I must have been in my early 20s, newly graduated, with the “I know everything” arrogance of those fresh out of university. After all, I had a journalism degree and honours in the dramatic arts.
So, when an aged white man I was sent to interview (he’d scored a hole in one — twice on the same day) asked how come I spoke so well (for a darkie, it was implied) my cocky response was that I was very well educated. My parents, I said airily, had spent a fortune on giving me an excellent education.
And so they had. And so I was. Well educated that is. Well, well educated for that period of time in the history of the planet!
I identified with the Beatnik writers, even though I was born on the pointy end of the 1950s and had spent the 1960s being a child. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs…
I could quote (I can’t now!) vast tracts from The Naked Lunch — written the year after I was born. I was intrigued by the journey that junkie, William Lee, took me on, through real and imagined places; the US, Mexico, Tangiers and that mysterious place, Interzone.
As part of my drama honours course, I’d fallen in love with the British playwright Harold Pinter and devoured Betrayal, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker. I’d read them, real books, sitting under a tree on the Drostdy Lawn, eating a Chelsea bun from Paula’s café and drinking hot sweet tea that the Sissies brought out at 10am.
I knew from my history professor that in the year I was born, 1958, until 1961, 45-million people died during the Chinese famine, under the cruel leadership of Mao Zedong. My university life was filled with books and sitting in lecture halls and debate and tutorials and bunking class to go to the beach and talking to interesting people and, well, more debate.
The “word” was spoken, face-to-face. And had been throughout my blissful childhood spent playing with my siblings in our mother’s award-winning garden, keeping clear of her prized rose bushes and avoiding the thick, thorny Sleeping Beauty hedge that surrounded our home.
Disruption has happened, in just about every aspect of our lives. Algorithms are the new gods as artificial intelligence blends with humanity in a way that blurs the physical, biological and digital
It felt safe and cut off from the world in that garden, guarded by intertwined branches that created a prickly barrier between us and our neighbours.
We played board games and read books; my father made up the most incredible stories that always began “Once upon a time in the far-off land of China”. I have no idea why his stories started that way because there was never any Chinese content in them.
We lay on my parents’ bed and listened to the portable radio. I was devastated when I finally saw the movie The Avengers because Diana Rigg looked nothing like the glamorous character she played, Emma Peel, I’d imagined in my head.
Technology came late to us; TV was only introduced to SA in 1976 and so, in my first year at Rhodes University, like everywhere else in the country, Tuesday nights were Dallas nights. For the rest of my time at Rhodes, I went to lectures every day, used notebooks and a pen to take notes, wrote essays on foolscap paper and stapled the pages together so that the covering page displayed my name, always written in capital letters.
I called my parents on Sunday evenings from the pay phone in the rec room in my residence. My mother wrote me a letter every week — long letters in which she told me the minutiae of life in Ladysmith; what my class mates were up to; who’d given birth; died; what she’d served our parish priest when he came to dinner — a dinner my lovely dad had cooked. There was a lot of advice, much of it religious: I should go to mass on Sunday; I should pray every day.
She always ended her letters telling me she loved me and was pleased that I was her daughter; that she was proud of me; that she wanted me to be happy. I know because I have proof in a box filled with those letters tied together in a faded pink satin ribbon. I can still see the spidery sprawl of her cursive stroke, neat and precise, the Is dotted and the Ts crossed with long sideways strokes.
It never crossed my mind that I might not find a job after graduation. If anything, my degree in journalism was so specific that I was almost guaranteed employment. That was the extent of my good education.
‘Re-inventing universities’
So… What’s changed in the last 40 years?
Everything. Everything. Everything has changed.
This week I am at the inaugural National Higher Education Conference being held under the auspices of Universities SA (USAF) in Pretoria. The give away of what has changed, is changing, is in the theme of the conference: “Re-inventing South Africa’s Universities for the Future”.
This conference, and think-tanks and gatherings like it, are happening all over the world in every sphere; business, finance, fashion and, probably most importantly, in academia. Disruption has happened, in just about every aspect of our lives. Algorithms are the new gods as artificial intelligence (AI) blends with humanity in a way that blurs the physical, biological and digital.
We’re in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR); the world as we know it has been turned on its head. Universities are the place of research, think-tanks, experimentation, and contemplation. Everything that once was relevant in the gathering, understanding and disseminating information is different.
The buzzword is future-proofing. And boy, do we need to future-proof our lives.
There are huge fears in our country that “disruptive” technological developments, such as automation, robotics and AI will see the loss of jobs. (Valid fears if you consider the changed labour needs and the subsequent retrenchments in the banking sector.)
However, these changes are also creating opportunities; if we tilt our heads and get new perspective (happening at this USAF conference, I must say), there are new types of jobs and conditions of work. There is new learning, new ways to learn, new ways to interpret what we learn, new ways to access the information that helps us learn.
These have significant consequences for the way students are prepared for the labour market, which is why universities have to reboot, as it were. How you teach is as important as what you teach.
Issues such as student funding, integrity and ethics in academic publishing — even in the need for changed physical spaces — are being debated by some of the finest brains in the land. Change comes hard and I’m being forced to rethink how I think. Daunting and terrifying and wonderful and new and exciting.
Watch this space!
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