All of a sudden, academic excellence descended on Nigeria’s private
universities. The university’s good fortune was in the news a few weeks
back, as it rolled our 40 First Class graduates across several
disciplines. The same university also produced over 270 other graduands
with the Second Class (upper division) degrees for the same academic
year. If this number of high flyers is taken as a ratio of the total
population of graduating students for the year under reference, it may
probably turn out to be an unprecedented development. Is this bad in
itself? I don’t think so, if the performance is a sign that academic
excellence is on the ascendant at last. But many observers fear the
worst.
The first point of entry on this matter is perhaps to ask how many of
the lecturers in the said institution are First Class graduates, First
Class scholars and First Class academics. Of course they may be
exceptionally brilliant university teachers, with a consistent record of
excellence throughout their academic life. In that case, they should
naturally produce as many of ‘their kind’ as possible, should they not?
Let us assume it, even though the experience is scholars and academics
of such pedigree do not ‘produce’ so many of their kind in one fell
swoop.
That brings us to the (possibly mischievous) thought that maybe, just
maybe, the lecturers are mostly not first class products of the system.
What if majority of the lecturers were not known for dazzling academic
performance and, therefore, were not really the types that got too many
“A” grades as students? What if the recent results is only an indication
that the school is unable to control the intrepid commitment to the
subversion of true scholarship that has become the norm in most
institutions? What if some desperate persons are now awarding marks and
degree with a cheerful disregard of the conditions under which such
things should be done?
But, just in case someone is thinking of prancing forward to sound
indignant and very surprised, let it be said for the record that there
is nothing essentially surprising here. The rot in the system is not
new. What is a bit new is the level of impunity, along with a
shamelessly cash-driven academic culture, that is being exhibited
everywhere. Young graduates now seek jobs as fresh lecturers with the
clear and primary target of ensuring they retain an assistant who will
coordinate, collate and collect all manner of ‘returns’ from students
who are serious about passing their examinations. Scholars of
questionable academic standing are also cheerfully recruited without any
concern about their academic qualifications. The new recruits, too,
have no such concerns. Thus a homogenous group that is committed to a
species of learning that can best be described as subversive scholarship
emerges, thrives, overruns the system and overwhelms the few sensible
scholars among them.
One basic feature of university education is its gates are open to all
who can enter, while its bowels are conceived to retain only the best of
its products as propagators of the system. That is why the best
graduating students, or others of clear scholarly promise, are usually
retained as lecturers. But no Nigerian university has been able to
retain most of its best products in the last 20 years. Better paying
sectors of the economy has drawn away some of the very best from the
academia over the decades and the challenges of the system have done the
rest of the damage.
With the universities unable to retain their best, and with even their
second best close to extinction as lecturers and professors, what you
find in most tertiary institutions today are actually third-rate
academics who are churning out fourth rate ad even ‘no rate’ materials
with embarrassing excitement. The academically sound and truly committed
ones among them are an absolute minority. They are also often the butt
of coarse jokes from some of the most depraved of their colleagues, even
as they are among those most hated by irritated of would-be students;
who find their insistence on doing the right thing unacceptable. In sum,
many people who now masquerade as lecturers in many universities have
no business near a university, however conceptualised.
A related problem, but one which neither the National Universities
Commission (NUC) nor the universities themselves can deal with anymore,
is the fact that many of today’s senior academics climbed to their
currents heights via controversial routes. While some became professors
simply because they were so appointed by some new university of
questionable pedigree, others became lecturers using duly awarded
Masters Degrees that were actually not the type of Masters Degrees
anyone should use for teaching in a serious university at all. These
latter categories of lecturers are graduates who obtained ‘weak’ first
degree. Such graduates are usually constrained to do a one-year M.A., or
M.Sc. Degree in a place like UNILAG, to address the perceived academic
deficiencies by the system. It is after this that they are then allowed
to register for an M.Phil, as a proper Masters Degree before going
further.
The academic distillation process was quite rigorous. Some post
graduate students were even actively and deliberately discouraged from
taking their delusional academic aspirations too seriously, so that the
system does not run the risk of having them let loose on people’s
children one day as lecturers. But that was before. That was when the
university product came out as a person duly educated in his chosen
field but with enough knowledge of the world and other disciplines to
live his life with intelligence and grace. That was when the university
unpretentiously addressed itself to all, but intrinsically appealed to
only a few whose goals and aspirations tended in that direction. That
was when vocational and technical schools complemented polytechnics and
trade centres to give people survival skills. That was when university
education was not linked to a desperate search for no-existent jobs and
the provision of jobs was not seen as the exclusive preserve of
governments.
So let no one start to sound too surprised. Let no one also pretend
that academic progression in many of our universities is anything but a
well-contrived group fraud that is nurtured and facilitated by
“incestuous scholarship”. What other name can we find for the practice
of promoting lecturers largely because of their often wishy-washy
publications in departmental or internal academic journals? Among these
journals, the few with any pretensions to some rigour acquire this
contrived reputation by the mere fact of their publishing materials sent
by colleagues from other universities. So, if you publish mine and
publish yours, then we are all contributing to learning and making
serious interventions in ‘learned’ journals. This is incestuous
scholarship, nothing more.
Beyond the foregoing, there is the matter of whether the universities
are actually receiving ‘teachable’ materials from the society and from
the other lower levels of the national academic ladder. When a
thoroughly compromised human capital factory is supplied with low
quality raw materials and these materials are badly processed, it is
only natural that the final product should be a disaster when taken to
the market. So those who are fretting and sometimes heaping all the
blame on the university system should take a second look.
The pre-primary level of education is practically unregulated. Any
garage, disused store or leaking warehouse may come in handy for anyone
who wants to set up such a school. Primary and secondary school
dropouts, house maids and old women of questionable care-giving capacity
are often the academic feedstock when you need teachers for pre-primary
education. Primary education itself is distinguished by its own
handicaps. All states of the federation that have tried to ascertain
academic standing of their secondary school teachers by giving them the
tests meant for their junior students were shocked to discover that over
60% of the teachers failed the tests. But the tests they failed were
taken from the syllabus of their junior students.
We need not say anything about the secondary school that serve as the
last middle man between parents and the university education of their
children. Do we know what they do, what they teach, where they are, how
many of them are “special centres”, when last they were inspected, or
even when last they were visited by anyone. Until 2006, the official
records put the number of secondary schools in Nigeria at 9,700. A
physical inspection of all secondary schools carried out that year
revealed that there were actually 14,543 secondary schools – and
possibly more. In other words, our tertiary institutions have been
receiving ‘ungraded’ raw materials from pirate groups and break-in
purveyors of secondary school certification examinations.
Notwithstanding the fact that examination malpractice is on the rampage,
the nation has consistently recorded between 78 and 90 per cent failure
rates in competitive final examinations for over 20 years.
But to get back to the matter of the swarm of First Class graduates now
being littered on sidewalks and street corners, it will be interesting
to have someone show us the ‘academic history’ of the first class
graduates for the last 12 years, including their nursery (if available),
primary and secondary school academic records? We know that most
Nigerian private universities still scrounge on the leftovers after JAMB
examinations and even after their own first internal admission
examinations. We have it on good authority that a candidate’s score is
rarely a deterrent if the parents or guardians want to secure admission
in most of the universities. It is quite possible that these
universities have very brilliant academics in the majority; or that
these brilliant products of the school we are talking about are actually
the high flyers in their JAMB examinations. Yes it is possible, just as
it is possible that the US President is my cousin, a happy, go-lucky is
actually Igbo Chap whose name of Obarakunime Obioma was bastardised –
or vandalised - to read Barack Obama by the Americans. Please!!!
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