A RACIST rant sent by an unknown person has left students and staff at the school of statistics and actuarial sciences shaken.
“Actuarial science and mathematical statistics are tough darkies, they aren’t for you…So if you k*ffirs thought you might pass them, all I can say is hahaha think again…”
This was the e-mail sent to stats 1 and stats 2 students, from a fake Yahoo account on Wednesday evening last week.
The following day, the same e-mail was sent from the same Yahoo account to the Stats 3 class but this time the unknown sender added “once a stupid monkey, always a stupid monkey” and named two black third year actuarial science students, saying they were “repeating 3rd year for the third time and ended, “monkey go back to the jungle…”
Thokozani Mogano is one of the two third year students mentioned in the offensive e-mail. He says all the information about him and his classmate, who did not wish to be named in Vuvuzela, is false and degrading.
Mogano says he had heard about the e-mail sent to the 1st and 2nd year students but only read the second one after a classmate told him about it.
He says the e-mail has made things uncomfortable for his class and, whoever the sender is, the person is just “trying to cause a war between blacks and whites”.
“I can’t trust even the people I hang around with anymore and I can’t say it’s a white person who sent that e-mail, it could be anyone,” Mogano says.
He has laid a complaint with the investigations unit at Campus Control.
Head of the school of statistics and actuarial sciences, Professor Peter Fridjhon, sent an e-mail last Friday to students in stats 1, 2 and 3 and to the university’s management, condemning the e-mails, labelling them as “highly offensive”.
Fridjhon vowed that “once this person is caught, there will be a serious disciplinary hearing with dire consequences”.
Wits University’s code of conduct states that each individual is required to act ethically, which includes preventing racial and other forms of harassment, disrespect for persons and discrimination on the basis of race, amongst others.
The code of conduct also lists responsible conduct as “preventing misuse of personal and university information and property and the name of the university”.
Shashilan Singh, administrator at the school of computer science, which administrates the e-mail address used by the stats 3 class, says: “In terms of security, we never considered possibilities of people using e-mails like this, but in future we will consider all security loopholes to prevent such from happening again.”
Fridjhon says in his e-mail that the university authorities are investigating the source of these e-mails.