Universities must not die on our watch!

The Kenyan university is dying. It has been dying for the past 30 years or so when a decision was made based on the assumption that the intellectual is a dangerous individual.

The decision was to exile the most ‘radical’ of these intellectuals, and emasculate those that chose to remain. This led to vulgarisation of university education in Kenya, with a massive invasion of the Academy by barely literate barbarians who rose to the apex of Kenya’s university education system.

ACADEMIC DWARFS

After emasculating our university educators and filling the Academy with academic dwarfs, the powers that be used this as evidence that nobody needs university education, justifying reduction in funding and freezing of recruitment of staff.

Today, the government has clearly stated that university education is not a priority, and has shifted its attention to the so-called technical and vocational training institutions. Regularly, conversations in official circles suggest that university degrees are useless and unnecessary, and that all that is needed are ‘practical skills’ and ‘street smarts’.

Over the past 10 years, the strangulation of the university has escalated exponentially, and every year funding for the sector has been significantly reduced.

Universities have been asked to find their own sources of funding while being under pressure to ensure that tuition fees are not raised. The result has been a continuing decline in the numbers of academic staff and the resultant poor quality in the products, further ‘confirming’ the assertion that universities are ‘useless’.

MYSTERIOUS METRIC

Employers have been recruited to argue about the unsuitability of Kenyan graduates, and they have done this job convincingly, leading to the widespread perception that nobody needs a university education. Examples are even being trotted out of illiterates who turned out to be ‘very successful’ by some mysterious metric, and young Kenyans are being encouraged to consider careers outside of the Academy.

Today, the Kenyan university is on its knees. Academic staff who are dying or leaving are not being replaced, and those that remain are not being promoted, leading to a highly demoralised staff influencing the minds of young Kenyans who are expected to collectively form the elite of our society. A society that destroys its avenues for philosophical reflection and generation of new knowledge eliminates all possibilities of surviving in a future where knowledge will be the main currency.

NATION OF AUTOMATONS

The ministry of education is led by a renown academic, who has sat at the apex of the Kenyan university system. His role should include advising the government on how to ensure our future as a knowledge-based society poised to participate fruitfully in the global economy. We cannot superintend over the death of our universities and expect to be leaders on the continent and the modern world.

We should agree that our universities need to be empowered to lead this country into the future, and fund them sufficiently to teach, conduct research that answers questions that are important to our developmental aspirations, and provide services that solve urgent problems in our communities. Anything short of this only guarantees a dreadful future full of automatons that operate on ‘instructions from above’, incapable of thinking for themselves or for society.

Lukoye Atwoli is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]