The universities journey from excellence to mediocrity

When local leaders in Kenya’s North Rift town of Eldoret led a protest against the appointment of an acting vice chancellor of Moi University from outside the community, they were merely bringing out into the open some of the rot that has come to be associated with university education in East Africa.

But the shameless display in Eldoret was just the tip of the iceberg. Universities today are a shadow of what they represented just three decades ago. Although expected to provide enlightenment to the rest of a community, universities are part and parcel of society and will tend to reflect the shared values of any community. The question, then, becomes one regarding the values entrenched in society.

To be fair, on many occasions universities have been at the vanguard of revolutionary thought and protest in East Africa. This has in the past led to police clampdowns on campuses as well as arrests, incarceration, killings and flight into exile of lecturers and student leaders alike.

As would be expected, however, most faculty members have been content to lead a quiet existence devoid of controversy. With successive regimes intent on stifling dissent in universities, merit has slowly given way to sycophancy, gradually diluting standards.

Today, therefore, universities are largely sleeping giants – there is enormous potential, but largely underutilized and frustrated by the establishment. The rot in the rest of society has quietly found its way into academia. When everyone is “eating”, is it reasonable to expect professors to be left out?

Corruption, ethnic considerations, nepotism, and other evils are all rife in universities, especially public universities. It all has to do with control of the resources that a university commands – especially jobs and tenders. Not only is the rapid expansion of university education in the region largely unplanned, it is often based on criteria such as enabling every ethnic group to have one in their midst regardless of the feasibility of establishing a university.

With this in mind, then, it is easy to see why local leaders would seek one of their kinsmen to lead Kenya’s second largest university. Today, virtually all public universities are involved in a building frenzy of sorts. The excuse, of course, is to expand university facilities so as to accommodate more deserving students to join higher education programmes. The real reasons aren’t so noble.

The various projects in universities are essentially a conduit for stealing public funds. It is common knowledge that public projects are hugely inflated, leaving a handsome margin for senior management and their political paymasters.

This is done at a great cost to the health of academic programmes. Many academic departments operate on a skeleton staff, yet universities prefer to continue putting up buildings rather than to hire qualified staff. This has led to the inevitable trend to use part-time lecturers on an unending basis.

Yet, if one is a part-time lecturer one semester after another for years, this points to a clear vacancy and the continued use of such labour obviously goes against the law and ought to raise concern from the Commission for University Education (CUE) – which unfortunately prefers to see no evil.

But even worse, public universities – and an increasing number of private ones as well – are taking up to two years and beyond to pay part-time lecturers. The demoralized teaching staff, in turn, work half-heartedly as they spend time looking for consultancies and various other opportunities outside these universities. It also gets ugly sometimes, and some part-time lecturers have been known to refuse to submit examination results until they are paid their dues.

The main sufferers in this situation are obviously the innocent students, who pay fees but get poor services from demotivated teaching staff. When they eventually graduate, they are branded half-baked graduates – which may be true but is certainly not their fault. Meantime, their fees would have been utilized in projects that are inflated many times over for the benefit of senior university managers.

There are other serious problems as well. Most of these universities lack sufficient working spaces and facilities, especially for part-time teaching staff to use while on campus. They suffer from inadequate and overcrowded lecture halls and other facilities, broken desks, dilapidated buildings badly in need of repair, inadequate library facilities… the list is endless.

The rush to open satellite campuses has further diluted standards. At one campus in Nyeri town, for example, lecturers teach upstairs as a welder goes about his noisy business downstairs. While CUE has tried to force universities to improve facilities or close down such campuses, problems remain.

The solution to the problems affecting universities, then, lie in achieving good governance for countries in the region. Without these, it’s not only universities that will suffer, but every institution in our midst. Sadly, universities provide high-level manpower to these other institutions, which puts every other sector at serious risk of mediocrity.