Time to mourn the demise of the Ivory Tower

A graduation ceremony.

What you need to know:

  • Sorry state: It is now possible to graduate with a bachelor’s degree and meet your “classmates” for the first time during the graduation ceremony!

There was a time in this country when everyone was clear about the meaning of a university education.

While the Ivory Tower was regularly derided on the street, those that occupied or had passed through it were respected and treated like the national treasures they were.

They were often consulted by government and non-governmental bodies in their areas of expertise, and their opinions were widely sought after.

A university education then meant exposure to a broader world-view, an expansion of an individual’s knowledge horizons. Often, people left home to go to university, and no matter what they studied there, they came back totally changed.

For a long time we held the celebrated view that the university was a great melting pot of ideas, and that the mere exposure to this environment was sufficient to infuse one with a sense of purpose and direction in life.

LIES IN RUINS

If this column today sounds like a piece in the obituaries section of this newspaper, it is only because that is exactly where it should be. It is time, in my view, to mourn the demise of “proper” university education in Kenya, after decades of multiple ailments that overwhelmed the Academy and crushed its spirit.

The Ivory Tower has finally succumbed to the sustained pressure of the multitudes, and today lies in ruins where it once rose majestically into the sky like the proverbial construction in ancient Babylon.

Today, every village is clamouring for “our own university”, ignorant of the oxymoron inherent in claiming something truly universal and ‘villagising’ it. As a result, even more established universities are being claimed by the villages surrounding them.

Somewhere in Eldoret, the village has moved into a university and paralysed its operations, the main gripe being that the leadership of the institution is not “local” enough, at least according to newspaper reports.

Across the country, there seems to be an unwritten rule that any new university must have the same complexion as its “host” village. The Council and the University Management Board must be led and overwhelmingly composed of “local” talent.

The result is that one can tell the location of most of our universities by simply studying the last name of their chief executives or the ethnic composition of their governing organs.

Indeed, this phenomenon is fast creeping into the classroom as well. While it is a statistical certainty that most students in a university are likely to have roots in the community around it, the same ought not to apply to the academic staff. One would expect that universities would search far and wide to attract the best teachers in order to guarantee a high quality education for their students.

Unfortunately we have become lazy, and will instead endeavour to bestow dubious titles on sons and daughters of the soil in order to be able to promote them into senior academic and administrative positions purely “on merit”.

This vulgarisation of university education has seen the quality of graduates plummet as has been repeatedly pointed out by industry. It has seen the Ivory Tower lose its sheen and, like the proverbial Tower of Babel, collapse into a state of neglect and squalor.

It is now possible to graduate with a bachelor’s degree and meet your “classmates” for the first time during the graduation ceremony! The Academy is dead. Long live the Academy!

Prof Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Dean Moi University School of Medicine, [email protected]