Free No Time Like the Present: A Novel by Nadine Gordimer Page B

kind of swaying genuflection and raise her voice clear of the chatter and laughter. She sings. The scale is low, high, ululating, up to the roof and out through the open terrace, claiming the Suburb. Nothing like it ever came from the choir of the Gereformeerde Kerk, in its day.

 
    This is no alma mater, the university where he had somehow graduated with his industrial chemistry degree while acquiring the alchemy to sabotage the regime in which higher education was an exclusive facility. The new student ‘body’ was beginning to be many-limbed. Among the white students whose parents were paying tuition and hostel fees there were rising numbers of young blacks with confidence in their right to knowledge that would lift them out of the level of skills, money, dignity their parents had been dumped at.
    The place of higher learning is open. The undenominational bible (want of a better title for secular faith), the Constitution, decrees this. But like most decrees it doesn’t, can’t ensure what’s called ‘capacity’ to benefit by them. Young men—so far, fewer women with that nerve half-grown Jabu had had abundantly—are registered on scholarships or sponsorships of some kind, there are even white employers who hand out a bonsella chance these times, to a servant’s bright son. The ‘bridging classes’ Senior Lecturer from the Science Faculty gives voluntary hours to: a band-aid. He knows it doesn’t deal with the chasm of poor schooling the students claw up from.
    The Struggle’s not over.
    There are still some professors of the past on the faculties along with the intake of comrades like himself known as the Left by academics not wishing to question themselves too exigently whether as an acceptable political category this can be taken to include, in support of just ends, power stations that were blown up.
    The comrades, the Left or however they’re seen, are aware they have to re-educate themselves somewhat. The immediacy of uncompromising back-and-forth in the bush, guns and cell walls instead of theses and coffee-vending machines in a faculty room—their kind of blunt confrontation will be misinterpreted by people who haven’t known they may be dead in the dirt next day.—If something new is going to be made of the university we’ll have to start with what we’ve got. We have to get on with the old guard on the principle that we don’t accept they’re guarding the same education any more, doors closed. That we trust they know this.—
    —Even if they don’t?—
    —Even if they don’t.—
    —Exactly.—
    —They should take early retirement—it’s late.—
    He’s stirring his coffee as if repeating the sequence of those words heard.—No, no. Hang on. Most of them are good teachers. Some better than we are. They have the broad, worldly—sophisticated—general knowledge the students need to be given real access to. Grant that. Who’s out there to replace them right now.—
    Shudula Shoba’s Struggle record isn’t known, maybe it’s enough he rescued himself out of the ghetto to earn a Masters, but he’s one of the new appointments at lecturer level, under distinguished professors, novelists and poets.—Mphahlele, Ndebele, Kgositsile.—
    He’s too new to the faculty to ignore voices over his informing what he ought to know, they’re already professors in other universities.—Sharp sharp—but some of the other big names, they’re in rural colleges, just one step above high school, wasted there in the backveld.—
    —You’re going to poach them away from the people?—
    The exchange isn’t abandoned even as a few establishment professors come in with greetings all round. Coffee-vendor bonhomie. He puts his words into practice at once:—What we’ve got is with us.—Steve’s remark is for professors all, against a clink of cups and the derogatory hiss of the coffee dispenser.—Don’t you find our bridging efforts inadequate. Band-aid.—
    —Here we go talking end results when