Moses:
I am a former VC of a Nigerian university NOT beholden to ASUU orthodoxy (in fact, by government design, there were no Staff or Student Unions during my five-year tenure, except for two months of Student Unionsm and three days of SSANU unionism towards my tenure's very end!); starting a new university NOT beholden to traditional Nigerian university administration orthodoxy; and a Diaspora transplant NOT beholden to Nigerian Higher Education orthodoxy.
I am so eager to write on my experience, that you cannot believe it. But I am FIGHTING some post-VC battles of my own right now that I wish to complete before making a few statements, and some may not be pretty. (Succession issues are part of the blight in Nigeria's university landscape.)
But please DO not discount the issue of FINANCES as to why Nigerian are not achieving or fully achieving: it is a SERIOUS one. You cannot have government declare that tuition in PUBLIC TERTIARY INSTITUTION is free, and yet have not determined what that TUITION amount should be! The reasonable thing, having determined that amount, is to negotiate with each university - depending on the number of students AND staff - what FRACTION of the TOTAL TUITION should be paid by PARENTS (zero if free), how much should be paid by GOVERNMENT, and how much should be paid by UNIVERSITY INTERNALLY GENERATED funds. To pay less than 5% of the TOTAL TUITION needs of a university, and then expect the University to make up the rest through IGR is simply to ask the universities either to GIVE UP - because it is impossible - or to leave their core mission of education in pursuit of other things.
But Finances are not everything........but I shall get to spilling my mind at an opportune time.
Quite frankly, I had had the mind to VOLUNTEER to participate in the forum that you wrote about - no new-university VC or Diaspora VC was invited; I certainly was not invited - but I was away in the UK during the period anyway, so I would not have been able to attend.
But I will still speak my own.....
And there you have it.
Bolaji Aluko
Pioneer VC, FU Otuoke
On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 4:44 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
I have come again with my troublemaking. Someone must pose these questions. If no one else will, I'll step up and do so. I've gone through the photos of this symposium on higher education organized by the ISGPP. I have also read Tunji Olaopa's essay on it. If that essay is a faithful account of what transpired at the symposium, I must say with a sense of regret that it does not seem like any radical or new ideas emanated from the deliberations. Dr. Olaopa quoted and paraphrased copiously from presentations done by retired and serving Vice Chancellors. From his essay, one gets the sense that the participants were simply rehashing the familiar, ASUU-endorsed problems of high education in Nigeria, which can all be reductively contained in the rubric of funding. Nothing new here. It's the same lack of self-reflexivity, the same "it's other people's fault" canard.You gather some retired and serving university administrators to engage in an incestuously self-serving conversation about how the problems plaguing Nigerian universities can be reduced to funding (the easy, hackneyed go-to alibi) and how the problems are other people's fault and not their own. The outcome would be predictably banal and officious.I ask: what radically new ideas for reforming the Nigerian university system came out of that gathering? I did not see any in Dr. Olaopa's essay/summary. What proposals were advanced to hold academics and administrators accountable? What innovative strategies did the VCs, retired and serving, implement in their institutions to solve or mitigate some of the problems we already know? What did the symposium demand of Nigerian academics and Vice Chancellors?More crucially, the university exists primarily as an organ of instruction, with students being the objects of this instructional enterprise. Accordingly, I ask: were students or student bodies invited to offer their perspectives on the problems of university education in Nigerian and solutions to them? If they were invited, did the forum offer them a free platform to enunciate their frank opinions on some of the familiar problems (poor or absent instruction, exploitation, sexual harassment, etc)? Were parents or alumni organizations invited to offer their own unique perspectives? It seems to me that the big men and big women VCs and other big invitees assumed the position of omniscience in university matters, speaking for all stakeholders.I see that my friend, Professor Jibo Ibrahim, presented at the event. I personally would love to know the kernel of his presentation. I am tired of getting the ASUU-approved line from these forums on Nigerian higher education, which the VCs and others seem to have simply repeated at the ISGPP symposium. I've known Jibo to buck the ASUU rhetoric, to demonstrate self-critique as a former ASUU activist, to introspectively question ASUU's current tactics and direction, and to advocate that ASUU evolve even as higher education has evolved globally. Perhaps he is able to offer these dispassionate views because he left the system and now has an outsider's perspective. Even so, I admire his nuanced but empathetic position on ASUU and its struggles and on the university sector generally. I would have loved to read what he had to say because he and Professor Falola are the only ones I know among the panelists who are neither beholden to the ASUU orthodoxy nor protective/defensive of their legacy and constituency (They're not former or incumbent VCs).--On Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 9:43 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:--
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