Page 10 - Professorial Lecture - Professor P van Rooyen

The expectation of family and parents:
 Family status
 Social security and old age support

The expectation of academics:
 Salary
 Qualification and integrity (self-actualisation, in Maslow’s terms)
 International matrix of relationships
 Often a fierce defence of traditional norms, values and regulations of
the university sector
 Academics are intellectual elites, free thinkers, and therefore, per
definition, entrepreneurs

This is my inaugural, therefore my own position at UNAM:
 Belong to the class of intellectual entrepreneurs
 Where outcomes (the cause), not people are important
 Lectures ideas but also judge standards

This has brought me into conflict with the University authorities on several
occasions.

Indicators of an overly-manipulative role of politics in the academic
sphere:
 Politically-motivated appointment of senior administrators
 Politically-motivated appointment of academics
 Manipulated assessment of student capabilities
 Entry-level downgrading of prospective students
 Preferences given to politicians and their families
 Absorption of graduates into politically-prepared positions (15
ministers and deputies ex-UNAM)
 Interference in the framing of curricula
 Reluctance to discriminate
 Reluctance to enforce personal discipline and standards

8 |