How to express your otherness

Wits university’s education faculty has launched a Democracy Training Programme for Professionals, available to all academics. Central objectives are “to enable professionals to:
a) develop a grammar through which to understand the impact of the transition to democracy on social relations in the workplace.

b) establish practices through which to articulate experiences of otherness, ambiguity, inconsistencies, prejudice and irrationality in an educative rather than a defensive way.”

Armed with this new grammar and various otherness-overcoming devices, the academics will learn such essential life skills as “how to avoid dialogue turning into an argument” and “an appreciation of the ways in which values, attitudes and dispositions are embodied in specific cultural and social contexts with reference to the ethics of caring”.
Academics who complete the programme will enter a sort of new South African moral nirvana, receiving a well-deserved certificate of competence in democracy training, signed by an academic adviser and a dean, to hang on their wall.

It seems a long way round: the old way of achieving this state was simply to sign off, drop out and smoke dagga. The key questions about this excellent programme are: what happens if you take it and fail? And will it remain voluntary?