"He has been battling with his conscience in the past five years on whether to expose this act of academic terrorism or not."
Its a pity he does not know his story is not new. Congratulations on his having the courage to speak out and move closer to psychological freedom from the terrorism he went through and help others do the same. I expect there are worse stories than his from Nigeria.Professor Ogo Ofuani,who did his PhD at the University of Ibadan more than thirty years ago,described the Nigerian PhD as "prostration, handwork and dobale" 'dobale' being a Yoruba word for prostration in recognition of the power,whether actual or symbolic, of an authority figure.I would not know about the University of Ibadan or about other Nigerian universities,or even much about other departments outside the one where I studied and taught in a Nigerian university, but my experience there has some similarities with stories coming from other Nigerian universities.
The junior academic staff and I, who were often also postgraduate students, at the Department of English and Literature at the University of Benin between 1990 and 2002 when I left there, had a similar experience. The sheer horror and ridiculous character of the experience informed my criticism of the recent agitation by indigenes of Benin, the city where the university is located, to make sure the next vice-chancellor is Bini on the grounds that they have been cheated out of that position since the inception of the university. Having escaped the semi-jungle that some of the powerful figures in the university at times turned the university into, my attitude was "What is the concern of a person who has escaped from prison with who becomes the head prisoner in a prison?". Rather than insist on having a person from an ethnic group as head prisoner, work to change the place from a semi-academic institution cum prison to a fully functional academic system.
I did not think I would have the motivation, the emotional resources, to catalogue how a group of people transformed an academic environment into a personal fiefdom. I might be reduced to simply chanting repeatedly "It was horrible!".
Not all the senior academic staff in my department were guilty. I got the impression that those who could not adapt themselves to the system of being victim or victimiser were the ones who left.
I need to state that those senior academic staff at the Department of English and Literature at the University of Benin between 1990 and 2002 who so devalued the department when I was there did me two strategic favours. Those favours, ironically, helped make me strong enough to understand that they were running a destructive system. I also wonder if I would not have been better off in the long run without those favours.
The first favour was being offered the place on the MA program even though I could not have passed the entrance exam. My relationship with academia has always been problematic since I dont identify fully with the educational system, preferring to educate myself rather than be subjected to the strictures of programs not designed with individual needs in mind. I did not study for the entrance exam and so could not answer any of the questions, preferring to answer a question set by myself. The staff made sure I was offered a place anyway, partly because I was one of if not the best graduating student in my BA class and they knew I had such hiccups during my BA program and still did very well. With hindsight, I might have been better off outside that MA program but it meant I kept my job in the department which I had been offered after the BA program.
The second favour was a couple of senior academic staff making 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,who was the head of department and his protege,the oldest professor in the department,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.
Yes, these senior academic staff had proved helpful to me in the ways I described. Some academic development was also taking place. But at the heart of the system was a culture of systematic dehumanisation created through consistent outright public verbal assaults at graduate students and junior academic staff, arbitrary changes to the rules guiding postgraduate programs, using staff like errand boys; all these coupled with being largely impervious to new ideas, backwardness in the scope of ideas taught at BA and MA levels and ideas and subjects tackled at the PhD; in fact backwardness that extended to being at least ten or more years behind in strategic global developments in key fields in the discipline. All this was compounded by the limitations of the university as a whole, amplified by the country's shortcomings in general.
The university library was well equipped and I wish I made better use of it but the scope for developing ideas within the university system was severely corroded by its systemic problems. Most of these problems were human made.
My vision when I completed my BA was to use my studies in Nigeria as a launching pad to reach a global audience. I disdained the fashionable idea of studying abroad. I was convinced that we needed to demonstrate the value of our national environment in developing the best scholarship possible, as a means of breaking Western epistemic hegemony. Why cant people come from the West and Asia to study at the University of Benin or anywhere else in Nigeria? Why must we be the ones to travel there?
Why cant Africans, Asians and other non-Western thinkers develop their own epistemic frameworks, using tools from anywhere in the world they choose, from which perspectives they would study the world?
Why must I always rely on the philosophies and methodologies developed in the history of Western scholarship in studying almost anything while neglecting centuries old developments from other civilizations? Why cant there be a genuine global dialogue of epistemologies and methodologies?
In relation to my limited experience with the Nigerian university system, I am convinced such an achievement is a possibility regardless of the country's limitations, particularly electricity supply. If security is assured, people can create and sustain programs that people anywhere would be willing to participate in. If the right attitudes are cultivated, such achievements are possible at the level of the national educational system.
My experience studying in England reinforced my conviction that what I was experiencing in that department at the University of Benin was,to a significant degree, a sad and terrible joke branded as an academic system. At last, it was the norm to treat me as a human being among other human beings, a person who deserved to be respected, in a context where mutual respect was the common currency of interaction. I was no longer in danger of being embarrassed by rudeness and snide remarks from senior academic staff at departmental board meetings, a situation that had sustained a slow burning dread in me for years whenever approaching the department at Uniben. I would no longer be subject to being the victim of an ambush by my supervisor as I had experienced at Uniben, who at a departmental seminar, condemned an essay which I had written under his close supervision, having had the outline written entirely by him and having made all corrections he demanded, while still in debt from the two sets of copies of the essay I had made for all members of staff before and after his corrections had made it necessary to replace the first draft. All the senior staff present at the seminar condemned the essay on spurious grounds, and without bothering to suggest any improvements, while my supervisor declared that I had misquoted him in my essay, a false assertion. One professor called the essay vulgar. I requested from them how the work could be improved. There was silence. I recognised that they had ganged up to subjugate me for an earlier initiative in which I had dared to go ahead with my idea of writing books and selling them to students, because most of the senior academic staff lived in mortal fear of intellectual initiative from their graduate students and junior academic staff. It was that seminar experience that convinced me that even though I had spent up to three years in that PhD program, to continue would be to waste my precious time and further subject myself to psychological brutalisation. I left the program so as to avoid their games in which people's lives were being strangled and precious years laced with unproductive sand.
The story I posted on these fora recently about what I understand as discrimination against a student at the University of Cambridge convinces me that there can be injustice in academic systems all over the world.The possibility of being maltreated,however,is reduced by the general cultural level of the nation where the university is located and by the culture of the university itself.
The only time my PhD supervisor at UCL has come close to being rude to me was was in expressing exasperation over my tendency to unilaterally modify the thesis, a tendency that emerged every few years as the program wore on. This was because I was constantly wanting to integrate new ideas, broader perspectives.
My Uniben experience was one in which ideas unknown to the supervisor would not have been entertained in the first place. And the prevailing ideas were the ideas a small core of senior academic staff, two or three people, had learnt in their graduate education in the 1960s and perhaps 1970s.
My UCL program involves a synthesis of ideas and works from the verbal arts, the visual arts, music, philosophy and spirituality. It involves collaborative supervision from the exposure to African art from my supervisor at SOAS and the grounding in Western art from my supervisor at UCL.
The student/academic staff who tried to do his PhD through inter-university supervision at my Uniben department had his thesis topic approved, leading him to continue till he had practically finished the thesis in about three years or more, writing about 100,000 words or more,I expect, only to have his thesis topic cancelled by a professor in the department who decreed that it was not relevant to the department. The student rebounded by writing another thesis while publishing the old one as academic papers. Having overcome such hurdles, he has now become head of department while those who opposed his work are retired.
Efforts to navigate within such a system while abiding by its rules meant, to me, that the scope of people's possibilities for achievement was significant narrowed. They were also compelled to internalise a culture of subservience, of suppression of their own creative abilities so as to survive and continue to earn a living at such a high price within the system. As long as one was malleable in relation to those academic bullies masquerading as academic authorities, those who were undergoing temporary appointment like I once was, would remain employed. Those who were permanent staff had so internalised the jungle culture of being either predator or prey that they bent like rubber under fire under the blows of those academic terrorists or were themselves engaged in preying on others.
For those employed in the system, their income would rise steadily.They would compete their formal academic education sooner or later. They would be able to sustain their families with the income being earned. They would not, like those who went abroad to study, have to acclimatise to a new culture.
The question, however, would be, what is the value of the price being paid for these benefits?
Thanks
Toyin
From SaharaReporters
Dr. C. J Iwuagwu: A Professor As An Academic Terrorist
This report is not necessarily to expose the ugly-bullying tactics of Dr. C.J Iwuagwu in terrorizing his post graduate students, but to advance an informed debate as to why post graduate program in Nigerian universities are so long, uncoordinated and amorphous to say the least. It will also provide a forum to debate on whether it is better to spend five Million Naira for graduate program abroad or waste your youthful years in Nigeria struggling to obtain sub-standard MSc. In Nigerian academia, we have a variety of adept psychological bullies -"academic terrorist". An academic bully is someone who says and does aggressive-bullying things that under normal rules of social engagement would not be acceptable and then uses those same rules of conduct to hamstring his/her students. An academic bully will continuously manipulate the loopholes in the system to keep his students for upwards of 3 years (in some cases 5) in a masters program that should ordinarily have been completed in 18 months. While faculty may bully each other, often times post graduate students are bullied by research advisers without even knowing they are being bullied or are too scared to acknowledge it/do anything about it.
How do I know?
I was a victim in the hand of one Dr. C. J Iwuagwu – a professor of petroleum geology and current head of department of Geology at Federal University of Technology Owerri, Nigeria. Dr. Iwuawgu is a bully who hurls brutal words at his students (graduate and undergraduate) simply for his personal enjoyment, at their expense. His intent was and is still to undermine the victim's self-esteem and make them doubt their own worthiness, intelligence, and/or accomplishments. Academically, Dr. Iwuagwu has no clear plan for his postgraduate students, no class/lecture material or allocated time, no feedback to his students on 'progress' in the program.
A power relationship that faculty have over post graduate students makes it easy to control them overtly and covertly for several reasons. In the case of Dr. Iwuagwu, his graduate students are meant to pay/bribe him for his signatures on documents and applications. It took Dr. C.J Iwuagwu SIX good months to go through a typed manuscript of my thesis that is less than 70 pages. On several occasions, he had boosted that he will only graduate 5 students in the post graduate program in his area of petroleum geology before he retires. At my last count, about four has made it in more than his over 20 years in the academia.
In most post graduate schools in Nigeria (UI a clear exception), there is no proper coordination between the different programs, departments and the post graduate school; no strict timetable/deadline for course work scheduling and completion; no feedback loop for assessment of effectiveness or addressing of complaints.
What is even worse is that in cases where the student may have the courage to escalate his predicaments, there is no designated authority willing to take proper action to address the incivility and academic terrorism. In the case of Dr. C.J Iwuagwu, I was so terrorized when I made a complaint to the dean of the School of Science and Post Graduate School without success. When he got wind of my complaint, he boosted that "he is like a sewage waste that flows out of the toilet that nobody can touch." He told me that if I like, I can take him to the school senate and that "nothing" will happen to him. And in fact nothing has happened to him.
That is why today he still shamelessly parades himself as the head of geology department that failed to gain full accreditation in the last NUC visit in the school. His appointment as the department head in the late 1990s and early 2000 witnessed the worst years that the locust ate in the history of the department as it regards human progress and academic improvement in whatever form.
Dr. C. J Iwuagwu is thus a typical example of a professor as an academic terrorist. But he is not alone on this; his likes are all over universities in Nigeria, from UNN to Unical, from OAU to ABU. The question thus is; why are most Nigerian professors terrorizing postgraduate students? Why can't post graduate studies in Nigeria run smoothly as undergraduate program (at least for the MSc program) as is the case in most western countries? What will it take for the university authorities to enforce sound academic discipline in postgraduate programs in Nigeria?
The way forward
One of the first steps that all post graduate schools must adopt is a clearly defined academic calendar for their post graduate programs. There should be clear timeline for course work completion at least, not this prevailing cases where courses are irregular and undefined. Furthermore, a feedback from MSc/PhD supervisory aspect of academic life MUST be factored into faculty promotion, tenure, or post-tenure review. In western world (where most of these professors did their graduate programs) professors brag with the number of students they have graduated. Without a feedback loop, some students will encounter or be assigned to faculty members who exploit their student labor and/or fail to usher them effectively into the profession.
One other approach is to decentralize post graduate program to faculty/school levels. This way, the administration of programs will be more effective and responsive to the needs of students. While this my expository may be described as a testimony or gripes of a disgruntled student by Dr. Iwuagwu, the truth is there on the ground at Geology Department FUTO for all to see. The fact is that without recognizing that problems exist, without discussing it in a forum like this, there will be no first step toward averting them. Without a clear policy statement from post graduate schools or university authorities that reaches beyond a stated or implied ethical code of conduct, little can be done to break the silence on academic terrorism.
E-mail: churchill.okonkwo@gmail.com
The writer graduated in early 2005 with MSc in Petroleum Geology after five years (full time) of psychological, emotional and financial torture under Dr. C.J Iwuagwu. He has been battling with his conscience in the past five years on whether to expose this act of academic terrorism or not. With this piece, he hope the informed discussion it will generate can help improve on the administration of post graduate program in petroleum geology FUTO in particular and all PG programs in Nigeria as a whole.
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