Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why Do Nigerians Contribute so Much to the West through Educational Migration?: Painful Facts

Oga  Moses,

Black and White Vision

The problem with your perspective is that you are  seeing  only what you want to see.

This means your orientation on this issue inhabits only one dimension, perceiving  only black and white in a universe of varied colours.

Holistic Vision

Over the years, I have described on this forum, on Yahoo groups I belonged to, on Facebook and on my academia.account  my positive and negative experiences with the Nigerian university system represented by the dept and university I studied and worked in as a BA student, graduate student, lecturer and ASUU exco member.

In my first and second 22nd July 2010  contributions to the thread ''Academic Terrorism,'' on this group, I  have described in much stronger terms than in this latest essay the negative aspects of my experience with my departmental graduate program  as well as with attitudes of senior to junior lecturers  between 1990 and 2003 when I left the dept.  

 In the name of justice, I also stated the following:

...a couple of senior academic staff  [ made] sure I retained my job even after my then temporary appointment was not renewed by the vice-chancellor as punishment for refusing to return to work during an academic union strike. A  senior lecturer [then Dr. Ogo Ofuani],  who was the head of department  and his protege [ mentor actually] , the oldest professor in the department [ Romanus Egudu]  were aggrieved at this even though they had returned to work like most others had under the threat of losing their jobs, but they did not think I should lose my job for standing on principle.

 

The professor appealed to the vice-chancellor who asked me to write a letter of apology for not returning to work and he would renew my appointment. That meant I would remain employed, take care of my family, and eventually, be strong enough to rebel against the system the department was running.

In my 5th December 2010 response to the thread ''What Makes a Great Teacher: Part 1" on this group, I also referenced my Uniben BA teacher Virginia Ola, whose creatively fervent response to a line from Dennis Brutrus' poetry so affected me that:

I can still recollect the emotional imprint of her response on that day, when the poem moved her, even though it was many years ago on the first year of my BA at the University of Benin.

 

To  some people, the experience might have been a molehill. But to a person who will always remember the experience, it is a mountain that he continues to climb....

Contrastive Accounts of Experiences with Studying in and Assessing Nigerian Universities

My argument with your analyses of the system is  that they are  largely a black and white narrative, with little or no nuance. 

You have unfailingly  described your BA  experience at ABU, if I recall the university correctly,  as almost unmitigated hell on earth, and generalised that experience to include the Nigerian university system in general.

I have more than once on the various public fora I have mentioned,   portrayed the inspirational force of my BA at the University of Benin, recurrently referencing lecturers whose creative impact on me from that BA remains timeless.

I have published,  Inspiring Teachers,  a book of essays on those lecturers, responding to some of those who have passed away, and some of  who are living, my responses ignited by particular incidents. This book is composed of essays posted online and unified by a summative conclusion,  a project that continues to grow, my own rethinking of the concept of a book with the emergence of the ubiquity of the Internet. 

These essays, however, do not include much or anything at all on Virginia Ola, Odun Balogun, Opene, Romanus Egudu, Victor Longe and Nkeonye Otakpor in philosophy, people represented for me  by inspiring recollections, imaged in their words and actions as embodying the dedication they brought to that BA program. Challenges like this discussion suggest I should also take my time to immortalise their efforts, rather than waiting for inspiration by occasional incidents.

Well after I had left Uniben, in 2014, I  even started a Facebook group in honour of one of my lecturers and later senior colleague-Ogo Ofuani, Uniben Eng/Lit Dept and the Vision of Inspiring Teaching,  which I have used as an archive for cataloguing the achievements of some of my former teachers, within and beyond the University of Benin, as well as for exploring my experience with the dept. 

On that group, I published  a summative assessment  of my Uniben educational experience,  parts 1, 2 and 3 of a 2014  essay first published on Yahoo groups,  ''Remembering my Teachers at the University of Benin.'' The following conclusions, similar to those I have presented in my latest essay which you are responding to,  come from there:

The experience, particularly the BA, is foundational for me and continues to grow within me.The rigour and scope of the structure of the MA and the part PhD... left their mark, even though they did not demonstrate the near flawlessness of the BA.

 

Yes. I earlier criticized, and rightly so, my senior colleagues at the Department of English and Literature at the University of Benin in the 1990s for their mismanagement of the postgraduate program as well as a consistent culture of intimidation and under development of younger staff. I stand by that assessment…

 

At the same time, however, those members of staff cannot be assessed totally in terms of that aspect of my experience with them. Some of those people who were responsible for mismanaging the postgraduate program and retarding the development of younger academic staff were the same people who gave us excellent teaching in our BA program.
...

The cosmopolitan culture of Benin-City, perfectly balanced between the newer forms of knowledge and the ancient cognitive systems, rounded the learning experience off in providing an awesome matrix, the implications of which I am still working out with great benefit all the way in England, the creative possibilities of that cultural convergence in Benin being practically infinite.

I did not attend the University of Benin in what is known as the glory days of Nigeria, but my teachers in my BA remain my heroes for their absolute dedication and sheer knowledge. I also read their publications in leading journals in the field. Some of them were pioneers in their disciplines at a global level.

I also tried to examine the reason for the difference between the BA and the graduate program:

.. the rationale for the sharp drop in quality of experience between my BA and my MA/PhD at that university was due to a number of intrinsic factors, relating to the organization of the system  and extrinsic factors,  factors from outside the system.

These include erosion of staff morale and devaluation of the rationale for being an academic through economic and social factors, excessive power arrogated to professors, scholars above any kind of assessment, having reached the top of the ladder, leading  to serious abuses, including repeated increases in the criteria for promotion, while they who made those increases were unbound by them, having reached the top of the ladder, abuses tending  to affect negatively a broad spectrum of issues.

 

I also suspect that I was observing, in total, the difficulty of transplanting the latest stage of development of an institution from a social system where it had evolved across centuries, to one where it was not part of the society's social and cognitive growth.

 

The issues are complex and require careful analysis. Any effort to address the question without analyzing the social, cognitive/philosophical and historical issues involved and applying the lessons learned will be severely limited.  It is not enough to simply condemn.

 

 

Those summations from 2014 resonate with these from my latest essay on the subject, with new emphases in bold in advancing my point here:

The BA had been very good but the graduate program was dogged by orientations unhelpful to growth.

 ...most of the academic managers of the system in the department I worked and studied in were not committed to the greater independence for students and the creative leadership required to run an empowering graduate program or to the creative leadership required to help newer academic colleagues grow.

 ... 

Those dreams I had nurtured in Nigeria, the seeding of my mind by Nigeria's inspirational capacities, the thorough  education I had received but which I needed to build upon and go beyond, potencies my university and to some  degree, my country, were inadequately equipped to help me maximise, were creatively exploded into fruition through the enablements of the former colonial power...

The limitations of your reading of my accounts of my experience and  which another commentator on my  unfolding accounts once demonstrated, is in insisting that the negative must prevail always. That is not my experience with my former dept and university and of the Nigerian university system.

I have summed up here the inadequacies  my senior colleagues demonstrated with the graduate program.  Those observations  do not negate the fact that they delivered a very good BA program for us when I was there. That also is not invalidated by the fact that one or two of those lecturers were either not committed or had personality issues expressed in authoritarianism.  It also is not negated by the fact that the benevolence of some of these lecturers was not uniform at all times, across all students.

I attended three universities  in England  after leaving Uniben and experienced  magnificent growth opportunities, but underlying the magnificence of those opportunities the scholarly culture, discipline, knowledge and skills that enabled me take advantage of those opportunities, is the combination of my self education and my Uniben  BA and graduate programs, in spite of the greater inadequacies of the latter, the efforts of those who taught  me in that BA in particular  luminous in the sky of memory, around whom radiate those I met at the UK universities 

With broader exposure, the limitations of even that Uniben BA became clearer. We did not have a computerised university library.  Our exposure to theory was far behind current developments.

Situations understandable in terms of low technology in the country, and the near impossibility of buying new books from the West after the devaluation of the naira. 

Even then, most of our lecturers did their best within those limitations.

I have become a self taught scholar in the visual arts partly because of the thorough training I got in both literary analysis and literary theory at the University of Benin, transposing those knowledges to cognate disciplines.

My ongoing interactions with staff, students and parents from various Nigerian universities, such as Chijioke Ngobile's account of his studentship at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka,  convinces me that a totalistic negativisation of the system is false. 

At the same time, I try to contribute  to its improvement  through my writing, as in "Academic Standards in Nigerian Universities" and playing such a role as secretary in a 2019 petition by former female students of my former department and signed by a number of departmental alumni,  accusing lecturers in that department of sexual harassment, leading one of those lecturers  to  accuse me of trying to victimise him. 

Please, lets avoid uncritically  deterministic  and absolutist methods of writing history or describing social systems.

I was appalled at the totalistic brush you applied to the Nigerian academy.

The system is deeply challenged but the picture  of "it's all bad" or "it's mostly bad" your orientation suggests, does not look realistic to me.

The West is at least a century ahead of both Nigeria and its educational system. One can acknowledge that without insisting that the Nigerian academic system is equivalent to a rubbish dump.

You have earlier insisted that you make negativising generalisations in order to drive home  a point.

I am interested in depicting the complexity of a situation.

My referencing you in my latest essay on my experience with the Nigerian university system does not mean I agree fully with your views on that system. In the relatively informal context of the essay, I  also did not have to add that your arguments on the subject are often overstretched.

Thanks

Toyin  

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