I have been a little slow in picking-up on recent events at UCT this week regarding the economics curriculum. One of the non-permanent lecturers on the history of economic thought (HET) course, Kenneth Hughes, has had to stop teaching in person after some students took exception to a piece he wrote about aspects of the Rhodes Must Fall movement and UCT management’s response to RMF. [Subsequently an appropriately punchy response has been published from Russell Ally, Executive Director for Alumni and Development at UCT]
This is really all too predictable, and I have little sympathy for the department or university management: they are reaping the consequences of myopic and unprofessional decisions made in the past (albeit maybe not always by the same protagonists). As I noted in a footnote to a previous piece, when the core staff for the HET course were unavailable, the then-HoD (not the current one) just pulled-in whoever they could with little regard for academic status, qualifications, what they actually taught and so forth.
Continue reading “The predictable, but necessary, drama at UCT”