This is my fourth intervention on this column on the ongoing industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities against the Federal Government. In the three previous contributions, I supported ASUU’s position and urged the Federal Government to make good on its agreement with the union. My central argument has been that if ASUU does not fight for its members, nobody will. And if ASUU does not slog it out with the Federal Government, nothing will be done. Yet, the universities today are facing myriad problems. In various articles on higher education prior to the ASUU strike, I had highlighted the shortcomings of university education in the country, and pinpointed the contributions of the government, lecturers, students, and their parents to the deplorable quality of education in the universities. However, no document to date highlights the problems with our universities better than the Needs Assessment of Universities, carried out in 2012 at the instigation of ASUU. The report makes it clear that funding is the greatest problem facing the universities. True, as the proprietor of public universities, the government is largely responsible for their funding. Nevertheless, the Governing Councils of the universities, in collaboration with their Vice-Chancellors, have a duty to develop various ways of generating funds beyond government subventions. A third source of funding is increased tuition, which federal and state governments are hesitant to do owing partly to the self-delusion of providing free education and partly to the fear of student uprising. Yet, these are areas in which the young Ondo State University of Science and Technology at Okitipupa has been up and coming. The synergy between the Ondo State Government and the university authorities, led by Prof. Tolu Odugbemi as Vice-Chancellor, has led to a funding culture in which the university’s internally generated revenue and moderate tuition have been supplementing the state government’s subventions. OSUSTECH’s IGR comes from a variety of sources, including its bakery; fish, palm, and poultry farms; and juice, water, and garment factories. Its Governing Council recently set up a Fundraising Committee to embark on an endowment drive for the young university. Now only in its third year, the university has already moved nearly all of its programmes to the primary campus with fully equipped science laboratories, library with a research database, including electronic journals, and a computer centre, and a functioning health centre. Adequate, but not necessarily sufficient, funding by the state government has enabled the university to recruit well qualified teachers, making it one of only seven universities in the country with over 60 per cent of its lecturers holding a doctorate. It is also noteworthy that the university’s academic programmes were all fully accredited by the National Universities Commission during its very first exercise in the university. I use OSUSTECH to illustrate the centrality of funding and effective leadership to the successful implementation of a university’s programmes. Admittedly, the university is not a typical one. Its mission is highly focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education at the undergraduate level, and its admission policy has so far favoured a small cohort of just about 100 students per year. These are deliberate policies aimed at fostering reputable programmes and high quality training. Nevertheless, they represent an ideal model for universities striving for excellence in an increasingly competitive job market. This is where ASUU’s demand for more funding struck a chord with me. It is encouraging that delegations of the Federal Government, led by President Goodluck Jonathan, and ASUU have reached an agreement, which only needs fine-tuning. It is also reassuring that at its recent Kano meeting, ASUU virtually endorsed the agreement, subject to the release of the promised development fund of N100bn and the payment of the arrears of salaries for the last four months of the strike. These are not unreasonable demands, given the history of the various agreements and memoranda of understanding reached by both parties. To be sure, any reasonable person would know that it is difficult for any government to come up with N100bn of extra-budgetary expenditure, and towards the end of the year, for that matter. However, any sympathy for the Federal Government is eroded by various celebrated leakages and misappropriations of government funds and by the habitual practice of embezzling or returning unspent budget to the treasury at the end of the year. It is only reasonable for the government to be forthright as to when the promised first instalment would be released. If not immediately, then it becomes incumbent on the Federal Government to at least pay the lecturers’ salary arrears, with immediate effect, in order to encourage the lecturers to go back to work. State governments should, however, be allowed to make or withhold such payments at their own budgetary convenience. It is important to stress, however, that money alone does not necessarily translate into quality education. There must be quality teachers and quality instructional materials to turn students into quality graduates. True, adequate funding may provide necessary infrastructure, good and effective teachers are needed to capitalise on a good teaching environment. Although such teachers still exist within our universities, they are dwindling in number. My own experiences within the Nigerian university education system in recent years show lack of quality on the part of many a lecturer. It is not simply a matter of qualification deficiencies. Many lecturers and even professors do not prepare syllabi for their courses and even fail to provide quality reading material. Yet, a syllabus is a social contract between the teacher and his or her students, which specifies a schedule of class activities throughout the semester. It typically indicates what students should read, when particular topics shall be discussed, what lectures and class discussions will focus on, when tests shall be given out and returned for grading, and so on. It allows students to know what to read and do, even when their lecturers are unavoidably absent. To complicate matters, many lecturers hardly prepare lecture notes. I have watched classes where lecturers stood before the students and talked and talked from head, making occasional trips to the blackboard. Midway into the two-hour lecture, students stopped taking notes. There were jokes. There were rounds of laughter. But there wasn’t much content related to the course. In order to halt the reproduction of this kind of classroom culture, the federal and state governments should require university authorities to pay more attention to curricular construction and delivery. As a supplement, it is high time our universities began to develop online courses for small classes of 20 students or less, where necessary computing and internet infrastructure is available and adequate. For a start, syllabi and some instructional materials could be transmitted online to students. This should not be a big leap anymore. After all, many universities today have e-library, engage in e-registration and e-payments, while students are quite familiar with internet-based social media. Syllabus construction, teaching techniques, classroom management, and online courses are among the teaching innovations being developed at the Teaching and Learning Centre at Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko. It is envisaged that the TLC would be a resource centre for other universities within the state and beyond. As lecturers prepare to return to their campuses, they should take these suggestions to heart, if only for the sake of the students they have kept out of their classrooms for nearly five months. Honestly, it is time to go back to work.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 14:42:31 +0000
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