Thursday, October 20, 2005
The Politics of Stipends (OPN)
Category: Opinion
Subject: Stipends (believe it or not)
Jacques talks about stipends in a recent post and gives a clear account of the politics and history (or the history of the politics) of the whole matter. I won’t hypothesise about the extent to which KSU is under the PN’s thumb – I suspect that it is not (although I'm not quite convinced by the argument that protests achieve nothing - if nothing else it is complacent and couched in a misunderstanding of the power of a public outcry).
What I wish to question is the wisdom of the route that we had chosen back in 98-99 (and which I had fully supported) that is a system based on maintenance costs, equipment costs and academic resources. There is one fundamental flaw in that analysis that I think requires attention. I shall base my analysis on an underlying principle of maximisation of resources.
The survey that KSU conducted back in the day when Jacques was President of KSU and I was trying to help to run SDM (a very different SDM), makes one assumption that I believe is misguided, that is that students should be entirely autonomous. The flaw lies in that there is no distinction between maintenance and academic requirements.
Certainly, no student should be denied access to the university on financial grounds. However, that does not mean that students should buy all their books, should all own a computer and every piece of material that will no doubt become outdated in no time at all. The only people who really benefit from that are a few publishers of basic texts, computer dealers etc.
The alternative would be to allocate a specific fund to the University library. In this manner, rather than 100 copies of basic texts being sold every year, the library would buy a few copies to be kept in a short loan section. This would free up funds for the library to buy more books and subscribe to more journals (including the growing mass of excellent online resources). Would this not allow for greater academic development all round? Funds could also be set aside for student-requests for materials that are not available in the library (with supervisor approval of course).
The same applies to computers and other equipment. Would it not make more sense for government funds to be allocated to computer labs and hi-tech course-specific equipment rather than buying computers for students to chat on, play games and occasionally conduct research? (sounds condescending but is it untrue?)
I am pretty sure that dedicating funds for specific allocation to the university would allow for a vast reduction in government expenditure. Moreover, it would allow government to dedicate funds to the real issue in the stipends matter - student autonomy in social terms. The excessive demands of direct financing have meant that students end up with lots of books and photocopies but not what they really need: cash in hand commensurate to cost of living plus quality academic resources.
In the final analysis I fear that at the time we may have been victims of our own independence...we sometimes were too keen to prove, perhaps to ourselves, that we would stand up to a PN government as much as we did to the short-lived MLP one.
