Johannesburg — I TAUGHT at the University of the Western Cape for 20 years and sat on other university committees and a university council for nine years. Over the years I saw the results of a deteriorating basic education system, releasing to the universities more and more students that were not ready for higher education.

My colleagues and I became tired of remedial teaching and the amount of time it took to make students understand the basics, let alone the substance, of the disciplines we taught.

Moreover, the task of remedial teaching became the burden predominantly of junior lecturers and teaching assistants . The consequences were dire for young academics, who need to do research and publish in order to move upwards . Professors hogged the research, publication and conference funds, taught smaller third-year and postgraduate classes and enjoyed relatively more freedom to publish. In my job as gender equity officer I tracked the profile of younger women academics and discovered that it took them 10 times as long as men to achieve professorial status, even when they had similar or better qualifications , simply because the female academics were often assigned to undergraduate teaching. Their nurturing role at home became compounded by the nurturing roles they had to take on at university.

The transformation agenda demands innovative interventions to create equity for women and substantive equality with men. Similarly, transformation requires a different agenda to improve the qualifications of students, predominantly black students at universities.

It is not just about enrolment and admissions and academic support. Some 50% of first-year students will continue to fail and drop out if the schooling system is not radically overhauled. It is not the job of universities to address a basic education system that will not come right. The government and the university managements know that, but they continue in their deluded self-righteous and politically correct ways, pursuing remedies that have been proven to fail -- especially if the National Benchmark Tests Project, commissioned by Higher Education SA, is anything to go by.

The transformation agenda at universities amounts to racial bean-counting and perpetuates this scenario, made even more complex by the social engineering thrust upon universities by government. The pressure to fill formerly white universities with black faces is the reason for this. It therefore comes as no surprise when we hear that literacy and numeracy levels at universities are below standard. About 13000 students from seven universities and 300 academics participated in the National Benchmark Tests Project, which revealed that 7% of the students who wrote the mathematics exams made it; the rest needed extension programmes to pass. Academic literacy fared better, with 52% needing additional tuition.

No one cares about issues of diversity facing black universities. No one cares what happens there and whether or not the throughput rates are increasing, whether or not targets are being met to produce qualified and competent doctors, engineers, scientists, nurses, and the other urgent skills required by our economy. No one asks whether or not the racial balance at the black universities has been met, or whether or not numeracy or academic levels have improved. Why is this debate not in the public realm?

Unlike black universities, formerly white universities are under constant scrutiny for racial transformation . Many former white universities with black vice-chancellors have become no-go areas, the fiefdoms of those who stifle free debate and tyrannise those academics who dare to ask questions. Countless disciplinary procedures have been instituted against those who will not "toe the line" , at great legal cost to universities who need those monies for academic programmes.

Academic freedom has become the bugbear of those who feel threatened by freedom of speech, and who institute disciplinary proceedings on the grounds that they "brought the university into disrepute" -- the new phrase for shutting up academics who dare to ask questions.

Appointment processes are engineered by those desperate to make politically correct appointments based on race alone, rather than looking at race in conjunction with skills, competence and merit. No wonder many black appointments end in disaster -- for institution and candidate. I have witnessed many a process that predictably ended in disaster because the university in question was set on appointing someone of a particular race regardless of competence, experience or ability.

But universities will not learn, because like the government, those in charge fail to understand that universities are lifelong institutions, there to be preserved for generations to come.

Kadalie is a human rights activist based in Cape Town.