What is plant blindness? Take a moment to look at the image below and think about what you see. If the first thing you saw was a giraffe on a cloudy day, you might be suffering from a phenomenon known as plant blindness. That giraffe is but one of hund…
What does the youth of 1976 have in common with today’s youth? As we commemorate Youth month and specifically Youth Day on the 16th of June, I have been trying to search for similarities between the youth of 1976 and the youth of today. The students th…
We all accumulate new experiences and learn new skills daily. Some skills take time to learn. After a while, some of these memories are replaced by new ones and consequently one often has to figure out how to do something all over again. Imagine an ide…
Do we do enough to identify our own biases in everyday life? Inscribed on the frontispiece of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi are three maxims. The first, and arguably most famous, “know thyself”. A simple phrase that holds the entirety of one’s existen…
The furore over Professor Gray and the role of academics in the response by the South African government to the novel coronavirus pandemic reminded me that in late 2019 I was asked to speak on the institutionalized culture of discrimination at the Univ…
Have lockdowns been a good motivation for supervisors to relook at their approaches? Written byProf Roula Inglesi-Lotz, Department of Economics, University of Pretoria Guest – Star and co-contributor Prof Natasja Holtzhausen School of Public Mana…
Should online Schooling as the ‘new normal’ leave older teachers behind? The concepts of ‘e-learning’ and ‘online schooling’ are filled with a near magical aura of curiosity and novelty. When I hear these terms, I tend to think of words and phrases suc…
Does the right to freedom of speech include the right to be wrong? There is a touch of irony in one of the defining characteristics of the Information Age being #FakeNews, and in recent years the impacts and origins of #FakeNews have become the subject…
In the midst of COVID19 and lockdown in South Africa, there has been much commentary on the class fault lines suggesting a return to ‘normal’ should never be contemplated. In the space of a few weeks, we have seen forced removals under the gu…
Is there an algorithm for choosing a supervisor? If the gods of academia work in my favour, this time next year I, will be a postdoctoral research fellow. While searching for potential postdoc positions, a thought crossed my mind: ‘Could there be an ex…
