No need for wrangle over academic titles

The ongoing talk started by columnists Godwin Murunga and Makau Mutua on whether Peter Kagwanja is a professor or not is a sad illustration of how petty our so-called leading intellectuals can be. ILLUSTRATION | JOHN NYAGAH

What you need to know:

  • Murunga, Mutua and Kagwanja all operate at the same level of deplorable ignorance of the irrelevance of professors to any society at this point in time.
  • I suspect that what we are witnessing in this so-called Kagwanja debate is a resurgence of the diploma disease that Ronald Dore diagnosed in 1976 to be the irrational application of educational qualifications as evidence of ability and merit.
  • Knowing this, I find it grossly unfair to readers if I were to overlook the stale talk about Kanu professors and others who fell through the cracks of the system to acquire the titles just because they warped the system with the help of a relative here, a predatory journal there, or an industrious.

The ongoing talk started by columnists Godwin Murunga and Makau Mutua on whether Peter Kagwanja is a professor or not is a sad illustration of how petty our so-called leading intellectuals can be. When I decried this pettiness some time last year, only God knows the vitriol that came my way after an honest opinion that focused on the University of Nairobi, the same one where Dr Godwin Murunga is based.

I am now trapped between emotions of relief and disappointment, driven by a sense of vindication that came much sooner than I ever imagined. Who would have thought, a few short months ago, that an intellectual of Makau Mutua or Murunga’s standing, would indulge in the pedantry of defining a mere title in the name of intellectual discourse?

Anyway, I had made up my mind not to bother with the malicious excitement with which the accusations against Kagwanja have been thrown around, until I read Julius Sigei’s rhetorical question, ‘Can the real professor please stand up?’ I had earlier read Murunga, Mutua, Omanga and Lukoye Atwoli on the same, though the latter two played safe by not naming their subject of attack. Political correctness is not my thing, so I shall speak because I know that as a member of this generation, I am implicated against my will in this madness that, if left unchecked, will make me ridiculous in the eyes of later readers.

Surely, future generations will be puzzled by how simple-minded we all were at a time when we should have shown more depth in the subjects of our engagement. It is incredulous that in 2016, when knowledge travels faster in multiple ways through all sorts of hand-held gadgets, university lecturers can devote time (and journalists' space) to trade petty suspicions on individual qualifications.

DIPLOMA DISEASE

What, if I may ask, is the substantive difference between the Mutua-Murunga duet that accuses Kagwanja of intellectual fraud, and Ferdinand Waititu and William Kabogo who speak the same language in trading similar accusations?

What Murunga, Mutua and their cheer leaders forget is that their preoccupation with titles is just another indicator of the banal vanity that caps our widespread malaise of pettiness — MCAs insisting on being addressed as ‘honourable’ and governors thundering at anyone who does not call them ‘your excellency’!

The Murunga-Mutua duet, I think, represents a section of the university professoriate that suffers from the delusional arrogance with the presumptuous illusion that they are the only smart Alecs in town, and who indulge in a social grandiosity of titular superiority that actually helps no one.

I suspect that what we are witnessing in this so-called Kagwanja debate is a resurgence of the diploma disease that Ronald Dore diagnosed in 1976 to be the irrational application of educational qualifications as evidence of ability and merit. To the diploma disease that we have never recovered from, add the new strain of professor fatigue that the Murunga-Mutua duet is now exposing us to.

What matters to me is not that Kagwanja was not appointed ‘professor’ by any university, but that his intellectual output may enrich or harm society in some way.

No one should forget that the university space and its titles are in decline as the dominant place or indicators of knowledge production and opinion shaping. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o said some time back, there is space enough for a thousand flowers to bloom, and those may do so in different names.

The Einsteins and Darwins of this world did their bit, and so have the Steve Jobs’, the Bill Gates’ and the Papa Wembas. There need not be any dynamic tension between intellectuals within and without the university, as has been dramatised in the recent columns.

Let us not forget that the spurious notion of the university as the only or main operative space of knowledge production, implied by Murunga and Mutua, needs to be tempered with the prevailing logic of industry-based innovation — the Steve Jobs’ or MPesa way — rather than college-based invention as a key intervention in solving our problems now.

To tell you the truth, Murunga and Mutua, the ubiquitous presence of cutting edge knowledge everywhere continues to render university-centred titles both banal and irrelevant. It is those who do things, not who theorise them, that help to transform society.

I wish I were naïve enough to believe that all this talk about Kagwanja’s professorial status or lack of it is an academic debate. But I know it is not; it is about the competing claims of representation in public political sphere, and about ethnic loyalties to political standpoints at the national level and within institutions such as universities, where apparently Kagwanja should go for the conferment of the hallowed name of ‘professor’.

We know how our universities dole out those titles, and so they don’t always give a fair indication of what the individual has actually done in their area of research.

Knowing this, I find it grossly unfair to readers if I were to overlook the stale talk about Kanu professors and others who fell through the cracks of the system to acquire the titles just because they warped the system with the help of a relative here, a predatory journal there, or an industrious student who researched and appended their supervisor’s name to the published findings, either to succumb to intimidation or smoothen their own examination process.

MEANINGLESS TITLE

Such professors are all over this country, including the University of Nairobi that celebrates its status as the less mediocre of such institutions in the region.  

Whatever the case, Kagwanja has more than merited to become a professor in any university, I believe, and for colleagues to embarrass him because of his political inclination, regardless of its reasoning, is to engage in reproachable intellectual righteousness that makes small the likes of Murunga and Kagwanja.

Murunga, Mutua and Kagwanja all operate at the same level of deplorable ignorance of the irrelevance of professors to any society at this point in time. Now, it is war generals like Norman Schwarzkopf, innovators like Steve Jobs and entrepreneurs like Richard Branson who change peoples’ lives, not elevated swots who don’t even know when they have been left behind.

It is annoying to read this so-called Kagwanja debate, and to see someone like Kagwanja shamelessly falling for the desperation of usurping a meaningless title at a time when serious people like Noam Chomsky — yes, the same one who gives linguists nightmares — have moved on to other things. Remember what Chomsky says in Andrew Ross’ “Defenders of the Faith and the New Class.” “Intellectuals, the educated classes, are the most indoctrinated, most ignorant, most stupid part of the population” because they “have internalised their own propaganda and believe it.”

For Murunga, who writes propaganda in all his columns, to accuse Kagwanja of propagandist writing is to remind us of the Kiswahili proverb about nyani and its whatever!