Dear Editor
The decision to close four colleges of the Educor group is a blow to the private higher education sector. Lyceum College, Damelin, CityVarsity and Icesa City Campus, have all been deregistered by the Council on Higher Education (CHE) after Educor’s failure to submit its 2020 and 2021 annual financial certificates and annual reports, as well as a host of other concerns.
Educor has until October to appeal the deregistration and the DA calls on the group to get its ducks in a row for the benefit of its 13 000 students.
Private higher education institutions are instrumental to filling the gap of access to higher education and Educor’s failure is causing its students severe stress, while also relegating its staff to South Africa’s vast unemployment lines.
Educor’s demise must serve as a lesson to the Minister of Higher Education, Dr Blade Nzimande, and his Department to tackle similar concerns at public higher education and the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) to root out the precedent of flouting laws and rules without fear of consequence management. It also highlights the importance of reviewing the Higher Education Act to fully comply with the White Paper of Higher Education.
Regards
Chantel King MP
DA Shadow Minister of Higher Education
Avenge Paws
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Eye Candy Kitten
Ukraine: You have two cows. One of them feeds on American grass, the other feeds on Russian grass.