Varsity education won’t be fixed by CS edicts

The Swahili have a saying that “Mgema akisifiwa, tembo hulitia maji”, meaning that when a brewer receives lots of praise, he tends to start diluting his brew.

In other words, it is a caution against the facilitation of hubris by overpraising someone for simply doing his job.

In Kenya, we have become so accustomed to mediocrity that whenever a public officer manages to do their job as required, we shower them with such an abundance of praise that it inevitably goes to their heads.

A case in point is the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Dr Fred Matiang’i. After his handling of the national examinations last year, many Kenyans practically sainted the man, and not a few people were convinced that he had the mettle necessary to run for the highest office in the land.

SAFEGUARD INTEGRITY

His firm decisions and follow-through impressed many, and his ability to mobilise the entire education sector to safeguard the integrity of the examinations was the clincher for many.

Unfortunately, the minister has taken the same attitude to the university sector. Blanket directives have been issued concerning the qualifications of university lecturers, the structure and even content of curricula, methods of delivery, marking of examinations, and even procedures leading to the award of degrees and the graduation process.

While many of these edicts fall under the ambit of the Commission for University Education under his docket, a number of them do not.

Before we delve into the merits of these edicts, it is important to consider a few basic precepts upfront.

MORE DIVERSE

It bears restating here that a university is a very different proposition from a primary or secondary school, and not merely because of the level of instruction.

Firstly, while basic education delivers the same curriculum and assesses the learners using the same terminal examinations, university education is vastly more diverse.

Universities have programmes spanning many fields of study, and even when two universities have the same programme, the delivery may differ significantly.

Two universities cannot be compelled to deliver exactly the same content in the same way, because they derive their main competitive edge by the “value addition” they inject into their curricula and delivery methods.

The CS cannot appear from the blue and order universities to harmonise all their curricula and give the same examinations to their students unless his intention is to take us back to the days of one monolithic national university with specialised campuses all over the place.

ADD VALUE

University curricula must add value to the communities around the university, as well as bringing something new to the marketplace of things and ideas.

Further illustrating this misguided “standardisation” of university education, there has even been talk of forming a body like the Teachers Service Commission to employ all academic staff at public universities and deploy them based on some unspecified need.

This ridiculous suggestion ignores the fact that the universities are in competition for the market share, and they depend on the reputation of their teaching staff and the longevity of their research programmes to attract high quality students.

Putting academic staff in the uncertain position in which some commission could decide to transfer them to a competing institution on a whim is untenable and will discourage serious scholarship.

HUBRISTIC BEHAVIOUR

There are many other problematic matters that have been exposed through the minister’s recent hubristic behaviour, but a final one that we must bear in mind is that, unlike in basic education, at the university level not all academic staff are employed to teach.

Some of them are employed to attract grants to facilitate cutting edge research whose results may then be used by others to enrich their teaching and service to the community.

Any attempt to deal with our universities as though they are glorified high schools will kill the spirit of academia and deal a blow to the university mission of generating new knowledge and raising a generation of critical thinkers to guide the development of our country and the world.

We cannot fix university education by ministerial edicts.

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