The right attitude to rain Presentation to PICMET 2008

Isabel Dalhousie is the heroine of the new Alexander McCall Smith series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. She is an editor, a philosopher, an ethicist, and an astute observer, all of which mean that she is well qualified to reflect on the social world of Edinburgh with its slow-paced charm and beneficence. Isabel declares in her debut novel The Right Attitude to Rain that the key to contentment in the Scottish climate is the right attitude to rain, just as the key to happiness is making the best of what you have. This advice reminds one of the arguments now being presented for the problems within South African universities, which state that university management is the cause of much of the present problems. Declining outputs, poor staff morale, inadequate funding these issues are all the fault of those on the 11th floor at the University of Witwatersrand, in Bremner Block at the University of Cape Town, and similar offices at all the other institutions. But the authors of these articles and those that support them need to look more widely than the confines of their own institutions. The source of the problem is not the university management, but the Department of Education and its policies towards the tertiary education sector. In this paper, the departments funding formula is analysed and it is shown how this framework fails to conform to some of the basic principles of performance management.