out by a bunch of black stu- dents because he derided the 'academic boycott' of South Africa. He never returned and a commission of enquiry, appointed by the university, sided with the student thugs and condemned O'Brien for having 'a colourful and volatile personality' and being 'politically provocative'.
Since then the triumph of acquiescence over argument has been almost complete. The universities are at the centre of huge and difficult South African problems about which the truth desperately needs to be spoken but is nearly always evaded. There is, for example, an absurd debate over the `transformation' of the universities from `Eurocentric' to `Afrocentric' ideas. The striking point about this debate is that you are never allowed to enter it. You must simply nod your head to it. If you remem- bered that, at the time of their first meet- ing with white men, black men had no written language, and suggested that Afro- centric universities should abandon writing and go back to the oral tradition, you would be shouted down as a racist — and the threat of being called a racist is enough to silence any critic.
Apartheid spent far more money on the education of each white child than it did on each black, and black children are still at a huge disadvantage. If university entrance was based purely on merit, whites, a minority, would get far more places than blacks, a majority. The approved remedy is 'affirmative action', special training or special exemptions for blacks. The aim is to increase the percentage of blacks in the universities until it matches that in the population, and indeed the numbers are going up: between 1991 and 1994 the number of diplomas and degrees awarded to blacks increased by 42 per cent, com- pared with 1 per cent for whites (although whites in 1994 still had 76 per cent of the degrees held by the population). More- over, the big corporations, such as Anglo- American, and state-run industries, such as Eskom (electricity) and Telkom (tele- communications), deliberately employ blacks to raise their racial quotas.
The consequences are mainly disastrous. Poorly educated blacks are pushed into university courses they cannot manage, forcing the authorities either to lower standards, so discrediting their degrees, or to humiliate the blacks with failure. Often the blacks enter university simply for the bursary money, which they send back to their large extended families in the town- ships, so turning educational finance into a form of social security. In the industries where I worked as an engineer, any black man higher than a labourer was referred to as an 'affirmative' and it was automati- cally assumed he was incompetent and given the qualification and the job because of his skin colour. All of this is well-known to everybody in private but not admitted in public. It makes the whites scornful and resentful, and is leading to a damaging emigration of skilled white men.
In the deepening gloom of the South African university system there are a few rays of light, and the brightest shines from an unlikely source at the University of Cape Town. It is the Academic Support Programme for Engineering in Cape Town (Aspect). The biggest problems for black students are mathematics and science, which combine in engineering. Aspect was begun in 1986 to tackle these by an engi- neering lecturer, Andrew Sass, who once lectured me. Sass is a burly ex-engineer, a superb lecturer and organiser, plain-spoken and honest, whose only affectation is pre- tending to be less clever than he really is. Seeing the plight of black students in the first two years of the engineering degree, he hit upon the idea of an 'extended cur- riculum'. Blacks do exactly the same cours- es as whites and are examined just as critically, but they do in three years what the whites would do in two. Special help and training is given to them to help them overcome the handicaps of their poor school education.
The results have been wonderfully encouraging. In their final years blacks do as well as whites. Sass told me that it was crucial to develop the 'study skills' of the black students, breaking their habit of rote- learning (for which they seem to have extraordinary memories) and encouraging understanding and reasoning. He said that his ideas about the intelligence and inher- ent ability of blacks have changed dramati- cally over the ten years he has been working closely with them, and that most of his old prejudices have fallen away. He says that there is no such thing as 'a single IQ test' to judge between the races.
He also told me that, from his experi- ence, the single best judge of a potential engineering student was his ability in his home language. If he had two candidates for an engineering place, one with an A in mathematics and a D in English in his matric results, and one with an A in English and a D in mathematics, he would give the place to the latter. This is a cold-blooded, scientific assessment from a practical man.
Unfortunately, for every Andrew Sass in the South African universities there are a thousand dull-witted, politically correct academic functionaries who speak about `the neo-liberal paradigm' and the 'African cultural ethos', who blame their failures on lack of funds and the 'legacy of apartheid', who cannot write plain English and are sus- picious of anyone who can, and whose only strong emotion is a loathing of original thought and any deviation from their con- stipated orthodoxy. There are clear ways forward for higher education in South Africa, but at the moment the shortage of courage and truth is much more serious than the shortage of money.
The author is an engineer in a South African manufacturing company.
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