Bro Kwabena,
We are all proud of your achievements which go to show that something good can come from Nazareth. They call it the normal curve in social statistics - there will always be outliers in any distribution. Even a village school is capable of producing over-achievers while Ivy-Leagues can turn out itiboribo too. As a Freshman in Sociology, some Sophomores tried to scare me with the prospect of having to take Mathematics for Social Science and Social Statistics but I looked them in the eyes and said, bring it on, and went on to ace them both (no bragging).
I agree with you that the instant publishing technology of the internet is error-prone but one good thing about it is that once identified, errors are easily corrected and the publication quickly updated especially when those websites were built by well-paid consultants. Given that the league tables for universities may rely only on the websites for information on our institutions, each of us may need to go and review the websites of our Alma Mata and make suggestions for improvement when necessary.
I also agree with you that the availability of hot shower should not be the basis for the comparison of academic excellence in African and foreign universities especially because the rigorous research methods training in institutions without web sites count for more than multiple-choice based assessments that predominate in North America due to the large class sizes that are increasingly the norm back home now too. Our undergraduate theses were pretty rigorous and included the oral defense before an external examiner but it is not rare to find even Masters degrees by coursework (no thesis) in excellent universities abroad with the result that for some doctoral students, the dissertation is the first time they are attempting an original research project and they consequently struggle for years as ABD. Those who are given the opportunity to serve as research fellows or visiting professors back home should therefore be attentive to identify things they can learn from Africa instead of assuming that the exchange of knowledge is a one-way traffic.
Biko
From: "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" <KAParr@ship.edu>
To: "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 24 September 2013, 22:43
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ikhide and Pope, I Beg Help Us?
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We are all proud of your achievements which go to show that something good can come from Nazareth. They call it the normal curve in social statistics - there will always be outliers in any distribution. Even a village school is capable of producing over-achievers while Ivy-Leagues can turn out itiboribo too. As a Freshman in Sociology, some Sophomores tried to scare me with the prospect of having to take Mathematics for Social Science and Social Statistics but I looked them in the eyes and said, bring it on, and went on to ace them both (no bragging).
I agree with you that the instant publishing technology of the internet is error-prone but one good thing about it is that once identified, errors are easily corrected and the publication quickly updated especially when those websites were built by well-paid consultants. Given that the league tables for universities may rely only on the websites for information on our institutions, each of us may need to go and review the websites of our Alma Mata and make suggestions for improvement when necessary.
I also agree with you that the availability of hot shower should not be the basis for the comparison of academic excellence in African and foreign universities especially because the rigorous research methods training in institutions without web sites count for more than multiple-choice based assessments that predominate in North America due to the large class sizes that are increasingly the norm back home now too. Our undergraduate theses were pretty rigorous and included the oral defense before an external examiner but it is not rare to find even Masters degrees by coursework (no thesis) in excellent universities abroad with the result that for some doctoral students, the dissertation is the first time they are attempting an original research project and they consequently struggle for years as ABD. Those who are given the opportunity to serve as research fellows or visiting professors back home should therefore be attentive to identify things they can learn from Africa instead of assuming that the exchange of knowledge is a one-way traffic.
Biko
From: "Akurang-Parry, Kwabena" <KAParr@ship.edu>
To: "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 24 September 2013, 22:43
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ikhide and Pope, I Beg Help Us?
Oga Biko! I am with you on your tongue in cheek take: websites and shower-heads as signifiers of under/development! Yes, I am a proud product of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). I went to KNUST to study architecture but found the mathematics that accompanied it too cumbersome. As a result, I ended up in the Faculty of Social Science that catered to History, Sociology, English, African Studies, and Political Science. I am sure that the new Department of Sociology and Social Work is an offshoot of the then Faculty of Social Science, and that makes it a work in progress. For one thing, this is not to say that the grammatical infelicities of the website should be caressed and championed. For another, it means in so many ways that sometimes, we overstep the boundaries of comparative lens: websites and shower heads in the West and those in Africa. Let me add that in the bygone era, KNUST did not have websites, but produced excellent students! My Bachelor's thesis, defined by sociology and history, was 149 pages long, excluding bibliography. It entailed field work and archival searches. And it prepared me very well for what I do today. Here in the Western world, there are universities, including withering diploma mills, with neon-rich and well-groomed websites that cannot match the excellence of some of our website-challenged universities! Let us stop the Africanization of poverty and mediocrity! Africa will come into its own.
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Biko Agozino [bikozino@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 10:50 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ikhide and Pope, I Beg Help Us?
Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 10:50 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ikhide and Pope, I Beg Help Us?
Ikhide complains a lot about the poor design of the websites of some Nigerian Universities and Pius complains about imperfect shower heads in Nigeria and Ghana. Here is job for the self-professed African Super Minds - Shakara Ikhide, cycling away while Africa is dumbed down, and the most superior Pope with a swagger:
Please visit the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, and 'enjoy' the welcome message from the Vice Chancellor, a certain professor Otio. If you think that the welcoming message could use some editing, wait until you visit the homepage of the Department of Sociology and Social Work: http://archive.knust.edu.gh/pages/index.php?siteid=sociology
The university claims to have been founded in 1951 (older than almost all universities in Nigeria), it is named after one of the greatest sons of Africa, it actively advertises for students to apply for admission from Nigeria, it collaborates with top-notch institutions internationally, and it claims to be among Africa's best universities. Ikhide and Pius should please help them to edit the grammar on their website or help them rewrite everything in broken English if they prefer. Better still, they have job vacancies for lecturers and you should consider applying there so that you can show 'yeye' ASUU members in Nigeria how to be excellent intellectuals.
'Pope', I beg sit down and do some editing to earn your keep because you have just been hand-picked and appointed as a Diaspora Visiting Fellow to help develop African Universities but without any call for competitive fellowship proposals. When asked why a Nigerian was being posted to Ghana for your fellowship, the Nigerian director of the program at an international foundation claimed that his foundation already works with three Nigerian universities (two in the North and one in the West but none in the East which incidentally leads the country in the education industry, some meritocracy there). Oga moderator, I beg hold your hammer, this is not another Igbo-Yoruba wahala, I am just saying....
The first essay from our Diaspora Fellow for the exposure of lack of perfection in African Universities (as if there is perfection anywhere) was a comparison of hotel shower flows in Nigeria and Ghana where the burning desire of our Canada-based expert was to have a hot shower in Africa. No kidding. He said that he was only interested in perfection and so even if nine in ten shower heads were working in Nigeria and Nigeria (never counted shower head flows with my mediocre mind), he had the right to make a fuss and show the hotel staff who was a big man even if that risked a spit or a piss in his room service, he bragged. No kidding either. According to our effico expat, the Nigerian 'engineer' with whom he bonded through broken English could not understand his gra-gra about a shower that worked well-well while his Ghanaian counter-part understood this perfectly in Queen's English.
So Ghana must be superior to Nigeria in shower head maintenance and 'the most popular African public intellectual' must be superior enough to all African professors to be hand-picked without due process and transparency but I doubt that shower heads analysis is his main job description. I extend many congratulations to Ghana, to the superior expert and to the international foundation for recognizing the need to reap some brain gain from our brain drain because, as one poem puts it: 'brain for drain no better pass brain drain'. All I am saying is that the year-long fellowship should, at the very least, be spent editing illiterate web messages on the websites of some African Universities rather than on navel-gazing at the perfection of shower heads for hot showers in the above 100 degrees temperatures of West Africa, important as that may be as a 'metaphor for perfection'.
Biko
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