AC Grayling, Oxford professor of philosophy – and the author of a recently-published “secular Bible”, The Good Book – has recently announced his intention of establishing the New College of the Humanities (NCH), an elite tertiary education institution. He’ll be joined in this endeavour by a number of intellectual luminaries, including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and Steven Pinker, many of whom will be shareholders in the College.

News of these plans broke while I was writing a previous column on the value of intellectuals and defending the idea of elitism at institutions of higher education, and in the two weeks subsequent to that, the opinion pages of most British newspapers have been littered with responses. Some of these have been favourable, but the majority of them create the impression that Grayling is determined to destroy the notion of education as a public good, and that he and his partners should be defeated at all costs.

Conveniently for many of the critics, Grayling and Dawkins are prominent atheists, so some of the criticism simply accuses them of wanting to institutionalise secularism and then stops there, thinking that some worthwhile point has been made. But outside of a religious university, a secular approach can mostly be assumed – exposing this particular criticism of the NCH as a straightforward attack on the characters of its founders.

More significantly, the matter of the fees charged and the structure of the college have been raised as issues. These are closely related issues, in that the NCH is not a university at all, but instead a provider of tutoring and lectures to assist students in succeeding with their registration for degrees via the University of London International Programmes.

These international programmes have over 50 000 students spread across 180 countries, and around 70% of these students pay independent teaching institutions for tuition towards attaining their University of London degrees. The NCH intends to be one of these independent institutions, and students attending classes at NCH will still pay approximately £1500 in fees to the University of London, as well as a smaller fee of £20 for associate membership of the UL libraries.

On top of this, they will pay £18 000 per year to NCH – double the £9000 cap imposed by government on public universities. And this is where the trouble really starts, in that critics allege that only the rich will be able to afford to attend NCH, and that Grayling and his compatriots are therefore entrenching class privilege.

But this isn’t a public institution. The NCH will receive no state funding, and will offer a service to those who want it, and who can afford it. If it is the UK government’s view that anyone should have access to the best possible education at the lowest possible price, then it is their task to provide that. Disparities in the quality of any good – including education – should not be remedied by simply excising the top end of the market, eliminating healthy competition.

Two other relevant considerations should be born in mind. First, that this is an attempt to introduce a US-style private institution to the UK, and that a fee-comparison with those sorts of institutions might be more relevant than the £9000 public university fee cap. At Harvard, an undergraduate degree costs you £21 500 in tuition fees per year, leaving the NCH looking far less of an outlier.

Second, Grayling intends to offer scholarships to 20% of students at launch, and hopes to increase this to 30% over the first few years of the NCH’s existence. It is his intention that financial means will be no bar to the best students being able to attend classes at the College, thanks to endowments that are currently being solicited. Given the networks that the academics in question have access to, there are some grounds for optimism that sufficient funding will be forthcoming. But even if the endowment scheme does not prove fruitful, the stated wrongfulness of this elite institution remains somewhat mystifying.

Better staff command higher salaries, and well-equipped universities cost more to run than less well-equipped ones. If every student and every curriculum looked exactly the same, we’d eventually see similar rates being charged across the board. But this homogeneity does not exist, and if the NCH offers a superior product, they should be able to charge a higher price.

The notion of tertiary education being a right rather than a privilege underpins these complaints. But that misguided notion does not support restraint of trade – or even charges of moral turpitude – in the case of the NCH. If it did, we should just as readily be complaining about the discrimination of charging R 10 000 a year more at one institution compared to another, in that some potential student will thereby be barred from studying where she wants to thanks to her available means.

At the forefront of the attack on the NCH we find Terry Eagleton, who speaks of the “nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit”. One of his concerns relates to how frequently students at the NCH will even come into contact with Pinker, Dawkins and the other notables, given their teaching, public speaking and other commitments. It’s unclear how their potentially irregular appearances in class differs from Eagleton’s own 3-week per year residency at the (private) University of Notre Dame (annual tuition fee? £ 25 400 p/a), but the extent to which the ‘names’ will and won’t be available is known to students in advance, and they can make an informed and free choice regarding whether they think they are getting their money’s worth or not.

Eagleton’s primary concern is the matter of what he calls “educational apartheid”. He says that if “a system of US-type private liberal arts colleges like this one gains ground in Britain, the result will be to relegate an already impoverished state university system to second-class status”, where we could expect poor students to go to (poor) state universities, while privilege is amplified through rich students being able to access elite institutions such as the NCH.

And yes, this could happen. But people will continue striving to become wealthy in order to afford the sorts of things that (more) money buys, and one of the ways that they do that is through inventing and selling things that rich people want. An elite education is one of those things rich people want, and if it’s being created and sold in a manner which involves no deceit or compulsion, they should be allowed to buy it.

Class divisions and poverty might well be with us forever. But to the extent that we can minimise social ills such as these, the argument that we should do so through forcibly impoverishing any person’s education makes little sense. Disguising historical advantage through not allowing initiatives like the NCH to compete in the educational market does nothing to flatten out that advantage. If we want to get to a world in which every student enjoys an NCH-quality education, starting by denying that privilege to any particular student doesn’t seem the most sensible strategy.

While my focus in last week’s column was on the question of universities as elite institutions, Dlamini’s column, and Molefe’s response to it, addressed the issue of whether universities should be engaged in remedial education and if so, to what extent they should do so.

As should be clear from my previous column, I’d argue that in an ideal world, universities would not be engaged in remedial education. But we of course don’t live in such a world, and it is a fact that students arrive at university with vastly different levels of preparedness for tertiary education. What many outside of universities don’t seem to realise, though, is that this disparity no longer manifests on exclusively racial lines – the sad fact is that many students, of all races and classes, get to university needing remedial education.

One solution for this is a radical increase in entrance requirements. But this would be socially and politically disastrous, because (at least at the University of Cape Town, but I imagine the same is true elsewhere in the country) it would result in mostly white universities, where stereotypes are simply reinforced, and where the university plays a far lesser role in social redress than I believe they should. As I argued last week, the fact that creating intellectuals should be the primary task of a university does not mean it should be their only task.

So, something needs to be done. The question is whether universities can do anything without compromising on intellectual standards, and – more crucially – whether it is their job at all? Because as much as national government might appreciate the fact that universities have a social conscience, the fact remains that by the time students get to university, much of the harm has already been done.

If universities are to encourage critical and creative thinking, of the sort that intellectuals rather than those with technical skills (equally valuable, but in entirely different ways) excel at, students need to develop certain skills. These are difficult to summarise, but they include being able to see beyond the given or surface level, to understand the basics of critical thinking, and to have a sense of how knowledge claims are developed and justified.

But much of one’s basic epistemology and habits in reasoning are already fairly well established by the time you get to university. To the extent that a student has picked up bad habits along the way, you’d need to start their university education undoing much of that harm before trying to lay new foundations, and before teaching the subject material the student has registered to learn.

The harm that has been done is not only the fault of Outcomes-based Education. We cannot ignore the fact that we are living in what Herbert Simon dubbed an Attention Economy, where the bombardment of signals and information we are exposed to result in your first victory as an educator being simply getting a student to read, or to listen for the entire 45 minutes of a lecture.

And this raises a quite practical problem, regardless of the meta-debates around racial redress in a country like ours. If we are to engage in remedial education at the university, where do we find the time or the curricular space? Something has to give – either subject-specific content must be sacrificed (resulting in weaker graduates), or we need to lengthen the period of study, making time for this remedial education.

I would hope that few people have appetite for the former course of action. And the main problem with the latter is quite simply that university study costs a fair amount of money, bringing us right back to the class problem – and therefore the race problem, at least in a South African context. While I’ve said that students from all classes get to university ill-equipped for success, it remains true that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are likely to be more so, and that these students will often be black.

Making this point on Twitter resulted in my being told that the “causal theory of learning was discredited centuries ago”, and that “stupidity is evenly distributed, not as a result of Apartheid”. While I’d agree that stupidity is evenly distributed, that’s obviously not the same thing as readiness for tertiary study. And as far as I can tell, the latter is certainly related to apartheid, regardless of what the ‘causal theory of learning’ might say.

I have not personally encountered this theory, and Google is not very accommodating on the subject. But if it’s premised on the idea that antecedent factors have little effect on a student’s chances of success in education, then it sounds like straightforward nonsense.

Some South African citizens still grow up in houses without books, and have parents who are ill-equipped to help them with their schoolwork or university assignments. Some South Africans have to commute further than others to get to school or university. Some might have a less reliable electricity supply, or more irregular internet access. In fact, many do, and in the years I spent dealing with the readmissions process at UCT, I came across hundreds who cited exactly these sorts of factors as being causally relevant to their struggles at UCT.

These students were often black. The fact that their circumstances were suboptimal is certainly at least partly, and probably mostly, the result of apartheid. And we know that education is in crisis in South Africa – so much so that smart folk like Jonathan Jansen are even prepared to bring in the nuns. While I’d not recommend the nuns, seeing as they tend to be accompanied by beliefs that run completely counter to critical thought, I can certainly endorse the call to start taking primary and secondary education far more seriously.

And yes, tertiary education should also be taken more seriously, at least insofar as it relates to addressing the fact that students need remedial education. But we should take on this burden with great reluctance, in that it will of necessity crowd out time spent on our core business at the university – the creation of elite thinkers, who should be able to emerge from any class, race or gender. We should remind ourselves that it is a privilege, not a right, to be at university.

But we should also remind ourselves that this privilege should be available to all – and that making it so is best achieved before students even arrive at university. In schools, in other words.

In Business Day last week, Jacob Dlamini argued that “universities should not be doing the work of high schools. Universities should not be in the business of remedial education”. TO Molefe has responded to Dlamini’s column, making the case that academic excellence is not the only imperative at universities, and that they do have a role to play in reshaping society through ‘remedial’ education.

A host of issues, some more controversial than others, are raised in this conversation. I’ve already shared some of my views on outcomes-based education and the infinitely-flexible (at least in the context of higher education) word ‘transformation’, in a column from last year. And while there can be little argument that universities operate within a social context, and that it would be impractical, probably inefficient and possibly immoral to ignore that context, I do think that we should guard against this context encouraging a form of anti-elitism, where the traditional standards of excellence are set in opposition to the goal of creating an open opportunity society.

Elitism does not need to be defined by race or class. But in many of the debates one encounters regarding the role of the university, this redefinition seems to be taking hold. If we allow ourselves to forget that excellence is a virtue, we run the risk of making many of our activities quite self-defeating.

If you attend The Juilliard School, it is probably because you want to become an excellent musician. If you train for the Comrades marathon, it is because you want to become an excellent endurance athlete. Or at least, you want to move yourself up the scale, closer to excellence and further from mediocrity. If you didn’t have that goal, you would not pursue those means, and if society saw no value in those goals more generally, the means to achieve them would cease to exist.

What are the goals of university educations, and therefore the point of universities existing at all? There is certainly more than one, but alongside goals such as social transformation, one of those goals is surely academic excellence – the sort that allows or encourages the best research, often informing the best policy, or the most creative innovation. Fostering academic excellence is what the university has traditionally been best at doing, and intuitively, it would see that they would perform this job most efficiently if it was allowed to be their primary focus.

This is why T.O. Molefe’s disputation of the notion “that universities exist to create intellectuals” is worrying. I could agree that it’s not all they exist to do, but to claim that this is not the reason for their existence is, well, anti-intellectual. While this sounds like (and is) entirely circular reasoning, it’s defensible on the grounds that creating intellectuals is what the university is designed to do, and that this is a good thing – so long as intellectuals don’t need to be rich, or white, or male.

The fact that they often are (comparatively) rich, white and male is a problem. This is why creating intellectuals should not be their only goal – but it in no way speaks against the fact that it could nevertheless be their primary goal. So, in order to address some of the issues raised by both Dlamini and Molefe, one perhaps has to start by defending the value of intellectuals (and intellectualism generally), regardless of the practical demands of the society in which they find themselves.

People respond to incentives, as do institutions. To define universities as having the primary responsibility of affecting social change means that academics will increasingly be required to become agents of social change. The worst possible sorts of consequences of this are obvious: all research funding, and all student subsidies, being channelled to courses and degrees which are socially responsive. And seeing as it’s far easier to see the short-term social effects of more engineers and accountants in the marketplace compared to philosophers and literary critics, justifying the existence of the latter sort of person will – and has already – become increasingly difficult.

A second sort of consequence (again, the worst-case scenario) is that academic activity would increasingly be driven towards specialisation, where your outputs can rapidly be translated into policy implementation. The pressure to address some sort of practical concern, be it poverty, sexism, racism, or the restitution of land will contribute to driving out or marginalising what we could perhaps call the public intellectual – the person who writes about potentially public issues in (sometimes) accessible language, and whose freedom to think outside of practical and social constraints can allow for unique insights, highlighting emerging problems that the more technically inclined might be less equipped to notice.

This pressure has been observed even in the discipline you might think most insulated, namely philosophy. Richard Rorty has pointed out that the “older sort of philosophy professor is dying out. The newer type is technically trained, devoted to ‘cases’, and argumentation – not history, morals, or public issues”. In other words, even the most rarefied intellectual activity is driven towards the practical. And while I’d agree that much philosophy strays too far in the direction of only being relevant to imaginary worlds, we should be wary of over-correction here, where we disincentivise all speculative thinking in order to address pragmatic reality.

The point is that achieving intellectual distance from the demands of the day, such as prevailing social or political conditions, form crucial features of the required intellectual conditions for permitting some forms of thought, and that these forms of thought can greatly extend the boundaries of our knowledge.

It’s not only in the academy that this is important. The citizen outside of the university sometimes needs to be reminded that politicians can spin the truth or that scientists sometimes cherry-pick the data. These are theoretical issues, and a culture in which they are treated as real and important issues is a culture that will be more prone to debate, civilised disagreement and learning.

If the universities are not allowed to encourage this, it’s not clear who will. Universities do so by encouraging intellectual activity. More to the point, they do so by encouraging the best intellectual activity possible under the conditions in which they operate. Elite intellectual activity, in other words, albeit constrained by circumstance as all things are.

The problem is not in the elitism, but in the fact that not everyone has equal opportunity to become elite. But let’s not demonise elitism for the sake of equality.

While South Africa’s Constitution attracts justified praise for its commitment to preserving various freedoms, we should remain vigilant in our defence of the rights it affords us, and consistent in our engagement with the responsibilities that correlate with those rights. When proposed legislation threatens to chill free speech, it’s appropriate for us to use that freedom to challenge measures such as the POI bill. In the absence of such vigilance, the Constitution could end up with little more than symbolic value.

But while much of our attention has of late been on various questions related to press freedom, a quiet – but worrying, and ongoing – erosion of other freedoms should not be allowed to pass unnoticed. And this is freedom of belief, or more specifically, the freedom to have no beliefs at all, particularly of a religious sort. The place where this freedom is threatened is in schools, where despite official policy which insists on religious neutrality, many schools continue to abuse their captive and impressionable audiences by proselytizing for one specific religious viewpoint or another.

The National Policy on Religion and Education (2003) is a wonderful document. Kader Asmal’s foreword tells us that the Policy “adopts a co-operative model that accepts our rich heritage and the possibility of creative inter-action between schools and faith whilst,[sic] protecting our young people from religious discrimination or coercion”, and that it “is neither negative nor hostile towards any religion or faith and does not discriminate against anyone”. Most important, perhaps, is that it calls for “a profound appreciation of spirituality and religion in its many manifestations, … but does not impose these”.

The Policy makes for interesting reading, as finding a compromise between the religious – and mostly Christian – beliefs of many of our citizens, and the need to embrace the possibility of a diversity of views is a tricky task. The Policy meets this challenge by defining “religion education” as an activity that requires “a spirit of openness in which there shall be no overt or covert attempt to indoctrinate pupils into any particular belief or religion”, with “religious instruction” understood as “instruction in a particular faith or belief, with a view to the inculcation of adherence to that faith or belief”. The former is permitted in schools, the latter not. In fact, the state “must maintain parity of esteem with respect to religion, religious or secular beliefs in all of its public institutions, including its public schools”.

But these noble intentions often seem to bear little relation to what might actually be happening in many of our public schools. Consider a school like Stellenbosch Primary, whose website says things like: “Die skool sal ‘n Christelike karakter hê en dit sal in alle aktiwiteite uitgeleef word” (the school will have a Christian character, and this will be exemplified in all its activities). And this Christian character frequently seems to involve keeping children in the dark ages, judging by the regular emails I receive from both parents and learners at various schools, expressing dismay at having to endure classes which dismiss evolution, and instead preach the explanatory value of creationism.

As many readers will know, the teaching of evolution has recently been in the spotlight due to a proposed policy change which will remove it as a compulsory topic in schools. The topic is alleged to be “cognitively too demanding”. The irony is of course that the concept of a triune God, or immortality of the soul, are orders of magnitude more cognitively demanding than the basic principles of evolution by natural selection. The travesty is that the lack of qualified teachers in this and other subjects is not being fixed by better incentivising those who might want to teach, but instead by dumbingdown the curriculum.

As part of the same round of revisions to the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), the Life Skills curriculum uses plenty of neutral-sounding language while simultaneously allowing for much dogma to be transmitted into the minds of your children. While it speaks of the virtues of producing learners who are able to “critically evaluate information”, it’s simultaneously littered with sentiments that express a necessary connection between religion and morality.

In Grade 6, learners get to hear about “risks or dangers associated with non participation; penalties for non participation.” And of course there may be risks, especially if your family or community is hostile to any questioning of their chosen worldview. But there may also be benefits, and we see no mention of these in the curriculum. Furthermore, seeing as it is quite plausible that what risks there are often result from irrational adherence and defence of dogmatic faith, discussion of the risks should really be framed as a problem with religious belief – not a problem for the learner who is thinking about opting out of religion.

In fact, the dogmatic retention of religious points of view is perhaps encouraged in the curriculum by requirements like “The teaching of Religion Education must be sensitive to religious interests by ensuring that individuals and groups are protected from ignorance, stereotypes, caricatures, and denigration“. What does “sensitive” mean in this context? Is it a stereotype or caricature to say that for some believers, the content of their beliefs contradict established knowledge in biology, physics or cosmology? It’s easy to claim offense, and the lessons learners are taught here will further reinforce the idea that the victory will always go to the hypersensitive, and those who complain the loudest.

Teaching learners about the wrongness of “discrimination against religions” and “accommodating religious diversity” is not necessarily problematic, so long as being critical does not automatically make one discriminatory. And, of course, so long as we also find counterbalancing mentions of the wrongness of discrimination against the non-religious, and how laws against “religious discrimination” may in fact exist in tension to laws around freedom of speech.

While children remain free to excuse themselves from religious ceremonies, prayers and the like, two significant problems are not addressed by the “freedom of association” embedded in existing school policy. First, if your school’s character is explicitly defined as Christian, you have no option to disassociate yourself on a formal level, except by leaving the school. If there are no other schools in your area, or that are suitable for whatever reason, then you are compelled to study at a school that is Christian in character, despite the fact that public schools are not permitted to take on or practice the character of any particular religion.

Second, and more disturbingly, children cannot be expected to have the independence of mind which would allow them to disassociate themselves from such activities, or to recognise that what is being taught to them as consisting of critical enquiry, and tolerance of diversity, is in fact significantly biased towards a religious point of view. Consider also peer pressure: If all of their friends happily say their prayers, I doubt that we would find many children willing to risk the potential social repercussions of excusing themselves. They would instead meekly play along, despite the fact that the mystic mumbo-jumbo they are exposed to might make no sense to them at all.

And in the manner of all propaganda and brainwashing, it may well end up being the case that some – or many – of these children end up taking the nonsense they hear seriously, and thereby consign one part of their rational brains to eternal sleep. We have an existing policy – the National Policy on Religion and Education – which reminds schools that religion education (a neutral account of various religious points of view) is permissible in schools, and religious instruction not. The CAPS are not in accord with this policy, and neither are many of our schools.

This is one of those areas which present a real threat of the subtle erosion of the liberties enshrined in our Constitution. We have little reason to be alarmed at the teaching of religious traditions and points of view in schools, so long as they are presented critically rather than being yoked to concepts like “equipping learners, irrespective of their socio-economic background, race, gender, physical ability or intellectual ability, with the knowledge, skills and values necessary for self-fulfilment, and meaningful participation in society as citizens of a free country”.

Self-fulfilment and meaningful participation is possible for us all, not only for those who believe in one particular religious tradition. Meaningful participation is even possible for those who think any religious traditions are a handicap to self-fulfilment. We can have little control over what children are taught in their homes, but ideology taught as objectivity has no place in public education. After all, schooling is meant to make one smarter, rather than to transmit the crippling notion that there is only one route to human flourishing.

The recent demonstration of homophobic intolerance at the University of Cape Town shows us – once again – that education is no obstacle to ignorance and bigotry. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the details, the story is this: Last week, the student organisation RainbowUCT (in association with UCT management) convened Pink Week, intended to celebrate and promote sexual diversity.

One of the features of Pink Week was the installation of The Closet, a bright pink closet on Jameson Hall plaza, which displayed messages related to instances of discrimination in South Africa and abroad. Students and staff were invited to graffiti the outside of this closet with their own examples, or to express their views on homophobia and discrimination more generally.

For some, it seems that peaceable expression of their views via graffiti was insufficient to convey their Neanderthal message. At around 11pm on the first day of Pink Week, less than twelve hours after it was put on display, someone chose to instead set The Closet ablaze, leaving us in no doubt as to the extent of their commitment to ideas such as tolerance, diversity and the rights of all to exercise their sexual freedom.

Gay rights activists on campus are understandably angry and disappointed. The real question, however, is perhaps “why isn’t everybody else?” Instead, many of the comments appearing alongside this story in our online newspapers say things like “gay people, get over yourselves!!! Be gay, but stop forcing it down on society. Be gay in silence like the rest of the world is straight in silence.” Or, they channel Fred Phelps and utter sentiments such as “if GOD won’t accept GAYS why should we! Stop the Filth STOP the GAYS!”

Besides their apparent predilection for multiple exclamation marks and shouty capitalised words, commenters such as these share the feature of being ignorant and offensive. In contrast to the sorts of commenters discussed last week, I do however suspect that this crop might be prepared to express these sentiments to gay people directly, in that they seem to imagine their stance is a principled one.

For the first comment quoted above, “MC” might well believe what he or she is saying, but this belief does little to dispel the appearance of prejudice. It is only through the lens of prejudice that this sort of comment can appear sensible, in that it ignores the significant bias towards heterosexuality that is evident in advertising, cinema, and all other forms of popular culture.

This point can be made clear through the analogous case of racial prejudice, where MC would probably not think it appropriate to ask blacks to be black in silence, just like whites are white in silence. Some of us are silent out of choice – for we have the power to do so – and others are silent because they are aware that their views (or their beliefs) attract antagonisms.

As for the second commenter, named “Anonymous”, it would probably be of little use to ask that he or she reconsider the appropriateness of basing 21st century moral judgements on the intuitions of largely uneducated folk from centuries in the past. But we can ask for consistency, and therefore ask him or her to account for the fact that many who believe in the same God do not think gay people are “filth[y]” or unacceptable to God.

One doubts that an anonymous commenter with such a simplistic approach to linguistic emphasis (capitals seem to be their only trick) would have the theological sophistication to defend their homophobia coherently and consistently. After all, the strongest Biblical injunctions typically used to denounce homosexuality are found in Leviticus, alongside prohibitions on eating “abominations” such as rabbits, pigs, and shellfish, and it’s quite likely that the commenter does not adhere to these rules as enthusiastically. If he does, then he is hopefully also aware that on a literal reading of the book in question, he would be allowed to keep slaves and have sex with his daughter.

Despite the prejudiced nature of the quoted comments, as well as the hate speech that the burning of The Closet might constitute, RainbowUCT’s statement in response displayed a tolerance that the homophobes would do well to emulate. The response, pasted on the burnt Closet, read: “This Closet was supposed to highlight the homoprejudice that still burns through the fabric of our society. Apparently, it also burns through our own campus”.

The University has opened case of destruction of property, and also say that they are treating the matter as a “serious crime”. This is good, but not enough. Students, staff, and management of this and other universities – as well as South Africans outside of the academy – should not think that these and other prejudices will diminish and eventually disappear, simply because we have an enlightened Constitution and/or because of the limping progress our species seems to be making toward becoming civilised.

For as long as we allow moral sentiment to be dictated by dogma – whether in the form of religious belief, cultural norms, or any other form of privileged discourse – we can never count on being able to shake off these prejudices. From amoeba to zebra, there are optimum ways of functioning. It is our task to begin the job of treating moral principles as seriously as we take other disputed forms of knowledge, so that we can establish which norms are optimal for both our species, as well as for those other species whose welfare we influence.

This involves paying attention to the evidence, and establishing whether our moral principles correspond to that evidence. It involves identifying and understanding the motivation for the principles we subscribe to, and ensuring that those motivations are consistent with others that we believe to be proper, and whether they seem to stand the best chance of conducing to human welfare – regardless of the race, gender or sexual orientation of the humans in question.

Of course, it involves a whole lot more too, and more will be said in due course. But on the issue of RainbowUCT and the burning of The Closet, one thing is clear: Being a student at a top university in South Africa seems to offer no guarantee of enlightened attitudes, or an ability to see outside of the closet of your own prejudices. And then, of course, it’s not enough to simply leave the closet in any case – you also have to get out of the house.

Waiting until you are married to have sex seems, in our sexually saturated culture, a rather old-fashioned, even idealistic, concept. In Western culture, moral standards seem to have slackened as more and more people are engaging in acts of copulation for recreation as opposed to procreation. Every sperm is no longer sacred! As people embrace their sexuality and desires, the practicality of our moral code is called into question. Why wait until marriage to discover the joys of sex?

The principal reasons for pledging purity are religious – to a sworn atheist, this seems absurd. There is no one biblical verse condemning sex before marriage; Christians suggest instead that this message can be inferred.

In Deuteronomy 22:13-22, for example, it is clear virginity when getting married is expected and sex before marriage is termed “a disgraceful act”. This is just one of many examples and the message is pretty clear. What the Bible fails to do, for me however, is provide adequate reasoning.
The only legitimate reason I can see for keeping sexual partners to a minimum is the risk of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. STDs are almost a symbol of promiscuity – the price of pleasure. And there is a belief that if everyone behaved responsibly the epidemic would end. So the church has made it its mission to ensure that everybody behaves.

In 1495, a new disease started appearing all over Europe and its symptoms were terrifying. A doctor at the time described it as “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.” Such was the explosive birth of syphilis.

Christopher Columbus and his crew have been accused of bringing the disease back with them from the Americas to Europe where it raged its way through the population, killing millions of people. During this period people’s attitudes towards sex changed radically. The church pushed its no-sex-before-marriage agenda hard and it to started win its battle.

Telling people they will die from disease if they have too much sex doesn’t work. We all need to believe that we will never die; that it can never happen to us, otherwise we would never be able to leave our houses.

However, if you make something deplorable, you attach stigma to it, and ensure that those who indulge in it will be ostracised; in this way people feel as though they can lose something tangible, something real. I am suggesting that the church has transformed pre-marital sex into a sin in order to protect its flock from real diseases, not hell. Once this disease was syphilis, now it is AIDS.

The moralistic preaching about sex before marriage has no place in our post-religious society. There is something profoundly wrong with telling people sex is dirty, therefore you must save it for marriage. Sex is not dirty.

For most of us, we have enough insecurities when it comes to the fuzzy tinkle times without having to worry about whether God is watching us and enjoying the show or not. This mindset imposed by the church had created guilt even when having sex with a steady partner.

This is wrong. Sex is about freedom, choice and exploration – and to be cheesy and romantic, love. And there is nothing wrong with that. Just use a condom.

Now, besides the apparent contradiction contained in the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, this appears to be a reasonable opinion piece, and one that warms the cockles of my heart (no, I don’t have those either) in expressing a naturalistic outlook on the question of premarital sex. But for some, what Ms Mitchell says is completely beyond the bounds of decency and good sense. And no, I’m not talking about Taryn Hodgson or Errol Naidoo, but rather a soon-to-be graduate of one of the more demanding programmes at the University of Cape Town. Let’s call him “Gershwin”. Gershwin offers us some impassioned pleas, in an email that was addressed to 114 people (including some mailing lists, so probably many more). He feels so strongly about the matter that he even included the Vice-Chancellor in his entreaty. I did reply to tell him that this was spam, and in contravention of UCT email policies, but perhaps he thinks that those policies are evil too. Anyway, let’s see what he says:

I am writing too you out of serious concern because of what has been written in the 24 August 2010 Volume 69: Number 9 issue of the varsity newspaper. I have attached an electronic version of the article for you to read.

My concerns are :

1. This has serious damaging effect on the students who do not have an standpoint on the matter of sex before marriage and will be swayed into thinking that this article has any substance
2. UCT is a prestigious university and one does not expect writing and lack of depth of thought of this calibre.

This article is intellectually limited and carries too much harmful effects too be taken lightly.

So, besides the implicit claim in (1) that students who don’t yet have a standpoint on “this matter” should presumably adopt Gershwin’s standpoint (which we’ll hear about soon), we’re probably also entitled to ask for some defense of the claim that the article has no substance. Maybe Kathryn got some facts wrong? Gershwin will hopefully enlighten us. On point 2, no argument from me – just the observation that Gershwin might well be in the process of getting his own petard ready for some hoisting.

Please I urge to help me undo the damage that the author has Kathryn Mitchell has caused. Please give me your opinions on the matter so that we together may create a better and deeper understanding of this topic

Here is what my thoughts on the matter are:

1. I believe that sex should be preserved for marriage because it the most deepest connection you can have with your partner. if you are constantly having sex with many partners you have shared that deep connection with many people. This means that your deepest connection is worth less.
2. From a spiritual point of view, sharing your spirit with people constantly leads ones spirit to be torn up in the end and one would constantly feel empty.
3. From an empirical point of view their are psychological studies (I have looked them up) that prove that couples who engage in sex before marriage most times end up being divorced. Hence we have high divorce rates, dysfunctional homes and even abuse
4. From a moral point of view, it is simply wrong.

We need to paint a proper picture and not simply eradicate the author’s view. I have not even considered a moral argument as the author clearly, from the article, lacks this. It would seem she is using this article to hide from her own sexual immorality.

People do not need to make this mistake before they understand its immensity.
Pleading you understand

Well, he asks for opinions, so here are mine, addressing his points in order:

1. Why should we care what you believe, Gershwin? I, by contrast, think that wrestling escaped marmosets together is the deepest connection one can make with a partner. Sure, doing so often leads to sex, but that’s not why we do it. If you think that sex involves the deepest connection possible, that’s fine – go forth and live according to your chosen standard. But if you want it to be anyone else’s standard, you’ll need to tell them why.
2. Even if one believed in the idea of a “spirit” (and there’s no good reason to, Gershwin), we’d also need to know plenty about the nature of that spirit. Maybe it can handle being shared? Perhaps it’s robust enough to sleep around with some other spirits without getting torn up and all. And sure, meaningless sex can make you feel a bit shallow, some of the time. But we can get meaning from all sorts of places – and while one of those places might be marriage, marriage has no monopoly on interpersonal meaning.
3. Oooh, you’ve looked them up, have you? I’ve looked some stuff up too. One of my sources says you’re an idiot, but the data isn’t quite clear, so I’m happy to judge you on your words instead, which appear to come from a distinctly idiotic religious space. Other sources I’ve looked up tell me that divorce rates are highest amongst religious believers, that all so-called “happiness indexes” consistently rank secular nations above religious ones, etc. And I can actually offer my sources, and have often done so on previous posts here – instead of just asking you to take my word for it.
4. What does that mean? What moral theory or framework are you appealing to, Gershwin? Sure, people can be harmed in sexual interactions, but that can happen whether they are marital or pre-marital. You need to give us an argument here, rather than just tell us it’s “simply wrong”. It’s not simple at all – you are, for claiming that it is.

Gershwin then tells us that he has not even considered a moral argument, which is of course clear from his letter. He does apparently seem to think that he’s offered some sort of argument, but all I can see are assertions, backed by unshakable prejudice. It’s bloody sad that 4 years of expensive education sometimes add up to this sort of stupidity.

A Higher Education summit hosted by the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, is taking place at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology on April 22 and 23. Much of the focus at the summit will be on “transformation”, one of the more flexible words you’ll encounter while working at a South African university. This is saying a lot, especially since many departments – at my university at least – still seem completely enamoured by the liberating brew of postmodernism, which of course allows for infinite lexical flexibility.

Perhaps this is simply another example of political correctness gone awry – we all know that transformation relates primarily to race, but to explicitly say so may be impolitic, in that colour-blindness is a virtue that we’re all meant to be aspiring to, even in cases where economic inequalities premised on race persist. Instead, transformation becomes code for various social issues, and allows us to collapse concerns around equity, throughput, policies on wheelchair ramps, and whatever else does not currently have its own committee under one handy banner.

For example, the most recent message from the Transformation Officer in my Faculty related to the “Executive Secretaries and Personal Assistants International Symposium”, which I had a difficult time relating to anything obviously to do with transformation. But then, perhaps I’m not transformed myself, or perhaps I’m simply insufficiently postmodern.

This is not to say that there’s no value in considering issues to do with transformation – in fact, I’m in full agreement that transformation, carefully defined, is one of the most important things we can discuss in a country with such obvious inequalities. But there needs to be a division of labour here, and universities already have a job to do: that of teaching, and of trying to help students to recover from their OBE lobotomies.

Where university policies and pedagogy are clearly limiting transformation, those certainly need to be redressed – but great care needs to be taken in realising the limits of what one can do in three or four years when students reach you with differing abilities, and where your job is primarily to teach, rather than to assist with social engineering.

One of the stated aims of this summit is to “identify key objectives for the higher education sector”. I’m not sure how many people realise what happens in the average university classroom, or in the offices of academic staff, where one is often made to feel like a client-service representative, where the customer is always right, and their questions always have merit, regardless of whether they have anything to do with your subject or not.

This is a discussion that I have with new students every year: whether they consider themselves to be customers or not. The distinction I’m trying to get them to grapple with is that as students, they are themselves a key determinant of how good the “product” ends up being. In other words, they cannot just place their orders and all expect to get the same result in terms of knowledge acquired.

While there are certainly some aspects of the relationship between educators and students that are analogous to suppliers and customers, it is an incredibly poor model to base one’s academic interactions on, as it encourages passivity on the part of the student, as well as a mindset which focuses on the rights of a student, rather than on their responsibilities.

And part of the problem can be traced back to outcomes-based education, where processes, systems and formulas are put in place in an effort to achieve certain defined outcomes. But one of the negative consequences of such defined structures is a lack of tolerance for ambiguity, and a lack of awareness that confusion can sometimes be productive. Education – at least in the formative years – is not about defined outcomes. It’s about developing a worldview, and a relationship to evidence/data, which allows you to separate quality content from bunk.

So before we try to turn out a worker bee, competent at various defined tasks, we need to first focus on intellectual attributes. Once those are in place, you can choose to apply your intellectual abilities to whatever field is attractive to you. The attributes in question are foundational to learning: critical thinking, close reading, composition and other similarly unfashionable skills. Without these, we are intellectually crippled; no matter how good a stockbroker, lawyer, or politician you may end up becoming. Your career prospects would most likely be capped at becoming a spokesperson for the ANC Youth League, and those jobs never seem to last long.

Part of knowledge-acquisition is an awareness of context. Perhaps part of the answer lies in the fact that students are not encouraged to ask the right questions, in that most of their questions during schooling have been in the pursuit of clarifying something they don’t understand, rather than meta-questions regarding why they should bother to understand it at all, what the purpose of that knowledge is, what it leads to, and so forth. In other words, they assume they are being offered a product, and their investigations start and end with understanding what that product is. Their investigations seldom involve whether it’s the right product, or indeed whether they should consider it a product at all.

Part of what needs to change is for the focus of universities to return to being demanding centres of excellence, rather than the place where overqualified nannies perform the remedial work required as a consequence of poor schooling. This is of course not going to happen, primarily because of political expediency. As a mostly 3rd-world country, we’re in a race with other developing nations to provide the technical labour force for global markets. We also want to fix unemployment problems, and the approach taken at the primary and secondary levels of education seems to be one of trying to quickly and massively empower people so that they can eventually participate in those markets.

Not everyone needs or wants a tertiary education, and this approach presents little obstacle to their prospects – it may well enhance them. But increasing numbers of those who do want a tertiary education arrive at university, only to find that they don’t have the basic skills they need. Numeracy is the issue most often identified here, but the problem is deeper than that, and relates to most forms of critical engagement with any type of data.

The consequence of this is the choice between three broad options: increased failure rates at universities, the lowering of their standards, or for universities to stop imagining themselves as elite institutions, and to instead focus on doing the sort of job that used to be the domain of the technicon, where people went when they wanted more than high school, but not quite as much as what university offered.

Given that State funding to universities is based primarily on throughput, increased failure rates (while maintaining traditional standards) are not really an option. The lowering of standards should not be an option, and is an idea which is routinely met with loud protestations in the academy, despite much corridor consensus that it has already happened.

Or, the universities consent to the notion that education – understood in the context of their (historical) high standards – is no longer their only purpose, and that they also have a transformation job to do. If we choose this route, it is important to realise that it has to involve some dilution of excellence in teaching and research, as resources are being diverted to tasks other than those. The notion that there is no conflict here simply doesn’t wash.

I’m not intending to make a moral judgement on these issues – at least not today. But the future this suggests is one of a future South Africa which enjoys a large and mostly competent workforce, able to fill as many technical and bureaucratic job-shaped holes as there may be available, both here and abroad. But this future doesn’t leave enough room for encouraging students to play the roles of visionaries or leaders. If education becomes mostly about pragmatism, we can hardly blame students for responding to the demands of the market they find themselves in.

As of January 1 2010, blasphemy is a crime in Ireland, with offenders liable for a €25000 fine. Later in January, Kurt Westergaard – one of those responsible for the infamous “Danish cartoons” – was attacked in his home by a knife-wielding fanatic. Closer to home, some readers of Sax Appeal may still harbour memories of the outrage provoked by the “blasphemous” content of Sax Appeal 2009, and some others (well, the same ones, probably) may currently be choking on their morning tea while trying to process the harms they believe themselves to be enduring as a result of the edition you are currently reading.

Well, good. If they splutter and cough for long enough, the next episode of Egoli or some such may just come along and distract them, and thereby save the rest of us from having to tolerate the harms and headaches of having to process the incoherent claims the faithful like to make, where omnipotent deities are suddenly – mysteriously – under threat as a result of some attempt at humour, no matter how feeble or sophisticated that humour might be.

In wars premised on ideology and dogma, our sense of perspective is often the first casualty. While nobody likes to be offended, having to endure a certain amount of offense is one of the prices we pay for living in a free society – and the same liberties that allow columnists to lampoon a belief that you hold dear are those that allow you to express those same beliefs freely. And given the tolerance awarded to metaphysics in our society, it might be true to say that for every homoeopathist, faith-healer, or quack of another sort, only half a joke is made at their expense – although I expect that this ratio overestimates the number of jokes we allow ourselves in these areas.

While it’s deeply offensive to me that some universities (not ours, thankfully) offer courses in things like homeopathy, or fail to censure staff who contribute to the spread of Bronze Age mythology in lecture halls, I don’t believe that I have any sort of rights or entitlement in terms of making them stop. As David Mitchell recently pointed out (borrowing from J.S. Mill):
“Let the idiots and bullies speak openly and they will be revealed for what they are!” is the idea. It’s a brilliant one and, in confident, educated societies, it almost always works – certainly much more often than any of the alternatives.

It’s true that some of the material published in Sax Appeal 2009 was offensive – given UCT’s professed standards, I would have hoped for the jokes to be cleverer. The concerns were however not about how funny the jokes were, but rather revolved around the idea that the jokes were taboo, in that they attacked some sacred cow or another. But our sense of what is – or should be – taboo cannot be trusted, as the arrogance implied by the position that your beliefs are beyond question eliminates the possibility of personal and social advancement.

When we find ourselves offended by something, we have three basic options. The first – and the one that seemed most prevalent following last year’s Sax Appeal – is to make the claim that the harms you feel are somehow privileged, and that others should respect your beliefs. But this response, if taken seriously, affords extra protection to those who complain the most or threaten the most violence. If the arguments for your position are sound, a more appropriate response might be to simply explain to the rest of us where we are going wrong – you can’t do yourself any favours in terms of persuading us by throwing your toys about.

Second, you can chose to ignore the offense, and simply hope that it goes away. It usually doesn’t, which brings me to the third response, which consists of realising that while people might sometimes be rude or offensive, this is an entirely separate issue from the quality of the ideas they express. Just as I have the option of responding to claims that offend, or simply strike me as bizarre, those offended by mockery of the things they hold dear have the same option.

Exercising this option has two clear advantages. It allows for the possibility of changing your own mind, in that the mockery might provoke debate and discussion about the motivations for causing the offense. It also challenges you to question the motivations for holding the very beliefs that have been mocked. Not allowing for these possibilities amounts to immunising yourself from correction, and that seems (to borrow a phrase from Christopher Hitchens) like “cultural and moral suicide”. It also seems like something that should have no place at UCT, or in the minds of the team who put together this year’s Sax Appeal.

* Having now bought the magazine, my piece isn’t in there – and neither is there much that could be considered offensive to anybody in the 2010 edition. It appears that the censors took their jobs quite seriously this year…

If any army was to lose three quarters of its forces it would not be considered a defeat -but a disaster. Statistically, 75% of young people from Christian homes who enrol at university are lost to the church.

He unfortunately does not cite the studies that show this, but I’m going to treat it as true, and pin this inspirational paragraph above my office desk to see me through those days when it seems like you’re not getting through to the students at all. Thank you, Dr. Hammond.

Unfortunately, he and his wife are committed to undermining our good work through home schooling and events like their upcoming Summit, which I had the pleasure of speaking at a couple of years ago. If you’ve seen Torchwood: Children of Earth, then you know what my night there was like – lots of sinister, glassy-eyed youth staring at me with confused malice in their eyes.

Dear Lenora (Pastor Paintball’s wife) says that

Men who follow Jesus Christ the dragon-slayer, must themselves become lesser dragon-slayers. And this is why it is absolutely essential for boys to play with wooden swords and plastic guns.

While I don’t have any principled objection to home-schooling, it is saddening that Lenora and Peter’s 4 children are being handicapped so thoroughly by their parents, and that having to tolerate this sort of abuse is a consequence of living in a (roughly) liberal democracy. But given that Frontline is both the name of Dr. Paintball Hammond’s group of evangelical nutters, as well as the name of a product dedicated to ridding your pets of fleas, we should all be quite nervous about rumours of Hammond having previously been involved in gun-running for Sudanese rebels. After all, us reasonable people may appear somewhat flea-like and evil to them at times, and

We want to instill in them a hatred for evil and to have a deep desire to fight it
…
The Christian faith is in no way pacifistic. The peace that will be ushered in by our great Prince will be a peace purchased with blood.

(that’s Lenora again, on your parental duties to let your kids play with tog guns and swords).

The recipe of a pro-gun stance in a violent country, and encouraging kids to play with guns, while teaching them all sorts of nonsense about their duties to defend that nonsense in the world is a pretty scary one. But if we’re lucky, the Hammond brood will come to UCT, and we’ll see what we can do to save them.

P.S. A colleague from the UCT Atheist and Agnostic Society points out the Frontline Fellowship’s “lying for Jesus” campaign is still going strong: their fictitious account of the aborted debate is still the second link on their home page.

On Blasphemy Day this year, I happened to be giving lectures on morality, which included a discussion on how religion isn’t necessary for morality (in fact, I argued that religion can be positively harmful to moral reasoning). In the course of the lecture, some implications of deriving morality from religion were teased out, and I did so in a manner which involved some teasing, which seemed to cause offence to a few of the students.

One came to me afterwards to indicate that he thought my treatment of the subject was inappropriate – I had “disrespected” something that he (and many of his peers) take seriously. I suspect that he was somewhat surprised by my response, in that I basically said that yes, I had disrespected his beliefs in this instance, and that was because they are beliefs that don’t merit respect. I reminded him also that one can disrespect beliefs without necessarily disrespecting the people who hold those beliefs.

But Blasphemy Day calls for us to go further than this, in that I raised questions which might offend believers, without setting out to offend them. I wasn’t merely mocking, even if my comments could be interpreted as disrespectful. Blasphemy Day, by contrast, has involved images and writing that seems to have little intent but to offend (not provoke thoughts, but merely provoke).

Given an existing climate involving a fair degree of hostility towards atheists for their perceived (and often genuine) militant nature, I remain sceptical as to whether this sort of thing is good strategy.

Opinions are certainly divided, with some of the “old guard” of the atheist movement speaking out against Blasphemy Day, saying that it “betrays the civic virtues of democracy“. Others, like PZ Myers, claim that “edgy is what young people like“, and that  ”the old school of atheism is really, really boring”.

That may be so, and it may be that we should do “whatever it takes to reach people”, as Ronald Lindsay claims in the article linked above. But that leaves the question of how we reach people, and how they respond to what we do and say, completely open. If we care simply that they know we exist, then of course shock-tactics may be most effective, and free speech affords us the right to shock as much as we like.

But I don’t care about getting the attention of theists, so much as changing their minds. And I can’t recall many times that I’ve changed someone’s mind through teasing them – usually I’ve just made them more intractable.

We’ve certainly got the right to poke fun or tease whomever we like, and I think the offended parties are daft for getting upset over it. But I care less for getting my kicks than for the long-term evolution of society, and defending reason and rational strategy in general – and I don’t think that this aids the secular cause on balance. Believers will be further encouraged to ignore us, because we appear to be uninterested in debate, and those occupying some sort of middle-ground might ignore us too, simply because we appear to be intolerably rude.

On a rhetorical level, we should also remember that

the problem with ridicule is also that one cannot answer it. Cliched perhaps, but there’s no defence against laughter. The clown leaves everyone powerless because no appeal to any discourse normatively defined carries weight with the clown. I’m not saying the clown is always right, but the clown always causes anxiety exactly because the laughter cannot be subjugated. Anyone who has ever tried to have a ‘normal’ conversation, say, with [a clown], may know that anxiety or the loss of control over discourse.