How about we take a bucket of human excrement and dump it in the living room of one of the University of Cape Town brownshirts? Or, even better, we dump it in the study of an academic who condones their behaviour — ideally a young academic who lives alone, so others aren’t affected. Alternatively, how about this? We find a "fallist" apologist who has a child and we get hold of his exam paper, in his toughest subject, and burn it or flush it down the toilet, taking care not to disrupt the other students sitting that subject. Both those ideas are, of course, awful. The point though is that they seem — at least to my white, bourgeois mind — far more defensible than what has actually been done on the campus over the last few days. They are more targeted and thoughtful, and more situation appropriate. I’m entirely convinced — though this can’t be proven — that a large part of the bilious student "animus" is derived from the encouragement, implicit or explicit, they’re getting from credib...
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