Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Symposium on Higher Education, ISGPP event in photos, 3

"My people" as Bisola, my daughter, calls Professor Aluko:

Greetings from Wesleyan University.

This is a master piece. Terrific. I read all the stuff but a grueling schedule cripples me.

I wish I could ask Prof. Mimiko to respond, as his argument is that governing issues are far more critical than we imagine.

And my question is always the same: what do we do? Whom do we mobilize? What movement should we instigate?

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of bolaji aluko <alukome@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, August 12, 2017 at 6:25 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Symposium on Higher Education, ISGPP event in photos, 3

 

 

 

Moses:

 

Thanks for yours below.  Despite your best efforts, I will seriously resist your "temptation" to spill my beans before I am ready, but I will respond briefly to some of your observations below, and leave the rest until much later.

 

First, infrastructural funding is extremely important.  Students have to live in hostels befitting of young adults and not in pistyes, receive instruction in classrooms conducive to learning, have access to  libraries to study in-between classes and refer to alternative books for their classes and journals for their research, and laboratories conducive to repeatable experiments, and where necessary have transportation to be able to move between hostels and classrooms without "sufferance", all of these desirables within the context of of  adequate water , reliable electricity and sewage/waste disposal and trusted security services  Ditto for staff, whether teaching or non-teaching, if you substitute housing for hostels, particularly where such staff live in communities -  say "rural" like Otuoke - that do not at their current stage of social development support the level of housing and social living commensurate with university-level achievement.  (As an aside, even after many years, many universities are so insular that town-and-gown interaction does not improve the rural nature of their immediate surrounding - topic for another symposium.)

 

There is a hierarchy of importance, no doubt, but a university is so tightly woven that any short-changes in any of these desirables are bound to negatively impact the institution in a remarkable manner, particular when university administrators, either under mandate or under the illusion of increasing internal generation, allow their "carrying capacities" to be exceeded significantly i.e unsustainable ratios of students to hostels, or to classrooms or to teaching staff etc.   It is not elitism to state that it is in universities that you have the greatest concentration of the best minds, both WILLING and CAPABLE to learn but also eager to impart knowledge, but the proper environment must be provided for them to be ABLE to learn and to impart knowledge.

 

So Moses, certain inabilities in our university system should not be confused with unwillingness or some innate incapabilities.

 

Secondly, staff salaries are important because, as citadels of higher learning, there is both a social and internal expectation that universities should also be citadels of higher EARNING!  Four major things should determine salaries:  your level of educational attainment; your experience at the work itself; and the (economic) nature/value/responsibility of the work itself; and whether it is public service or private service.  I know that there are always exceptions to the rule, but a PhD graduate who has worked commendably for a long time at a job valued by society should earn a decent living and should retire reasonably comfortably.  For university lecturers, they have the added burden of being ROLE MODELS.....students should be able to look at you and say, "You know, I like to be like my professor; he enjoys his work and he is not doing badly!"

 

But when - during the period of pain for Nigerian university lecturers that you talked about -  they were seriously under-paid, and looked scruffy, dejected,angry etc.,, teaching outsize classes in stuffy classrooms and under-equipped laboratories, and "catching danfo" to go to work, looking emaciated with sagging coats and trousers and soiled ties,  who would want to be like them?  Those who could go abroad went abroad in droves;  those who could not cut all kinds of corners at home; and those who were supposed to return to join them remained abroad despite all the money the country had paid on their education "overseas."

 

And then, according to you, salaries INCREASED, but - according to you - nothing materially changed!  You did not state how many years  that the "suffering" years were, and what IMPACT it had had on the intellectual psyche of those in the system.  First, scholarship is like athleticism:  you must train constantly to be stellar in performance.  After many years of not learning the best teaching tools, or being up in research in your field, it can be ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to just pick up as if those wasted years had not happened.  Secondly - and most devastatingly - many of those teaching-cum-research-deprived staff  had now necessarily MOVED up in the hierarchy of "management" in the universities to become heads of departments, Deans, even Vice-Chancellors - while some moved into ASUU.  You cannot give what you don't have; you cannot motivate what you were not motivated about.

 

That is part of the echo that we are observing today. 

 

 In any case, what really are those new salaries, when you look at them at NATIONAL and INTERNATIONAL standards?  The table below gives a summary of the CONUASS II  Table for academic staff - I put it in this form myself;

 

 

CONUASS Level	Designation	No. of Steps	Step 1 Salary	Top Step Salary TS (Naira)	TS (US$ at N140 to $1), Feb. 2011	TS (US$, at N500 to $1) Feb 2016	TS (US$, at N360 to $1) Aug 2016
1	Grad Asst	6	1,274,177.00	1,458,567.00	10,418.34	2,917.13	4,051.58
2	Asst Lecturer	8	1,461,861.00	1,765,702.00	12,612.16	3,531.40	4,904.73
3	Lecturer II	8	1,660,309.00	1,990,440.00	14,217.43	3,980.88	5,529.00
4	Lecturer I	9	2,090,705.00	2,694,810.00	19,248.64	5,389.62	7,485.58
5	Senior Lecturer	13	3,102,305.00	4,460,306.00	31,859.33	8,920.61	12,389.74
6	Associate Prof/Reader	10	3,779,021.00	5,015,550.00	35,825.36	10,031.10	13,932.08
7	Professor	10	4,591,149.00	6,030,906.00	43,077.90	12,061.81	16,752.52
VC	Vice-Chancellor	1	12,061,812.00	12,061,812.00	86,155.80	24,123.62	33,505.03
Registrar	Registrar	1	6,030,906.00	6,030,906.00	43,077.90	12,061.81	16,752.52

 

 

I want you to stare at those salaries, and state whether we might not be back to Square One in terms of the INTERNATIONAL disposition of salaries of our university academic staff, especially when you read some of the INORDINATE LOOTING that is reported in our country Nigeria.  Personally, among many other reasons, social and political,  I would not take a permanent VC job now in ANY Nigerian university today that I agreed to take in February 2011, certainly not a public one whose salaries are so fixed.  I am much wiser now.

 

As for the two agencies NUC and TetFUND, I have so much to write about them, but not now.  Suffice it to say that the NUC is burdened beyond its stipulated regulatory function, descending too much into the university arena; TETFUND is a model funding agency in Nigeria, but wracked with internal capacity problems and external pressures;  and respect in the university system for who heads both institutions - and their relationship to both the Presidency and the Ministry of Education -  is key to their success.    Peer review respect is also critical.

 

I have worked with the NUC off and on for over 15 years - long before I became VC at Otuoke - and had to work intimately with it during my tenure.  But I spent more time at Tetfund than at NUC during my tenure, to ensure to obtain whatever funds were allocated to Otuoke in a timely manner -  Tetfund was our major benefactor, funding (among many other things), Otuoke's first research journal, see below - so I know of what I will write about both institutions.

 

 

http://fuotuoke.edu.ng/news/2015-07/fuo-unveils-maiden-journal

 

 

Finally, with respect to improving research there is good news, even in what you wrote, when you ended with Prof. Bamiro indicating that there was a rise of proposals from 100 to 817 in 2015 to 1846 in 2016.  We await some information on quality and impact, but the Nigerian University system has demonstrated some resilience by winning 10 of 19 African Centers of Excellence awarded to West and Central Africa not too long ago:

 

   http://nuc.edu.ng/project/ace/

 

QUOTE

 

ACE UPDATE OCTOBER 2015

AFRICAN CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE (ACE)

The ACE project was launched in 2013 by the governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, with support from the World Bank. The objective of the ACE Project is to promote regional specialisation among participating universities within areas that address particular regional development challenges and strengthen the capacities of these universities to deliver high quality training and applied research.

The project consists of two components; the first is to build capacity in competitively selected institutions to produce in-demand, high skilled, labour and applied research. The second component will facilitate the regional impact and benefit of the strengthened Africa Centres of Excellence through talent and labour mobility and higher education services.

Under the ACE Project, grant awards are made to lead institutions to address specific regional development challenges primarily focusing on the following priority fields:

1.    Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)

2.    Health Sciences

3.    Agricultural Sciences

The first selection process produced 19 Centres of Excellence that were approved for the West and Central African sub-regions, out of which Nigerian Universities won 10.

The Universities from Nigeria that won the grants and their project titles are:

·         Redeemers University, Ede, Osun State (Africa Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases, ACEGID);

·         African University of Science & Technology, Abuja (PAN African Materials Institute, PAMI);

·         Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta(Center for Agricultural Development & Sustainable Environment, CEADESE);

·         Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (Center of Excellence on Neglected Tropical Diseases and Forensic Biotechnology, ACENTDFB);

·         University of Jos, (Phytomedicine Research & Development, ACEPRD);

·         University of Benin (Center for Excellence in Reproductive Health and Innovation, CERHI)

·         University of Port-Harcourt (ACE Center for Oil Field Chemicals,CEFOR)

·         Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife (OAU Knowledge Park, OAK-Park)

·         Bayero University, Kano (African Centre of Excellence ACE in Dryland Agriculture, CDA)

·         Benue State University, Makurdi (Centre for Food Technology and Research, CEFTER)

 

UNQUOTE

 

So all is not doom and gloom, Moses.

 

Finally, finally:  you wrote about a particular paper as "purportedly an analysis of metered billing practices of Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN). Not only is the "article" a mockery of every rule of academic publishing, the SOLE basis of the paper is the electricity bill of a Benin resident!!!!"   

 

Were you referring to this article (which I found by just entering some key tags based on your "objection");

 

  http://www.akamaiuniversity.us/PJST11_1_138.pdf 

  The Impact of the Pre-Paid meter on Revenue Generation in Nigeria. Emmanuel A. Ogujor, Ph.D. and Paul O. Otasowie, Ph.D.*      Department of Electrical/Electronic Engineering, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. * E-mail: Potasowie@yahoo.co.uk 

 

If you are referring to this article - and I strongly believe you are, unless you state otherwise - first, it is addressing an issue VERY PERTINENT to the Nigerian situation (electricity reliability, billing, etc.), so the authors should be commended for relevance.  Secondly, it must have passed muster the requirements of the journal in which it was published, resident at "Akamai University, Hawaii, USA".

 

But on second thought, I visited the website of the journal, and notice that 99% of the articles featured there were of Nigerians:

 

    http://www.akamaiuniversity.us/PJST.htm

 

with weird titles like:

 

  

• An Assessment of Motorcycle Operation in Ado-Odo, Ota Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria. T.G. Kolawole and O.J. Afolabi.

·          

•  

The use of Social Skill Training in Fostering Pro-Social Behavior of Secondary School Adolescents in Gombe State, Nigeria. M.K. Olanrewaju and G.A. Aliyu.

·          

•  

 

• Integrated Geophysical and Geotechnical Evaluation of Foundation Failure in Parts of Ikere-Ekiti, Southwestern Nigeria. O.O. Olutomilola, O.O. Afolabi, and J. Yakubu.

• Hydrogeochemical Characterization of Groundwater in Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti Southwestern Nigeria. O.O. Afolabi, S.O. Olatunji, and E.D. Wategire.

 

• Physico-Chemical Properties of Wastewater within Agbara and Impact on Ologe Lagoon, Lagos. A.D. Folawewo, A.N. Madu, A.F. Omolayo, and O.B. Muyideen.

 

• Extension Information Needs of Commercial Poultry Farmers on Environmental Management in Kogi State, Nigeria. I. Ogunlade, M.O. Oduwaiye, K.F. Omotesho, and S.E. Komolafe.
•  

Lord have mercy!   Nigerians have taken their "publish or perish" mentality to Hawaii!  And I do not know how many times I have told Nigerian academics not to include the names of their villages in their paper titles!

 

 

And there you have it.

 

 

 

Bolaji Aluko

Having a belly laugh

 

 

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

Bolaji,

 

I really look forward to reading about our experiences as VC in FUO. I am particularly interested because as you said, unlike most other VCs you did not come up through the ASUU system and therefore had no loyalty to the outmoded and stifling orthodoxies the union has fostered over the years. You presided over an institution without ASUU. I also would like to read your experiences from the perspective of an outsider-insider, which is what you were, for lack of a better term.

 

I agree that funding is an important aspect of the problem. As part of any profound reform of higher education in Nigeria, a sustainable formula of funding and cost sharing has to be in play. 

 

My main grouse is that the funding issue is often advanced as both a solution to all problems, which it is not, and an excuse for problems that have little or no bearing on funding. Everything gets blamed on poor funding in the ASUU rhetoric, which everyone nurtured in the ASUU tradition then uncritically repeats without interrogating the legitimacy and limits of it.

 

Furthermore, many Nigerian-based colleagues and administrators understand the issue of funding in a rather narrow sense--funding for building campus infrastructure. That is reductive, of course. Every time I go to a Nigerian university campus, I see shiny new buildings funded by TETFUND, ETF, NUC, or some other government intervention agency. You always see these impressive structures, completed or under construction. They have become permanent features of higher education in Nigeria. Yet, standards have collapsed even in the midst of this "funding" and infrastructural boom. Certainly, funding, understood in this narrow sense of throwing money at public institutions to construct infrastructure, has not yielded the most desired objective of expanding access and RAISING STANDARDS.

 

The other popular (popular with ASUU) understanding of funding is the one that translates to better remuneration and financial rewards to academics and administrative staff. I have nothing against paying workers the wage they deserve or as a way of motivating them to give more effort and demonstrate more commitment. However, in the Nigerian university system, efforts to boost the pay of academics have actually had the undesirably negative and unintended effect of causing further deterioration in standards--both in pedagogical and research terms. Let me illustrate this point with a semi-personal story.

 

When I was in my first year in my undergraduate program at Bayero University, Kano, the pay of my lecturers was abysmal. Many were struggling to feed and afford transportation to work. even as students, we could see the problem and knew that our lecturers were poorly motivated. We identified with their grievances. When ASUU went on strike in our second semester (I think), we as students wholeheartedly supported them. This was the famous Jega-led strike.

 

When the strike was resolved, the pay of lecturers was significantly boosted, and several allowances and entitlements were approved and paid to them. accumulated arrears meant that there was a dramatic transformation in our lecturers' personal economies. We could tell because many bought new cars, lived better, furnished their homes (we knew the homes of some of them), and became generally happy. One particular lecturer of mine, who had had to take a a tutoring job with a Korean expatriate family in Kano, left that job, changed his car and the furniture in his home and confided in us that his financial situation was now significantly better.

 

We students were happy for our lecturers. We also supported their subsequent strikes when government reneged on some of the terms of the agreement reached,  and I recall even publishing an Op-Ed in the defunct National Concord newspaper in ASUU's support. But we students also expected that our lecturers' pecuniary satisfaction would translate to a better attitude towards their primary job of instruction. Boy, were we wrong. We were utterly disappointed to observe that in fact the lecturers' hard-won pecuniary benefits and remunerative improvements caused many of them to be disdainful of their teaching duties and to look upon students with contempt. Lecturers, already haughty tyrannical snobs, began to behave like typical Nigerian big men and women. Teaching became a nuisance to many of them, who now wanted to enjoy their new financial resources. To our dismay, the lecturers who never showed up in the days of terrible pay or who showed up only a few times a semester continued in the same attitude. What was their excuse now that they were better paid? Some of them even became worse. Lecturers who had been showing up in the days of intense hardship now began to absent themselves from class. 

 

Improved rewards had become a curse, at least to the pedagogical enterprise in our university. This was a shocking outcome of the struggle, an unintended fallout of ASUU's success, one that has been repeated several times over the years and one that ASUU honchos are yet to reckon with. The paradox of increased funding (in the narrow sense of increased salaries and benefits) leading to poorer teaching complicates the funding-as-a-solution rhetoric.

 

I cannot speak to whether that burst of remunerative funding led to an improved research culture, as I was not attuned to the pre- and post-strikes research culture in my university and others. However, there is now ample evidence, accumulated over many years, demonstrating yet again the same correlation between improved funding and deteriorating standards. Everyone agrees that subsequent strikes by ASUU has led to a remarkable increase in infrastructure, remunerative, and research intervention funding. Yet the research output from Nigerian universities remains depressingly poor and is getting poorer. 

 

Over the years, I've been alerted to published "articles" of professors that would not make the cut as a first year undergraduate paper. Lacking original research, an argument, and any attempt at analytical rigor, these "articles" are published in pay-to-play predatory journals and are proudly displayed on CVs and parlayed into promotional evaluations. Nor is the problem simply one that afflicts the humanities and the social sciences. Bolaji, you're a professor of Chemical Engineering, so this one is right on your alley. The other day, someone forwarded to me a published journal "article" written by two UNIBEN professors of engineering. It was published in a junk, zero-reputation, pay-to-publish journal. First of all, the paper has nothing related to engineering in it. It is purportedly an analysis of metered billing practices of Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN). Not only is the "article" a mockery of every rule of academic publishing, the SOLE basis of the paper is the electricity bill of a Benin resident!!!! I have archived several other scandalous examples, including one written by two professors of mass communication that is written in sixth grade English and riddled with unpardonable errors of elementary grammar. 

 

My point is that the research culture in Nigerian universities has waned even as funding for research has become more available. Between TETFUND, the NUC, and other agencies, there are now pots of money running into billions of Naira for Nigerian academics to access for research purposes. Yet one of the recurring stories related to these interventions is the failure of Nigerian academics to even apply for these research funds. 

 

Why should they apply when research--original research--is virtually dead in the Nigerian university sector? Why should they when they can become professors without conducting a single piece of original research and can conduct derivative research and/or plagiarize their way to professorships? For those who worked heard to earn their promotions and ranks, what's the incentive to apply to these funds by crafting rigorous and compelling proposals when quality research is not a prerequisite for promotion or distinction and will not attract better remuneration to them as a way of recognizing and rewarding their research efforts?

 

I came across this story today. Read it below and weep for the Nigerian university system. The funding that we often harp on is  available, at least in the research sphere, according to this story, but there are either no applicants or the applications are poor and unfindable.

 

 

 

 

 

90% of lecturers' research proposals very poor and unfundable, says TETFund

August 10, 2017 by Yekeen Akinwale in Featured News, iNews · 1 Comment

 

Eight years after the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) instituted the N3billion National Research Fund (NRF) to enhance research activities in tertiary institutions, only N1.72billion of the fund has so far been accessed by lecturers due to the poor quality of research proposals.

Abdullahi Baffa, Executive Secretary of TETFUND, said this in Abuja on Thursday at the inauguration of NRF screening committee and Technical Advisory Group on Book Development.

He lamented the quality of research proposals submitted by Nigerian lecturers to access the research intervention fund, saying: "Since its establishment in 2009 with the seed fund of N3billion, about N1.72billion has so far been disbursed to finance researches in different thematic areas, and an additional N1billion was allocated in 2016 to beef up the intervention.

"One of the key concerns of the TETFund in respect of the implementation of this intervention is quality of research proposals that are being submitted by applicants."

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He explained that NRF and National Book Development interventions, among 12 other intervention lines, were put in place to assist the fund in the screening and selection process for the purposes of administering the interventions.

"The vision of this intervention is to deliberately promote the evolution of a knowledge-based, globally-competitive, research and development-driven socioeconomic development process in Nigeria," he said.

"This, we believe, can only be achieved through coordinated, properly-focused and cutting-edge researches in all critical areas, and anchored by scholars in the higher education institutions."

Femi Bamiro, former Vice Chancellor of University of Ibadan and member of one of the committees, spoke further on the poor turnout of Nigerian lecturers to accessing the research grant, noting that less than 100 proposals were received when applications were invited for grants.

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Speaking on behalf of other members of the committees, he said less than 10 of the proposals were fundable, due to their poor quality.

"If you are talking of knowledge economy, what drives it is research. If research is to translate into development, it cannot just be publications. It has to be research, development and innovations," he said.

"The burden of research lies on the shoulder of tertiary institutions. Funding research started around 2009 but we must also not forget that prior to then research was probably nothing to think about in tertiary institutions.

"Only three institutions were lucky to attract foreign grants. I'm speaking for the University of Ibadan, you found out that most of the grants for meaningful research in the system were from WHO and so on. We used to have senate research grant in the university but when the Vice Chancellor cannot even pay salary, how can he get money for allocation of research until TETfund came with that N3billion."

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"But when we started calling for proposals, initially we got less than 100 from out of the system; whether universities, polytechnics or colleges of education, and out of the 100 we found less than 10 fundable.

"But I must say that by the time institutions started taking proposal writing seriously, we saw significant improvement. By 2015 we received 817 proposals from the system. Then in 2016, we received 1,846 proposals, which meant that the Nigerian higher education system was now ready for research."

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) campaigned for enhanced funding of research in the universities before TETFund put in place NRF.

 

 

https://icirnigeria.org/90-of-lecturers-research-proposals-very-poor-and-unfundable-says-tetfund/

 

On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 11:13 AM, Mobolaji Aluko <alukome@gmail.com> wrote:

 

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:

No. 3 of 3

https://www.flickr.com/photos/toyinfalola/albums/72157684894317030

 

 

 

 

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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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