I sincerely appreciate your good wishes, Prof. Oyekanmi! Thanks also for the link to the Unilag website. Did I find useful stuff in there? That will be a story for another occasion. But with a website like that, I verily believe that the University is well on its way to achieving some of the goals we are enunciating here. Let me also apologize for misjudging the two posts from Nassarawa. But for purposes of clarity let me also quickly add that even though that explanation has been made, it does not change my position a bit. When I said in an earlier post that I care very much about the issue we are discussing , I meant it. Sometimes what we are looking for in Sokoto might be lodged right there in our Sokoto! We will be right to blame the government for neglecting its duty of providing funds for Universities that it established. But at the same time let us not be averse to self-criticism. Let it not be that we hastily dismiss every question about our own attitudes, systems and procedures as naive. Nor construe every such criticism as unmerited bashing. Mr. Oyeniyi made an excellent articulation of the main points of this debate. I had expected that someone would take him up on his claims since he teaches in a Nigerian university as well. There is none forthcoming which would suggest that he was probably spot on with his analysis. Whatever the merits of placing the ills of the Nigerian University on the government, and lack of funding as the main reason those ills persist, I am saying that does not paint a whole picture. Those who work in the Nigerian university system would have to grow out of old habits that produce retrogression rather than forward motion. It seems to me that blaming lack of funds is only convenient. It is worn as a shield to deflect every effort to unravel in a more balanced fashion the ills of the university system. This is year 2012! As I type this, the whole world is on the move. Some are moving forward. Others are headed the opposite direction. The choice of which group to join is entirely ours to make. We are discussing research and publishing in Nigerian universities. I fail to accept that the reason no Nigerian university can sustain a single academic journal and market it to the rest of the world is down to lack of funds. I cannot just buy that. And here I mean a journal that comes out regularly over a couple of years. Yesterday I asked, how much would it cost to publish a biannual academic journal in Nigeria? At the high end I suggested a million naira for both issues. If you decided to cut out paper prints and settle for virtual production, that cost comes down drastically. Can I be convinced that there is a Nigerian university worth its name that cannot some how find this amount every other year? How come in fact this is the only project for which the funds cannot be found? Now back to the pay-for-publication question, would I pay to get a manuscript published? Not a chance! Why pay if I can get it published elsewhere free? There are things we must recognize. Just as we all struggle to get published, the publishers themselves are competing to attract the best papers. So a good paper sells itself as many of us would already have discovered. Mr. Oyeniyi said the same thing. But it looks like as he said the publish-or-perish philosophy is being taken to new heights though, of course, we can point to colleagues who have neither published nor perished. Bottom-line is if you can't manage the little you have today, when you have access to the entire universe tomorrow, you will still mismanage it. A typical Nigerian disease is mis-prioritization. A university administrator is driving a 4x4-wheel car when the same university cannot produce the knowledge for which it was established. I know to doubt when that administrator makes "no funds, no funds" a hiding place. What applies to pay-to-publish also applies to pay-to-review. To be asked to review a peer's work, I should think, is the highest regard that could be paid to an academic. It means you are acquiring expertise and you can't quantify that in monetary terms. The enemy is not always at the door. It could be residing internally. Finally, I hope it is soon that one of these conferences could be organized to deal with this issue in a more comprehensive and systematic fashion.
Basil
From: Felicia Oyekanmi <profoyekanmi@yahoo.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 7:55:04 AM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Call for Papers
Dear Basil I wish you the best of luck as you complete your doctorate programme. As we say in Nigeria now 'good luck' is not enough, so go for the 'best of luck'. Please open the website of University of Lagos at www.unilag.edu.ng and click on 'publications'. You may get some of the materials which you require on Nigeria. Moreover, some of the Inaugural Lectures presented at the UNILAG by our Professors are listed and their contents are available there. Mine is #26 among those liisted as of today. Prof Felicia A. D. Oyekanmi Department of Sociology University of Lagos Akoka, Yaba, Lagos Nigeria Tel: {234} 1 7941757 Cell: {234}8056560970 --- On Tue, 22/5/12, basil ugochukwu <ugochukwubc@yahoo.com> wrote:
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