UWC 360 Issue 6-Draft 7 9/18/13 8:21 AM Page 8 C
DID YOU KNOW ?
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UWC is celebrating its 50th anniversary of graduation ceremonies this September?
From Bush College to Proudly UWC – the Education in the Bush By Jimmy Ellis
Celebrity Corner
unknown piece of UWC history and legacy that went with it. For deep within those thickets was a clearing where the real meaningful education, informal as it was, took place.
Many contemporaries will recall the special room in the old Library with the collection on Marx, Lenin, and other communist literature kept under lock and key.
I fondly remember when UWC formally became the University of the Western Cape in 1973, with a former colleague in the Sociology Department saying: "Now we have become the University of Port Jackson". The irony in this epithet, with the change of name that went with cleaning out those bushes through which we walked to the old Caf from L20 or to the Library, may be lost to some, while others may only recall the bad memories they still harbour from that era.
Many contemporaries, particularly in the Social Sciences, will recall the special room in the old Library with the collection on communism, inclusive of Marx, Lenin and all other literature regarded as subversive at the time, being kept under lock and key. You needed special permission from the Chief Librarian to use it, and then your name and time of use would have been recorded in a special book we all knew was not kept as an exclusive University record. We engaged in the first line of academic boycott by avoiding that room.
Some students who wanted to study this material, engaged in their own real bush education.
I remember less fondly the thick stands of Port Jackson bush, as alien to the Cape Flats as many of the ideas, dished up to us then, were to good education.
Some students who wanted to study this material, unhampered by some lecturers’ sanitizing or dismissive comments about its importance, engaged in their own real bush education. Right there within the Port Jackson bush, in the area across from the Social Science and Old Arts building. Not all were part of it and, of course, it happened secretly.
For me like many '60s contemporaries, I remember less fondly the thick stands of Port Jackson bush, as alien to the Cape Flats as many of the ideas, dished up to us then, were to good education. And yet, now that they are gone there is a largely
As we celebrate the academic institution of note that UWC has become today, let us recall that it was once necessary to turn the bush college education we got into our own education in the bush to become proud UWC Alumni.
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Hit recording artist Jimmy Nevis delivered a highly entertaining performance at the Google launch hosted by Information and Communication Services (ICS) at the UWC Student Centre on 30 July 2013.
Correction An article published in the previous edition of this newsletter incorrectly stated that, Professor Cudore Snell was an interim dean and associate professor at the School of Social Work at Howard University in the US. It should have stated that Prof Snell is the dean and a professor at the School of Social Work at Howard University in the US. The Three-Sixt-e team sincerely apologises and regrets this error.
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