Academic Standards in Nigerian Universities Within the Global Framework of the Economics, Social Contexts and Philosophies of Higher Education
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
The Comparative Study of Ways of Developing, Assessing, Storing, Applying and Transmitting Knowledge
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
The Comparative Study of Ways of Developing, Assessing, Storing, Applying and Transmitting Knowledge
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
College of Medicine
University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Image source: University Of Ibadan Student (graduate/undergraduate) Chat Room - Education
Nairaland
Accessed 24/06/2016
Nairaland
Accessed 24/06/2016
Summary
This essay, inspired by a discussion in the listserve USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, examines the challenges of Nigerian academia in the context of book and journal publication, main instruments in the creation and dissemination of new knowledge, a central goal of the university, the other component of that goal being the development of human power represented by students, a goal pursued through pedagogy using the knowledge largely developed by universities or knowledge gained by employing methods central to the cognitive processes at the heart of university education and research. The essay explores the subject by contextualizing Nigerian academia within the economics, social contexts and philosophy of higher education in a global frame, particularly in dialogue with the dominance of global academia by the West constituted by Europe and North America.
Contents
Relative Levels of Prestige in Academic Publishing
Economics of Academic Publishing for Publishers
Monetary Costs
Unpaid Academics a Central Labour Force for Academic Publishing
The Question of Indigenous vs Non-Indigenous Journals and Publishers
Need for Consistent Access to Developments in Scholarship Through an Ideally Global Scope of Academic Journals and Books
Book Writing and Publishing
Academic Standards for Professors
The Future
Relative Levels of Prestige in Academic Publishing
While recognizing this as important, particularly in the context of the development of the culture of academic journal publication as developed in the globally dominant Western academy and questionable practices demonstrated by a number of Nigerian based journals across time, along with the lack of sustainability evidenced by some of the better academic journals based in Nigeria which developed an international reputation in what may be described as a high point in Nigerian tertiary education in the 60s, such as Odu, on philosophy and Black Orpheus, on literature and art, I would be wary of dismissing ASUU or its staff on such grounds beceause the conditions vital for developing a thriving culture of academic journal and book publishing in the same manner as the Western academy, which is used as an exemplary point of reference on the subject, might not have existed in Nigeria since the social and economic upheavals recurrent in Nigeria with and after the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970.
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 University Press once stated that his publishing house never runs at a loss unlike a number of academic publishers, not surprising, if true, 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 the balance of plus factors as the Oxford approach.
Unpaid Academics a Central Labour Force for Academic Publishing
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 assessors 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, high cost of fuel even in those circumstances, 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 immediate past Jonathan 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.
The Question of Indigenous vs Non-Indigenous Journals and Publishers
Academic journals and academic book publishers may also be seen as operating in terms of explicit and implicit philosophies arising from their local environments, making them promoters of perspectives that align with such views above others. It can be argued that academic journals are largely international organs transcending national or cultural boundaries, making it unnecessary to argue that a nation or a trans-national cultural unit 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 the journal covers is studied, with Analytical Philosophy described as being dominant in England and the US and Continental philosophy in non-English speaking Europe, 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.
University of Ibadan, most likely in its early years
Architectural designs by husband and wife team Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew
Image source : "Introduction to Contemporary Architecture" in http://memarimoaser.blogfa.com/post-124.aspx
"After World War II through a series of acts of parliament Britain decided to invest money in the education of its overseas colonies.
One of the outcomes was the setting up of the first university in the British colonies in West Africa on an undeveloped site of forest and farmland in western Nigeria".
One of the outcomes was the setting up of the first university in the British colonies in West Africa on an undeveloped site of forest and farmland in western Nigeria".
Architecture.com by RIBA : Royal Institute of British Architects
Accessed 24/06/2016Need for Consistent Access to Developments in Scholarship Through an Ideally Global Scope of Academic Journals and Books
Academic journals and books are also shaped by economic imperatives that control access to these knowledge banks and their products, economic imperatives in which weak African economies are disadvantaged. 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 the journals and publishers that command academia being based in the West, publishing in them means such work is often not accessible to people in countries where access to these journals is not readily gained, leading to a loss in the ability of researchers from weaker economies publishing in those journals to contribute to the knowledge base of their own local environment.
Even Harvard, perhaps the world's richest academic institution, recently declared its difficulties in maintaining its subscription to its traditional corpus of academic journals and Timothy Gowers, Field Medal Prize winner at Oxford, led 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 its 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.
Even Harvard, perhaps the world's richest academic institution, recently declared its difficulties in maintaining its subscription to its traditional corpus of academic journals and Timothy Gowers, Field Medal Prize winner at Oxford, led 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 its 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 Abiodun'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 University Press. The cheapest price for Blier's book, quoting prices for purchase and delivery to Nigeria, on Bookfinder , the best book selling site I know and which gathers information 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.
University of Lagos Students Congregate by the Lagoon Near the University Campus
Image source : "Unilag Lagoon Front" post of July 24, 2012 on Lagos City Photo Blog by Lolade Adewuyi
Accessed 24/06/2016
University of Lagos Students Congregate by the Lagoon Near the University Campus
Image source : "Unilag Lagoon Front" post of July 24, 2012 on Lagos City Photo Blog by Lolade Adewuyi
Accessed 24/06/2016
Book Writing and Publishing
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 his blog post "Proliferation of Academic Journals" on his excellent blog.
The Internet provides great opportunities for reshaping the academic publication market, opportunities that represent a wonderful window for scholarship from relatively weak economies. Paper, to the best of my knowledge, is expensive. Production costs can be cut by producing Print on Demand books which are stored in digital form and printed only when a copy is ordered. Websites are as good as book platforms and perhaps even better in some ways than the traditional paper format or even PDF files, which reproduce the paper format in digital form, because websites enable links to information sources in other parts of the Internet, although science publishing in particular has gone a long way in making the publication of its academic articles fully Web intertextual, linking to other sections of the Web, including other academic publications. Social media is also very useful for scholarship, facilitating sharing and discussion, even in relation to sophisticated subjects, bridging gaps between various groups of people. Open access sites like Academia.edu are excellent, while open access journals and books such as those created by Open Book Publishers are blazing a vital trail in academic knowledge development.
Academic Standards for Professors
Another problem I observe in Nigerian academic assessment, though I don't 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 gained 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 along those lines.
The Open Air Sculpture Museum that is the Ekenwan Campus of the University of Benin
Image source : The Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Benin
Accessed 24/06/2016
The Future
Nigerian academia needs to be understood and engaged with in terms of its challenges and prospects if its potential is to be maximized. Magnificent as the achievement of the West is in terms of its higher education system which has enjoyed almost a thousand year growth or more since the European Middle Ages and the founding of the earliest Western universities represented by the universities of Bologna, Paris, Salamanca, Oxford and Cambridge , institutions eventually building on the older ancient Greek achievement transmitted to Europe through the Arab and Persian worlds, the Nigerian university system is not being built by anybody in Europe or its North American cultural outpost, or anywhere else apart from Nigeria.
Before Nigerians found their way to the West and other developed nations to work in their institutions, the people who lived there, through centuries of great sacrifice, had built the systems those Nigerians can now take advantage of, from Socrates who practically committed suicide by surrendering himself to execution by the state rather than stop his public quest for knowledge, a quest that through his admirer Plato and through Plato's student Aristotle, remains foundational for the Western academy, to Jesus Christ who also surrendered himself to death in the name of his mission, in the process laying the foundation for a world view that has shaped and continues to shape Western civilization and thought, with the Western university, as represented by the earliest examples, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge being primarily religious institutions in their earlier centuries, to scholars who lived only for their work and had practically little of another life, such as Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant, while people like Giordano Bruno were executed for heresy in the course of their pursuit of knowledge, William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible whose work was printed in English in a production on which the iconic Kings James Bible is based, was "executed by strangulation, after which his body was burnt at the stake", even as others like Galileo Galilei escaped death but were punished anyway and some like Newton avoided danger by keeping their heretical views to themselves, if I recall accurately on Newton.
University of Lagos Student by the Lagoon Near the University Campus
Image source : "Unilag Lagoon Front" post of July 24, 2012 on Lagos City Photo Blog by Lolade Adewuyi
Accessed 24/06/2016
Image source : "Unilag Lagoon Front" post of July 24, 2012 on Lagos City Photo Blog by Lolade Adewuyi
Accessed 24/06/2016
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