Tuesday 27 August 2013

Epidemic of First Class Graduates In Nigeria Private Universities By Okey Ikechukwu

Epidemic of First Class Graduates In Nigeria Private Universities By Okey Ikechukwu
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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