When i wrote those series I had no idea that two months down the line ASUU would embark on a paralysing strike that would do serious violence to the academic calendar. One doesn’t need to be prophetic, Godspower Oyewole-style, to see our public universities are headed for the rocks.
Their problems which daily stare us in the face will not and cannot be resolved by the fast increasing private universities, many of which invariably depend on academics from their public counterparts to fully meet their accreditation requirements.
Those who imagine the private universities can succeed where the public universities have failed are only taking a short time view of the situation. Although much more business-like and often better managed and maintained, they are by far too few and too expensive to take care of the educational demands of the armies of school leavers matriculated every year.
While one believes that there is too much emphasis on university education at the expense of traditional technical education of the sort provided by polytechnics and trade guilds, it is a matter of time before the private universities many of which appear prone to lower standards in order to attract more applicants and generally tend to shun out far too many first class graduates- it’s a matter of time before they too get overwhelmed by the pressure of demand. That’s even in the unlikely event that most Nigerians can afford and therefore prefer them to the publicly-owned institutions.
Until the middle class and society as a whole gets richer enough to afford private education for those qualified, university education would still largely be provided by public institutions. Which is why the public universities have to be better resourced. And this is not a new thing. Some of our universities like Ibadan, then Ife, Nsukka and ABU used to be among the best in the commonwealth with scholars from every part of the world.
A number of my teachers in the public secondary schools I attended were foreigners, from England, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, etc, to say nothing of Ghana. At the university, it was normal to see many of these scholars from other countries either as permanent staff or visiting researchers.
This is no longer the case. It is a measure of how low we’ve fallen out of the league of countries that provide meaningful university education that our universities today suffer from the most despicable and pernicious form of in-breeding. The politics of survival and ethnic and/or political balancing determines which students are offered admission and which lecturers are hired. It’s even shaping the curriculum in certain instances!
Most of the students, teaching and non-teaching personnel in Nigerian universities today, are from the local communities. But for reason of desperation due to severe shortfall in available spaces which forces some to move out of their ‘catchment areas’, it is increasingly difficult to find people going out of their immediate localities to seek university education to say nothing of filling teaching openings where such are available to ‘non-indigenes’.
This is nowhere helped by the violent campaign against so-called Western education in many parts of the North. You have to be a son or daughter of ‘the soil’ to make your way in the treacherous terrain of contemporary academia. In the private institutions, you must profess particular religions or belong in particular denominations in the event you can afford the relatively high fees to gain admission.
Many of today’s universities lack and cannot afford the facilities available in Nigerian secondary schools of the 1970s and 80s. The cliché that these universities are glorified secondary schools deserves close examination to appreciate the enormity of the problem we are faced with.
The near-total collapse of infrastructure with its manifestation in laboratories that are almost bare, shorn of necessary equipment and chemicals and/or reagents to perform experiments; library shelves that are coated in dusts, mildewed and outdated literature; poorly ventilated offices and lecture rooms (nobody talks of theatres anymore) with damaged roofs that expose their occupants to the elements- noisy offices and classrooms with puddles of rainwater mixed with human and animal faeces, powered by noisy generators that emit noxious fumes that make any meaningful research or study impossible- this is the picture of rot that pervades our universities.
Electricity is rationed and is available for less than ten hours in a whole week. A vicious circle that sucks alike brutal and brutalised lecturers and students into its vortex is created.
Lecturers have been reduced to mere classroom teachers. Salaries are delayed or irregular; research funds are grossly inadequate where they are available and lecturers are compelled to obtain bank loans to fund their own research and attend conferences even while carrying killing workloads involving students crammed into classes meant for a fifth of the population in it.
Aside all of this, they still have to face the indignity of appearing before very disrespectful and uncouth foreign embassy staff that routinely deny them travel visas to attend international conferences where local conferences are rare and are often convened by cronies with an eye to meet the demands for promotion.
There is hardly time for relaxed study or sustained reflection, the kind that gives birth to profound insight and discoveries. Scholarship is now a quest for survival, an economic struggle to recoup personal funds invested in academic activities.
Thus after working non-stop for six or more years in the very deplorable environments of our universities, lecturers look forward to their sabbatical. But sabbaticals are no longer what they used to be, a break from the demands of regular work routine, time to regain spent energy and engage in easy research, reflection and maybe light teaching.
Now, sabbaticals are opportunities for fully paid but very rigorous teaching engagements in equally parlous local university environments. This is the practical demand of individual economy. At the end of such sabbaticals, academics return to their regular jobs nowhere improved but more spent, enervated and on edge than they were before the sabbatical.
The campus environments are like open market bazaars. There are only dirt roads and footpaths, no paved roads. A concrete jungle of uncompleted, collapsing or collapsed buildings with cracked, unpainted walls that are grimy from lack of maintenance.
The grasses are shaggy, there are no lawns and where they exist they have since turned wild bushes of thistles and thorns. Nobody talks of recreation facilities where libraries and laboratories are empty.
The only recreation available is the dangerous kind: prostitution and cheap sex that often trigger bitter and violent confrontations among student terrorists called cultists and local bandits. Robbery, rape and binge drinking are commonplace activities here.
Their problems which daily stare us in the face will not and cannot be resolved by the fast increasing private universities, many of which invariably depend on academics from their public counterparts to fully meet their accreditation requirements.
Those who imagine the private universities can succeed where the public universities have failed are only taking a short time view of the situation. Although much more business-like and often better managed and maintained, they are by far too few and too expensive to take care of the educational demands of the armies of school leavers matriculated every year.
While one believes that there is too much emphasis on university education at the expense of traditional technical education of the sort provided by polytechnics and trade guilds, it is a matter of time before the private universities many of which appear prone to lower standards in order to attract more applicants and generally tend to shun out far too many first class graduates- it’s a matter of time before they too get overwhelmed by the pressure of demand. That’s even in the unlikely event that most Nigerians can afford and therefore prefer them to the publicly-owned institutions.
Until the middle class and society as a whole gets richer enough to afford private education for those qualified, university education would still largely be provided by public institutions. Which is why the public universities have to be better resourced. And this is not a new thing. Some of our universities like Ibadan, then Ife, Nsukka and ABU used to be among the best in the commonwealth with scholars from every part of the world.
A number of my teachers in the public secondary schools I attended were foreigners, from England, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, etc, to say nothing of Ghana. At the university, it was normal to see many of these scholars from other countries either as permanent staff or visiting researchers.
This is no longer the case. It is a measure of how low we’ve fallen out of the league of countries that provide meaningful university education that our universities today suffer from the most despicable and pernicious form of in-breeding. The politics of survival and ethnic and/or political balancing determines which students are offered admission and which lecturers are hired. It’s even shaping the curriculum in certain instances!
Most of the students, teaching and non-teaching personnel in Nigerian universities today, are from the local communities. But for reason of desperation due to severe shortfall in available spaces which forces some to move out of their ‘catchment areas’, it is increasingly difficult to find people going out of their immediate localities to seek university education to say nothing of filling teaching openings where such are available to ‘non-indigenes’.
This is nowhere helped by the violent campaign against so-called Western education in many parts of the North. You have to be a son or daughter of ‘the soil’ to make your way in the treacherous terrain of contemporary academia. In the private institutions, you must profess particular religions or belong in particular denominations in the event you can afford the relatively high fees to gain admission.
Many of today’s universities lack and cannot afford the facilities available in Nigerian secondary schools of the 1970s and 80s. The cliché that these universities are glorified secondary schools deserves close examination to appreciate the enormity of the problem we are faced with.
The near-total collapse of infrastructure with its manifestation in laboratories that are almost bare, shorn of necessary equipment and chemicals and/or reagents to perform experiments; library shelves that are coated in dusts, mildewed and outdated literature; poorly ventilated offices and lecture rooms (nobody talks of theatres anymore) with damaged roofs that expose their occupants to the elements- noisy offices and classrooms with puddles of rainwater mixed with human and animal faeces, powered by noisy generators that emit noxious fumes that make any meaningful research or study impossible- this is the picture of rot that pervades our universities.
Electricity is rationed and is available for less than ten hours in a whole week. A vicious circle that sucks alike brutal and brutalised lecturers and students into its vortex is created.
Lecturers have been reduced to mere classroom teachers. Salaries are delayed or irregular; research funds are grossly inadequate where they are available and lecturers are compelled to obtain bank loans to fund their own research and attend conferences even while carrying killing workloads involving students crammed into classes meant for a fifth of the population in it.
Aside all of this, they still have to face the indignity of appearing before very disrespectful and uncouth foreign embassy staff that routinely deny them travel visas to attend international conferences where local conferences are rare and are often convened by cronies with an eye to meet the demands for promotion.
There is hardly time for relaxed study or sustained reflection, the kind that gives birth to profound insight and discoveries. Scholarship is now a quest for survival, an economic struggle to recoup personal funds invested in academic activities.
Thus after working non-stop for six or more years in the very deplorable environments of our universities, lecturers look forward to their sabbatical. But sabbaticals are no longer what they used to be, a break from the demands of regular work routine, time to regain spent energy and engage in easy research, reflection and maybe light teaching.
Now, sabbaticals are opportunities for fully paid but very rigorous teaching engagements in equally parlous local university environments. This is the practical demand of individual economy. At the end of such sabbaticals, academics return to their regular jobs nowhere improved but more spent, enervated and on edge than they were before the sabbatical.
The campus environments are like open market bazaars. There are only dirt roads and footpaths, no paved roads. A concrete jungle of uncompleted, collapsing or collapsed buildings with cracked, unpainted walls that are grimy from lack of maintenance.
The grasses are shaggy, there are no lawns and where they exist they have since turned wild bushes of thistles and thorns. Nobody talks of recreation facilities where libraries and laboratories are empty.
The only recreation available is the dangerous kind: prostitution and cheap sex that often trigger bitter and violent confrontations among student terrorists called cultists and local bandits. Robbery, rape and binge drinking are commonplace activities here.
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