Vice-chancellor wrangle a sign of the times
What you need to know:
The University has now become a glorified high school in which teachers regurgitate ideas that they were first introduced to when they were in college themselves.
These students have gone ahead and acquired masters and doctorate degrees by whatever means, and are now back in the Academy repeating the same things they were taught by their lecturers.
Some time last year, the term of the then vice-chancellor of the University of Nairobi came to an end, and the Council decided not to extend it.
PAST WRANGLES
However, as has become characteristic of Kenyan institutions under the current administration, the position was not advertised in good time, and had to be filled in an acting capacity as the Council worked to find a suitable replacement. This process took a very long time, and about three weeks ago the Council announced that a decision had been made to substantively fill the position.
The Council decision set off a series of reactions that have exposed just how low the higher education sector has sunk in this country. While Kenyans have several times in the past wrangled over who should be the head of a public university, this is the first time we are seeing senior academics fighting over the privilege to run an institution of higher learning. Students and staff at the university have been caught in the middle, and they have felt the need to weigh in on one side, or the other.
BASTARDISATION
To my mind, this situation is the culmination of the bastardisation of the Kenyan Academy, a process that began in the early eighties. In the sixties and seventies, the Kenyan University was the crucible in which the national agenda was forged. The political ideologies of the day were debated at the University, and the dominant national narrative was developed in the hallowed halls of the Academy.
Beginning in the early eighties, the government decided to emasculate the Academy in order to reduce dissent in the country in the era of one-party rule. ‘Radical’ academics were either jailed or exiled, and those that remained were beaten down so hard that they chose to either cooperate with the regime or quit the Academy altogether. The result was that over time the University gradually relinquished its role as the generator and custodian of ideas, and has now become a glorified high school in which teachers regurgitate ideas that they were first introduced to when they were in college themselves.
COUNTERFEIT
The pursuit of excellence has been gradually replaced with an obsession for numbers, and the most successful class is one in which hundreds of students strain to hear what the lecturer is whispering in front of the class. These same students have gone ahead and acquired masters and doctorate degrees by whatever means, and are now back in the Academy repeating the same things they were taught by their lecturers. The spirit of innovation is dead.
When the regulator, the Commission for University Education, sought a metric to determine who is suitable for employment as a university lecturer, they employed the same counterfeit academics to develop the criteria. Instead of using internationally accepted metrics such as international academic reputation and citation indices, they came up with a formula that encourages academics to manufacture publications and punishes any attempt at collaborative research. Obviously it is unfair to blame someone who was given a job he had no idea how to carry out, but their output demonstrates the depths the Kenyan Academy is working hard to plumb.
KNOWLEDGE
The wrangles at the premier university in this country will show the neutral observer just what our Academics consider important, and it has nothing to do with generation and dissemination of new knowledge.
Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]
