Interesting.
Moses Ebe Ochonu has made some valuable points, but as usual he projects his anti-ASUU, anti-Nigerian university lecturers in Nigeria bias that dilutes his stance so significantly. 'the usual noisemaking ASUU-affiliated members of this list, who impulsively flock, like flies to spoilt food, to defend ASUU when it comes to matters of the pocket and the union's perennial financial blackmails misnamed strikes'.
'ASUU...That mediocrity-promoting, money-grabbing body of enablers and perpetrators is, alas, opposed to any effort to hold the large gang of rapist-lecturers and sexual abusers on our campuses accountable.
Sahara Reporters' summation of the outcome of the scandal, "Sexual Harassment Audio Tape Forces Top Unilorin Lecturer Out Of Job"not only makes it clear the university is taking action on the issue but that the university has issued a statement on it. The new medium states that "Investigations show that the university failed to take the case seriously until the video went viral on social media, suggesting that the institution is normally negligent in such matters". It would be helpful if ASUU were to make a strong statement on the story but does the union not doing so provide grounds to condemn the corporate body?
Internal vs External Disciplinary Mechanisms
I understand the report on ASUU's stance about the proposed bill as stating the union describes its members as being negatively profiled by the law in question and as ambiguously worded in a way that opens them to victimization, stating that universities have their own laws and processes for dealing with the challenges of sexual harassment of students by lecturers, mechanisms which exist and do demonstrate a degree of effectiveness in Nigerian universities, although I dont know how effective they are across the board. Is there not therefore a world of difference between the explicit and implicit meanings of the statement attributed to ASUU and Moses's summation that ASUU is "opposed to any effort to hold the large gang of rapist-lecturers and sexual abusers on our campuses accountable?".
Bolaji Aluko provides a very commendable summation of the issue from the perspective of administrative experience within the system being discussed. I wonder though,why he thinks an agreement has to be renewed in this instance to remain relevant. Does the agreement have an expiration date? Even if it does, which I doubt, should the relevant systems the agreement is meant to guide operate in a vacuum until this renewal takes place? As for the agreement being violated, if it has, does that mean it should be ignored? As for the autonomy/independence distinction, I would like to know what exactly that is supposed to mean and how it applies here.
Current Nigerian Govt and Anti-Corruption
As for those invoking the name of someone called Buhari into this subject and hoping for a positive legacy on the issue to be effected by a terrorist [ 'the use of violence or threatened use of violence (terror), often targeting civilians, in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim- Wikipedia], a person who threatened that 'the dog and the baboon', metaphorical for opposing politician contestants, would be bathed in blood if he lost the 2015 elections and who has been the chief supporter of the mass murdering Fulani terrorism and colonization drive across Nigeria, support given through his strategic silence at the mass murders and tardy speech when forced to comment by national outcries, as well as justifying the attacks by the Fulani herdsmen by claiming farmers have taken over grazing routes marked out in other people's property for the herdsmen as he uses foreign exchange unavailable for education and business in buying grass to feed the cows of his ethnic/religious herdsmen killers, a dictator whose anti-corruption war is primarily an instrument for enthroning an ethnic hegemony while ignoring glaring corruption cases in his own party, whose replacement of VCs on assuming office recapitulated in tertiary education his ethnically centred strategy in the intelligence services, the electoral office, the armed forces and other control centres of the nation, I wonder why you think you should expect anything substantial from a character whose primary interest is ethnically centered power consolidation and internal colonization and who has no conclusive personal exposure to even the lower levels of the educational system being discussed, as witnessed by the ongoing court case where he is using the nation's money in hiring the most expensive lawyers rather than produce the secondary school leaving certificate he claimed to have as a prerequisite for the scandalously low level of education required to run for the Presidency of Nigeria.
Need for Protection from Sexual Harassment for Students and Lecturers
Moses is eager to project a face of moral indignation and challenge but refuses to recognize what I would describe as its implications within the psycho-social network of a university and the Nigerian university in particular.
In response to Olajumoke's position, I argue that all forms of predatory behavior must be penalised. A student should not try to take advantage of a male lecturer by showing him her breasts in the process of requesting that he pass her in a course he is teaching, nor come to his office after school hours or on holidays to try to make herself available for marks, nor come uninvited to his house in pursuit of such a goal, nor indicate in an exam paper that she is available so she may be passed.
Moses sums up the reality across the workplace-'they will need plenty of luck to find another profession where sexual and other temptations requiring maturity and self-restraint are absent. The academia is a professional arena fraught with sexual tensions' and is eager to point to US policy on sexual harassment, but does not add that in US workplaces, predators are punished across the board regardless of their levels of institutional power, meaning students who prey on lecturers and lecturers who prey on students are both punished, with a US university whose rules I quoted in a debate on this topic in this forum spelling out this point out very clearly.
Bode's response says much on this "I understand the absolute need to punish the powerful especially with the endemic nature of abuse by teachers but we shouldn't fall into the opposite danger of romanticizing and normalizing reprehensible behavior simply because the persons involved are powerless students etc, what is the value of education that does not make students and faculty bear full responsibility for their actions no matter how differently we weight the actions as we should".
The Morality of Consensual Sexual Relations Between Students and Lecturers
Academic journal publishing and academic publishing in general are particularly time and energy consuming, even more so since they require a strong economy or creative marketing and publishing strategies for them to be economically viable for the publishers. This viability includes the ability to make enough money across the spectrum of publications running from textbooks vital for providing insight across subjects and more specialized works addressing breakthroughs in aspects of particular subjects. Along those lines, a member of the staff of Oxford UP once stated that his publishing house never runs at a loss unlike a number of academic publishers, not surprising given the scope of strategies Oxford UP employs to reach a broad readership, the most striking perhaps being their Very Short Introductions series which presents the latest research on particular broad fields in ways that the average reader can follow easily, a strategy I dont know any other academic publisher doing as successfully, with Cambridge's Canto Classics series, impressive at it is, not approximating the visual and practical, colorful, pocket sized appeal and breadth of subjects as the Oxford series. I read of a related effort from a US academic publisher but still not at the level of balance of plus factors as the Oxford approach.
Academic journal publication at present also operates in terms of access to a large workforce of academics who are prepared to work for free as assessor of journal articles. I wonder the likelihood of building such a workforce in large numbers in an environment like that of Nigeria bedeviled by system failure- low levels of access to public services such as electricity and water, recurrent loss of priceless energy and time in seeking fuel for cars and generators, political instability leading to instability in the educational system, demonstrated in graphic terms by the recent controversial replacement of vice-chancellors in the universities founded by the past administration, further entrenching a culture of subservience to political powers outside the university to whom vice-chancellors are primarily beholden for their offices, perhaps contributing to the temptation for the VCs to become overlords within their constituencies, lording it over those constituencies from within as the VCs are lorded over from outside.
It can be argued that academic journals are largely international organs transcending national or cultural boundaries, making it unnecessary to argue that a nation needs to have journals run by its nationals if it is to maximize its academic productivity, but is that international vision at best not a yet unrealised ideal? As far as I can see in the humanities, although I have not examined the subject systematically, I get the impression, that to a significant degree , the editorial policies of journals are not always representative of possibilities that may emerge from the various parts of the world where the discipline is studied, with Analytical Philosophy described as being dominant in England and the US and Continental philosophy in non-English speaking Europe, with Indian philosophy only relatively recently being discussed as a partner in addressing philosophical questions in such books from Western academic publishers as Self, No Self? : Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions (2010) published by Oxford UP ( whom I particularly admire) rather than being treated as books for area studies scholarship outside the mainstream of philosophy as understood in the West, although Oxford UP's Art History and Art Theory volumes in the Very Short Introductions series briefly discuss non-Western art and thought, but from within the perspectives of and from an emphasis on Western art and thought.
Operating at the highest level of scholarship represented by the most demanding journals and academic publishers requires access, over years, for an academic, and for a university or group of universities, across generations, to the latest developments in the fields in question as they emerge in academic journals and books, and taking active part in those developments, a task the Western universities stretch themselves to enable for their staff and students, with even Harvard, perhaps the world's richest academic institution, recently declaring its difficulties in maintaining its subscription to its traditional corpus of academic journals and Timothy Gowers, Field Medal Prize winner at Oxford, leading a boycott of Elsevier to protest what many describe as unrealistically high subscription costs from the publisher even though the academics the publisher relies on for the academic work that makes the journals possible are doing the work for free, developments fueling the move to open access publishing, at times using media that require no input from publishers, such as blogs.
How would Nigerian universities and academics cope in a world in which even Harvard is complaining of high subscription costs of journals? Compounding such developments , academic books are among the most expensive in the world. Two of the latest books in Yoruba art are Rowland Abiuodun's Yoruba Art and Language : Seeking the African in African Art, an indispensable work in Yoruba and African aesthetics, and Suzanne Preston Blier's Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba : Ife History, Power, and Identity, c.1300, both published by Cambridge UP. The cheapest price for Blier's book, quoting prices for purchase and delivery delivery to Nigeria, on Bookfinder , the best book selling site I know and which gathers info from book sellers in the West and Asia, is $86.00 while that for Abiodun's book is $140.33 with such books being published on a daily basis by Western academic presses.Those who are better informed about individual and institutional purchasing capacities in Nigeria are in a better position to assess the implications of these prices and the volume of production they represent in relation to keeping abreast with the disciplinary developments these books demonstrate.
Another challenge Nigerian academics might be facing is a disincentive to publish books since books might not be given assessment in weighting for promotion in Nigerian universities relevant to the effort it takes to prepare them, a situation exacerbated by a publishing industry challenged by operating costs increased by systemic problems ranging from access to electricity to low or non- production of publishing machines and difficulties in acquiring these machines on account of low purchasing power from within the Nigerian economy contributing to a situation in which I have observed that almost all the best books on African art I know of are not published in Africa because the mobilization of the scholarly and material resources vital for the research and publication that produces such books seems to be best achieved outside Africa with the aid of wealthy institutions that can finance such research and publication.
Yet books are indispensable on account of the level of elaboration they involve and can't be replaced by the briefer remit of academic articles, vital as those are. A way out of the challenges of paper based publishing is represented by the Internet, which needs to be maximized in spite of challenges of Internet access in Nigeria. A beautiful example of such maximization is Critical Interventions : Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture , the journal begun and run independently, to the best of my knowledge, by Sylvester Ogbechie for some years, although he did it from his US base, and it was readily affordable, charging £5 to download an article, until perhaps after the journal's very successful outing of bringing together a consortium of scholars in addressing the subject of African fractals across an interdisciplinary spectrum,with the major writer in that field Ron Eglash as guest editor, its publication became managed by a traditional academic publisher, Taylor and Francis, and one now needs £83 per issue as an individual to read articles in that journal. Ogbechie discusses issues of journal costs and open access in "Proliferation of Academic Journals".
Another problem I observe, in Nigerian academic assessment, though I dont have a broad overview on the subject, is the idea that the professor does not need to publish, leading to stagnation that could inspire the temptation to make professors insistent on keeping younger staff from rising to meet them at their level of stagnation and hypocritically raising the bar for assessment while not making any effort to provide any incentives for members of the professoriate to perform at a higher level than the lower standards at which they got their professorships in the first place. A method has to be found to re-describe the professorship as a level of expanding creativity, perhaps borrowing from the older German conception of the professor as I seem to have read it somewhere, as a person professing on a subject at a level of achievement equal to a unique world view, or something like that.
Summation- Nigerian academia needs to be understood and engaged with in terms of its challenges and prospects if its potential is to be maximised.
thanks
toyin
On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 12:32 AM, bcultral <bcultral@gmail.com> wrote:
Sent from my Boost Mobile Phone.
Bode <ominira@gmail.com> wrote:
The members of the House of Representatives whose visas were revoked by the US recently show how widespread this abusive behavior is. I suppose sexual predatory behavior in high Schools must be as bad if not worse given the vulnerability of the much younger kids.
I recall a friend about two decades ago who told me she went into an office to inquire about vacancies and employment. she had just graduated from college. The man she met at the personnels brought out condoms of different colors and asked to pick her favorite color! There should not just be laws protecting kids and women in workplaces and schools, as the Nigerian Universities Commission is pushing for, there should also be awareness programs and compensations for victims .
More importantly, none of this would matter if no one goes to jail for bankrupting the country. The singular most important legacy Buhari can leave is to be the president who instituted the rule of law. Everything else is contained in this act. Without the rule of law, there will be no justice for our girls, or the poor, or our friends ....
If no one goes to jail, Buhari has failed! The country has failed! Yes, everything comes down to this!!
Bode--On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 8:46 PM Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:I posted the link to a tape of a University of Ilorin HOD attempting to rape one of his students in his office and boasting about previous rapes of the same student as well as others. There was no reaction from the usual noisemaking ASUU-affiliated members of this list, who impulsively flock, like flies to spoilt food, to defend ASUU when it comes to matters of the pocket and the union's perennial financial blackmails misnamed strikes. They avoided the topic like a plague. Even our honorable home-based colleagues, who are usually the lone voices of rectitude from the other side of the Atlantic, stayed away from the topic.--The scandal has been raging for several weeks now but ASUU, whether national or the local UniIlorin branch, has yet to issue even a statement. Now we know why. That mediocrity-promoting, money-grabbing body of enablers and perpetrators is, alas, opposed to any effort to hold the large gang of rapist-lecturers and sexual abusers on our campuses accountable. Read the story below and weep for higher education or what's left of it in Nigeria. As usual, when it comes to being held accountable, they shamelessly run and hide under "university autonomy." But somehow, the narrative of autonomy never extends to monetary and compensation issues. ASUU exists simply to help its members to a bigger share of the proverbial national cake while protecting them from having to actually do their jobs and from being held accountable for this failure and for crimes against students.What a shame! Nonsense!'Sex-for-marks bill' is a violation of our rights, say lecturers
34AdvertisementThe Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) says the 2016 sexual harassment bill before the senate will undermine the autonomy of universities.
Biodun Ogunyemi, president of the union, said this at a public hearing on the bill, organised by the senate committee on judiciary, human rights and legal matters.
The sexual harassment bill was sponsored by Ovie Omo-Agege (LP- Delta Central) and co-sponsored by 57 other senators.
The bill seeks to criminalise sexual harassment in tertiary institutions and among other things, proposes a five-year jail term for lecturers found guilty of sexual harassment of students.
Ogunyemi said universities were established by law as autonomous bodies, adding that there were laws that clearly articulated redress procedures.
"As a global norm, universities and other tertiary institutions are established by law as autonomous bodies and have their own laws regulating their affairs," he said.
"This includes misconduct generally among both staff and students, with clearly articulated appropriate redress mechanism.
"Any law or bill which seeks to supplant these laws violates the university autonomy.
"In this particular instance, the bill violates the federal government of Nigeria and ASUU agreement of 2009 and as such should be rejected."
He said that the bill was discriminatory because it was targeted at educators.
According to Ogunyemi, it is unfair to come up with such a bill; sexual harassment is a societal problem and not peculiar to tertiary institutions.
He also said that the bill was a violation of section 42(1) of the 1999 constitution, adding that it was embarrassing that the legislative arm could seek to make such law that would violate the constitution.
Ogunyemi also pointed out that besides violating the constitution, the bill failed to take cognizance of various extant legislation that adequately dealt with sexual offences.
Faulting the bill, he said it failed to provide convincing evidence to show that sexual harassment in tertiary institutions had attained a higher magnitude than other spheres of the society.
"The bill is discriminatory, selective, spiteful, and impulsive and lacks logic and any intellectual base by attacking the character and persons of those in tertiary institutions rather than addressing the issue holistically," he said.
"Furthermore, the bill is dangerous and inimical to the institutions as it contains several loose and ambiguous words and terms which could also be used to harass, intimidate, victimise and persecute, especially lecturers, through false accusation."
The National Universities Commission (NUC), on the other hand, supported the introduction of the bill "in view of its relevance" and called for its passage.
Julius Okogie, executive secretary of the commission, said while federal and state universities had administrative structures for handling grievances, there was nothing wrong in having a legislation to help with that.
"University miscellaneous provision act gives them power to formulate policies and by-laws to guide them and most institutions have structures to handle these incidences," he said.
"However, there is nothing wrong if there is a legislation to add to what is on ground. We are only saying that universities are doing something about sexual harassment, which may not be enough".
Okojie called on the senate to extend the scope of the bill to cover primary and secondary schools.
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