Oga Ochonu,
There you go again, erecting a simplistic argument constructed by you alone but attributed to a person who sees your stance as needing enrichment.
I clearly stated, if I may amplify my point beyond journals, that we all know the best publishing houses, the most prestigious journals, even the best known and often the best books on Africa come from Western academia.
I am stating that I am dissatisfied with the end goal you project in your worthy though at times excessively generalising and at times perhaps unkind criques of Nigerian academia.
The vision I have read you project as the marker of success in the global market place of ideas for Nigerian academia is that of acceptance by the Western academic establishment, as demonstrated by being able to cross over to the West as the Falolas and others did in the 80s and being published in the best journals, which are in the West.
Your critiques for improving the system end there.
They are not embedded in a discussion of how to mobilize human resources, through the robust scholarly, mentoring and pedagogical culture you advocate, in order to generate an endogenously grounded and yet globally magnetising scholarly and academic culture.
Such a broader vision could take the discussion beyond a monilistic focus on the ills of the system to a mobilisation of aspiration to overcome those ills in the effort to maximize home grown potential as once existed in Nigerian academic up till the mid to late 80s.
I'm simply adding my bit to the question of how best to frame the struggle to refine and reposition Nigerian and perhaps African academia.
Your ideas on journal integrity are good ideas.
The discussion does not have to be broken into camps of stark disagreement.
Thanks
Toyin
On Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 03:16 Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
There you go again, Toyin Adepoju, claiming that my position is that our colleagues in Nigeria must publish in Western venues. I want them to publish in rigorous venues. These rigorous venues just happen to be LARGELY located in the global North today. That is a statement of fact.--Where are the rigorously established and run journals in Nigeria? With a few exceptions, all I see are incestuous and mediocre publications that have been proliferating since the early 2000s.I didn't create that situation. Nigeria-based colleagues are partly responsible for it by setting up a thousand departmental and faculty journals that have no rigorous standards of peer review and in some cases no peer review at all. In some scandalous cases they've allowed prestigious, rigorous Nigerian journals to atrophy and die and have established easy, non-rigorous journals in their place. Most now publish strictly in vanity venues and pay-to-publish journals located offshore.Ban vanity publishing, kill most of the rag sheet journals (or consolidate them), and set up only a few journals with proper quality controls, peer review, and rigorous standards. The editors and boards and articles should be drawn from as broad an institutional spread as possible.If the content is rigorous and of good quality even those of us in the diaspora would want to publish in them. And they would be taken seriously, the same way Nigeria-based journals were taken seriously from the 1950s to the 1980s.Sent from my iPhoneOn Jan 27, 2021, at 4:21 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:--I come across odd views about Adepoju from time to time coming from only God knows where, from commentators whose views are constructed in the shadows of self justificatory opinion beceause they are not aired except to the closed mind of the commentator and when aired are delivered without any signficant effort at justificationI salute the professors of self justified knowledge, concoted in sollipsistic shadows, of unavailable rationale, masters of rigor defined by their lone universe.Sir, in your relentness admonitions to Nigerian scholars to publish in prestigious, necessarily Western fora, please take pains to add a broader view of the challenge at hand.I am yet to read from you the beautiful contextualisations you describe above.Are they perhaps in your scholarly works but not in your social media commentary?Help us go beyond "you must publish in A BC journal in North America bcs it is the best" to "how can we publish in ABC journals and also develop our own journals of such calibre?"Within such a context, the campaign for cleansing the Nigerian University system becomes not simply a prelude to being able to cross over to the West or to publish in the West but to develop our own centres of global excellence round which the world would also gravitate as it once did.Too much effort is spent on extravertionist aspirations.ThanksToyinOn Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 21:29 Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:Gloria,But you can't have it both ways. You lament that African academics are below and behind Western ones because they lack the resources and money of Western academics, which is your way of explaining away the egregious deficits and misconducts in teaching, research, supervision, and scholarly ethics in Nigerian academia.Then you turn around to say African academics don't need to adopt the standards of Western academies and should be judged by their own standards. Which is it? You must be consistent in your frame of reference. Your frame of reference cannot be resource discrepancy between African and Western academics but then when it comes to standards you change the goalpost and reject that frame of reference.That is just an aside.My position is not at all that Western standards, modes of thought, ontological rubrics, or categories of analysis are better and should be paradigms for African scholars. You have heard me speak and may have read some of my work, which critiques the universalization of Western post-Enlightenment modernity, and the effort to make European ways of seeing and knowing into paradigmatic and hegemonic knowledge systems. So, I think you know that that is not my position at all. I let Toyin Adepoju's mistaken assertion stand because he has a knack for misreading people and crudely reducing one's position to a caricature that suits his purpose.My position is for rigor. rigor is neither Western nor African. It is universal. You cannot in the name of some alphabet, convenient Afrocentrism and pseudo-nationalist epistemology throw away rigor or justify/rationalize subpar scholarship, teaching, and mentorship.I know that this would conflict with your insufferable, dichotomously simplistic view of everything in terms of "Africa= totally good; West= totally bad." In that reductive frame, one cannot critique African institutions, practices, peoples, and vices without uncritically endorsing their Western counterparts. What kind of simplistic thought process is this?--On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 11:21 AM Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:--Well this boils down to one thing, for Moses:
My adopted Mama cooks the best soup.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2021 3:42 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's QuotePlease be cautious: **External Email**
Moses,
You get carried away at times in your critique
Your overly broad strokes and sweeping denunciations, at times uncritically presented, are not why you are responded to
From.my own petsonal view, as much as I appreciate your doggedness in critiquing negativities on the Nigerian educational system, you don't seem sensitive to the institutional extraversion you are championing.
You lament the decline of Nigerian universities as global knowledge centres but your suggested corrective blueprint does not go beyond the use of Western publishing platforms as global asessment matrices.
Is that the best we can aspire to?
Are the days of African based journals as global standard journals a thing for ever of past history?
As much as I admire the Western educational system, particularly in its highest point of actualisation in Europe and North America, I am not inspired by the idea of being able to sealmessly cross over from a Nigerian University to US academia as a celebration of global standing, which it actually is and which you are celebrating but in a spirit that might need to be more critical.
Still formative thoughts, though.
Toyin
--On Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 21:30 Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks.
I know your views.
I'm also happy to read from others from.different perspectives and even the same perspective and a different contextualization.
We should not be stuck in the unhelpful binary of " if you are asking for elaboration you must be trying to discredit the view being expressed" or " you must approach the subject in the same way as myself or you are aiding and abetting evil."
Thanks
Toyin
On Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 19:20 Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
"I suggest you manage yourself more carefully or you will come across as increasingly petulant and imperialistic of not only your own point of view but of your distinctive style of expressing your point of view."
But Toyin Adepoju, this is already the perception among ASUU types and I have happily embraced it as a welcome price for speaking out on behalf of our terrorized, abused, shortchanged, and voiceless students. I actually love the notoriety, if you don't know. If I had not chosen the "distinctive style" in which I have been expressing my view, do you think we would be having the debate we're now having? It is precisely because of the style I adopted that my points resonated with like minded folks and critics alike.
Meanwhile, I leave you with this one from a victim on Facebook:
Thank you for being a voice to the voiceless. You article brought me tears. It was like you telling my story. I studied to earn my PhD at UI and at a point when my abstract was delayed for over 2 years without much 'genuine' reason. Now it's in the past but I felt bruised and battered. I am gradually getting back to life but now I have no hope in our academic environment
--On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 11:58 AM Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Moses, allow Chidi to speak for himself as a father of three children in Nigerian universities, as you are allowed to speak for yourself as a diaspora Nigerian academic with a BA from a Nigerian university and graduate degrees from US universities and as I am allowed to speak for myself as an Independent Scholar in Nigeria with a BA and graduate degrees from Nigeria and the UK.
I am interested in various vantage points, in varieties of perspectives we have been observing in play, even within the same orientation.
I suggest you manage yourself more carefully or you will come across as increasingly petulant and imperialistic of not only your own point of view but of your distinctive style of expressing your point of view.
I'm not interested in going round in circles. Your views are well known.
I want to read from the perspective of a parent of children in Nigerian universities, as Chidi describes himself.
Chidi is primarily a poet and so is not given to elaborating on his views, preferring one liners.
That's okay.
If he he chooses not to elaborate, I'll take it that he chooses not so substantiate his views, not that the views should simply be taken as self explanatory.
toyin
--On Tue, 26 Jan 2021 at 16:14, Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:
Toyin Adepoju, please quit the pretentious ignorance. After many years of discussing and debating the many problems plaguing higher education in Nigeria, you're still asking Chidi to elaborate on his his and his children's experiences in Nigerian universities. Can you say in good conscience say that you don't know what the problems are, or what parents like Chidi are contending with?--
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 26, 2021, at 3:17 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
share with us what you have observed.
toyin
--On Tue, 26 Jan 2021 at 09:43, Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi.opara@gmail.com> wrote:
Oluwatoyin,What is there to elaborate? I had three children in three different universities in Nigeria and I know that what I went through was not what one should wish for even his enemies.
I still have another child in another university and I know what I am going through at the moment.
Believe me, the system needs overhauling, all parents with children in the system will agree to this except if they are part of the system.
It will take a whole lot of spaces to elaborate on half of the rots going on in the public university system in Nigeria.
This, for me is not an academic exercise, it is a statement of fact.
-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)
--On Tuesday, 26 January 2021 at 08:58:17 UTC+1 toyin....@gmail.com wrote:
Can you elaborate?
On Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 08:42 Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:
The university system in Nigeria needs total overhauling, I know because I had three children in three different universities in Nigeria.
-Chidi Anthony Opara(CAO)
--
Chidi Anthony Opara is a "Life Time Achievement" Awardee, Registered Freight Forwarder, Professional Fellow Of Institute Of Information Managerment, Africa, Poet and Publisher of PublicInformationProjects
--
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