University

[Jibrin Ibrahim]

The Private University as Enterprise: Limits of Academic Capitalism

Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 14^th January 2022

Last week, I attended a Convening on Higher Education in Africa, organised by Prof Toyin Falola of the University of Texas. The conference held at Babcock University, and focused on the theme of the impact of private universities on public universities in Africa. Participants were drawn from university faculty, Academic Staff Union of Universities, regulators, founders, donors, students, and independent researchers from Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Nigeria. It was an exciting debate on the complex relationship between the public and private sectors in higher education. 

The original argument for the establishment of private universities was to create more access for students but the reality today is that the private sector has not substantially increased access. In addition, private universities have not really recruited and trained its own faculty, it poaches from the public sector for staff and is dependent of moon lighting. The terrible story that emerged is that many public university lecturers that are rarely seen by their students teach the students in the private sector with assiduity and devotion for the extra money. The raison d’etre of private universities, at least in Nigeria, is that public universities are perpetually on strike and parents need universities where their children can study, covering fully the syllabus and not spending more than the required number of years before graduation. This is being achieved and already the age of graduands of private universities is significantly lower than that of the public sector.

Nigeria currently has a total of 198 universities, half of which, 99, are private. The private universities however host only about 10% of the total students in the country. The breakdown of the universities is as follows:

45 Federal Universities with 1,310,825 students = 62.4%

54 State Universities with 578,936 students = 27.5%

55 Private (Christian) Universities with 98, 358 students = 4.68%

5 Private (Muslim) Universities with 29,984 students = 1.4% 

39 Private (Secular) Universities with 81,908 students = 3.9%

A couple of years ago, we carried out research with the Institute of Education of the University of London on universities as a public good in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. Our findings showed a deep commitment by the governments and people of these countries to higher education as a public good that the State should bear responsibility for. The system worked as an elite model up till the 1980s when the demand for access grew and in the process of rapid and significant expansion, massification developed. The governing elites in these countries responded with their feet, taking their children out of public sector on the grounds that quality has fallen and sending them abroad. Those who could not afford foreign universities demanded for the establishment of private universities in their countries and the outcome is a two-tier system essentially separating the children of the elite and the people.

At the Babcock Conference, Dr. Hannah Muzee of the University of Capetown described this era we are in as one of academic capitalism because many of the proprietors of private universities conceive of their organisations as enterprises that provide a service but should also produce profit. The consensus at the conference is that in Nigeria, not all private universities see their mission as profit making. Nonetheless, they are seen as enterprises, that should at least break even. So far, that is not happening. Most private universities are making heavy losses. The reason is simple. I discussed with a number of proprietors and Vice Chancellors of private universities and their story is that the student base they have is too small to support the huge land acquisition, infrastructure development, security, construction and bank loan costs that they have incurred. In the coming years, many will collapse as bankrupt businesses because although they charge high fees, the fees are too low to support their costs.

The real problematic they face is not with public universities in Nigeria. The Nigerian University system is complex and class based and operates in an international environment in which many within the elite send their children abroad for their education. According to the United Kingdom’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), Nigeria was the third non-European Union country sending the highest number of students to the United Kingdom. In 2009/10, it had 16,680 students in UK Higher Institutions and in 2010/11; there were 17,585 Nigerian students in those institutions, ranking only behind India and China. The United Kingdom has been actively soliciting for Nigerian fee-paying students for decades with each student paying on average £12,000 per student just for tuition. It was the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Muhammadu Sanusi II, who first drew attention to the cost of education of elite children abroad. He said there were around 71,000 Nigerian students in Ghana’s tertiary institutions and they spent about US$1 billion on tuition and upkeep at that time: “The tuition paid by Nigerian students studying in Ghana with a better organised education system is more than the annual budget of all federal universities in the country.” 

A fraction of the amount spent by elite on their children abroad would be enough to adequately fund higher education. This is what led us to the current paradox in which progressive Nigerians insist that the Government must fully fund public universities but as the elite know that the university system is broken, they vote with their feet and send their children abroad for university education. According to the International Educational Exchange data released by the Institute of International Education (IIE), there were 11,710 Nigerian students pursuing their educational goals in the United States in 2017. When you add the numbers of Nigerian students in Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, India, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Cyprus and Germany, it is easy to see why private universities in Nigeria have been squeezed out of resources. There is a political economy crisis generated by the fact that the Nigerian elite place massive amounts of money in foreign universities undermining both public and private universities in Nigeria.

Essentially, our elite has made nonsense of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which provides: 

i)              Government shall direct its policy towards ensuring that there are equal and adequate educational opportunities at all levels

ii)             Government shall promote science and technology 

iii)           Government shall strive to eradicate illiteracy; and to this end, Government shall as and when practicable provide: 

●     Free, Compulsory and Universal Primary Education;

●     Free University Education; and 

●     Free Adult Literacy Programme. 

As a Nation, we have decided to divert the resources for these to foreign institutions.

The Babcock Convening had drawn out battles between ASUU activists who see the private universities as the problem and the private university warriors who see ASUU as the ogre that has killed the public universities with their strikes, forcing the need to go private. I think it would be useful to orient the discussion towards establishing the cost Nigerians pay to fund and support foreign university budgets. Consciousness of the vastness of the expenditure might push us towards reflecting on how some of the said resources can be used to revive the Nigerian university system. Academic capitalism is not local, it is global. The university as enterprise is not in Nigeria, it is abroad.

  

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Thought provoking.

I'm one of those part of the statistics who moved from a Nigerian university to study in England in the 2000s.

Can I be described as a member of the elite who left because of massification of public universities or even beceause of ASUU strikes?

I had been a lecturer in the same system and a branch ASUU executive.

I had been so proud to be a lecturer at the University where I graduated.

Why did I leave?

The BA had been very good but the graduate program was dogged by orientations unhelpful to growth.

The graduate program, which I was a part of and the relationship between senior and newer academic staff was not being developed in a way conducive to maximizing of potential.

Corrosive politics was the norm. Domination of those newer to the system was the culture.

I had earlier vowed never to study in the West so as to contribute to breaking it's epistemic hegemony, but here in my own home land, I could hardly breathe in my effort to discover myself as a scholar. 

The BA was very good but the managers of the system were not committed to the greater independence and creative leadership required to run an empowering graduate program or to the creative leadership required to help newer academic colleagues grow.

From the analyses on this subject of such as Moses Ochonu on this forum and elsewhere, my experience is not unique, even till the present day.

I can hardly imagine what would have happened to me if I had not been blessed to do graduate study in England.

The opportunities I was exposed to, the empowerment I enjoyed, transformed my creativity, setting me on a flight forever rising. 

The Western universities and cultures are so far ahead of us as a nation, talk less our educational systems, we may be seen as a village outpost in relation to their metropolitan centrality.

Who, with the opportunity to worship in the great mosque at Mecca, the ultimacy of Islamic arhitecture and splendor, where the world converges, is likely to insist on remaining forever at his village mosque?

By the time one compares the enablements of the Western societies, the emowerments of their universities, amplified by the potencies of the most exceptional of those universities, such as Cambridge, equivalent to various universities in one, hosting cutting edge seminars and conferences in the entire disciplinary spectrum day after day, almost 365 days in a year, one realises  those people are in a different world, a world defined by differences of orientation as much as of material resources.

People gravitate to where quality is to be found. Most students in Nigeria universities would migrate to the West if they could.

Class emerges here  in terms of relative ability to fulfill such dreams.

It's not a matter of snobbery, what I see as Jibrin's second reason for educational migration from Nigeria, along with ASUU strikes.

Before the 20th century Germany was the centre of graduate education in Europe, to the best of my knowledge. Their command of the heights of the humanities and certainly the sciences was obvious, their Nobel prizes visible to all.

US scholars visited Germany and adapted the German model in their own country. The rise of Nazism and WWII led to the flight of top scholars from Germany to the US.

The rest is history. We all know the role US graduate education now enjoys on the global scale.

What are we going to gain from our own Diaspora concentrations?

Without a significantly improved, secure, equitable country that is truly modern in striving for the best achievable by humanity, the exodus will continue.

I spent millions of naira, tens of thousands of pounds, in that educational pilgrimage. 

If I spent the same amount of money in Nigeria, I wonder what scope of what I gained from the pilgrimage I would get.

A country where there are few libraries, small output of books, talk less serious non-fiction, among other inadequacies, cannot be a knowledge power, a force in the knowledge economy.

We have a long way to go. We should acknowledge it and pursue the journey doggedly. The world waits for no one.

Great thanks.

Toyin

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

"From the analyses on this subject of such as Moses Ochonu on this forum and elsewhere, my experience is not unique, even till the present day."

Toyin Adepoju,

What prompted you to start telling your own story of victimhood at this time? Why are you now not only validating my position on the mess that is Nigerian higher education and how it is justifiably pushing young people to study elsewhere, but also endorsing and referencing my previous analyses and arguments---positions that you serially attacked and against which you mobilized local ASUU types against? 

Were you not always urging home-based colleagues to attack and debunk my position, which you claimed was false and overly generalizing, and getting worked up when they failed to challenge what you inaccurately characterized as my maligning of their work? 

What changed bro? I am not only disappointed; I'm disgusted that you're now essentially narrating your own victimhood (on which you were previously silent) as part of the larger victimhood and anti-intellectual practices that I was drawing attention to but for which you attacked me multiple times. 

At the time that I was highlighting these issues in Nigerian universities, even recalling my own experiences and those of many others to buttress my points, you kept this story of your own personal victimhood, disillusionment, and observations as a lecturer and graduate student in Nigeria to yourself and instead vigorously defended the rotten, dysfunctional, and tyrannical higher education system and its violence (which is sometimes fatal) on the ambitions of young, promising Nigerians.

What shifted for you? What broke the proverbial dam? You knew all these facts you've spewed here and yet you were gaslighting me and others who criticized the rot and the complicity of our colleagues in it, a culpability you have now underlined with even more clarity and experiential authority than I ever did.

I can understand home-based colleagues being defensive, escapist, and deflecting. Their livelihood depends on the putrid system, and they're insiders who think that criticizing the anti-scholarly and ethically problematic conducts of actors in the system reflects poorly on them. I can understand that.

I cannot understand your own previous positions of defense, deflection, and escapism when you were not an insider and had no existential investment in the system. Why did you choose to keep quiet about these experiences you had, which pushed you to seek, as you put it, "quality" higher education in the UK, convinced, as you are now saying, that quality had been compromised and a good graduate education was not possible for you in the Nigerian higher education setting?

Given your previous positions on this issue during our previous discussions on it on this listserv, I could not believe that you wrote this. I had to do a double take. Your indictment and criticism of the Nigerian higher education system and of our colleagues in Nigeria who superintend graduate academic programs in it are a lot harsher in some respects than my own. Yet, you heckled me repeatedly whenever I raised these issues.

Human beings will never cease to amaze me. 

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Oga  Moses,

Black and White Vision

The problem with your perspective is that you are  seeing  only what you want to see.

This means your orientation on this issue inhabits only one dimension, perceiving  only black and white in a universe of varied colours.

Holistic Vision

Over the years, I have described on this forum, on Yahoo groups I belonged to, on Facebook and on my academia.account  my positive and negative experiences with the Nigerian university system represented by the dept and university I studied and worked in as a BA student, graduate student, lecturer and ASUU exco member.

In my first and second 22nd July 2010  contributions to the thread ''Academic Terrorism,'' on this group, I  have described in much stronger terms than in this latest essay the negative aspects of my experience with my departmental graduate program  as well as with attitudes of senior to junior lecturers  between 1990 and 2003 when I left the dept.  

 In the name of justice, I also stated the following:

...a couple of senior academic staff  [ made] sure I retained my job even after my then temporary appointment was not renewed by the vice-chancellor as punishment for refusing to return to work during an academic union strike. A  senior lecturer [then Dr. Ogo Ofuani],  who was the head of department  and his protege [ mentor actually] , the oldest professor in the department [ Romanus Egudu]  were aggrieved at this even though they had returned to work like most others had under the threat of losing their jobs, but they did not think I should lose my job for standing on principle.

 

The professor appealed to the vice-chancellor who asked me to write a letter of apology for not returning to work and he would renew my appointment. That meant I would remain employed, take care of my family, and eventually, be strong enough to rebel against the system the department was running.

In my 5th December 2010 response to the thread ''What Makes a Great Teacher: Part 1" on this group, I also referenced my Uniben BA teacher Virginia Ola, whose creatively fervent response to a line from Dennis Brutrus' poetry so affected me that:

I can still recollect the emotional imprint of her response on that day, when the poem moved her, even though it was many years ago on the first year of my BA at the University of Benin.

 

To  some people, the experience might have been a molehill. But to a person who will always remember the experience, it is a mountain that he continues to climb....

Contrastive Accounts of Experiences with Studying in and Assessing Nigerian Universities

My argument with your analyses of the system is  that they are  largely a black and white narrative, with little or no nuance. 

You have unfailingly  described your BA  experience at ABU, if I recall the university correctly,  as almost unmitigated hell on earth, and generalised that experience to include the Nigerian university system in general.

I have more than once on the various public fora I have mentioned,   portrayed the inspirational force of my BA at the University of Benin, recurrently referencing lecturers whose creative impact on me from that BA remains timeless.

I have published,  Inspiring Teachers,  a book of essays on those lecturers, responding to some of those who have passed away, and some of  who are living, my responses ignited by particular incidents. This book is composed of essays posted online and unified by a summative conclusion,  a project that continues to grow, my own rethinking of the concept of a book with the emergence of the ubiquity of the Internet. 

These essays, however, do not include much or anything at all on Virginia Ola, Odun Balogun, Opene, Romanus Egudu, Victor Longe and Nkeonye Otakpor in philosophy, people represented for me  by inspiring recollections, imaged in their words and actions as embodying the dedication they brought to that BA program. Challenges like this discussion suggest I should also take my time to immortalise their efforts, rather than waiting for inspiration by occasional incidents.

Well after I had left Uniben, in 2014, I  even started a Facebook group in honour of one of my lecturers and later senior colleague-Ogo Ofuani, Uniben Eng/Lit Dept and the Vision of Inspiring Teaching,  which I have used as an archive for cataloguing the achievements of some of my former teachers, within and beyond the University of Benin, as well as for exploring my experience with the dept. 

On that group, I published  a summative assessment  of my Uniben educational experience,  parts 1, 2 and 3 of a 2014  essay first published on Yahoo groups,  ''Remembering my Teachers at the University of Benin.'' The following conclusions, similar to those I have presented in my latest essay which you are responding to,  come from there:

The experience, particularly the BA, is foundational for me and continues to grow within me.The rigour and scope of the structure of the MA and the part PhD... left their mark, even though they did not demonstrate the near flawlessness of the BA.

 

Yes. I earlier criticized, and rightly so, my senior colleagues at the Department of English and Literature at the University of Benin in the 1990s for their mismanagement of the postgraduate program as well as a consistent culture of intimidation and under development of younger staff. I stand by that assessment…

 

At the same time, however, those members of staff cannot be assessed totally in terms of that aspect of my experience with them. Some of those people who were responsible for mismanaging the postgraduate program and retarding the development of younger academic staff were the same people who gave us excellent teaching in our BA program.
...

The cosmopolitan culture of Benin-City, perfectly balanced between the newer forms of knowledge and the ancient cognitive systems, rounded the learning experience off in providing an awesome matrix, the implications of which I am still working out with great benefit all the way in England, the creative possibilities of that cultural convergence in Benin being practically infinite.

I did not attend the University of Benin in what is known as the glory days of Nigeria, but my teachers in my BA remain my heroes for their absolute dedication and sheer knowledge. I also read their publications in leading journals in the field. Some of them were pioneers in their disciplines at a global level.

I also tried to examine the reason for the difference between the BA and the graduate program:

.. the rationale for the sharp drop in quality of experience between my BA and my MA/PhD at that university was due to a number of intrinsic factors, relating to the organization of the system  and extrinsic factors,  factors from outside the system.

These include erosion of staff morale and devaluation of the rationale for being an academic through economic and social factors, excessive power arrogated to professors, scholars above any kind of assessment, having reached the top of the ladder, leading  to serious abuses, including repeated increases in the criteria for promotion, while they who made those increases were unbound by them, having reached the top of the ladder, abuses tending  to affect negatively a broad spectrum of issues.

 

I also suspect that I was observing, in total, the difficulty of transplanting the latest stage of development of an institution from a social system where it had evolved across centuries, to one where it was not part of the society's social and cognitive growth.

 

The issues are complex and require careful analysis. Any effort to address the question without analyzing the social, cognitive/philosophical and historical issues involved and applying the lessons learned will be severely limited.  It is not enough to simply condemn.

 

 

Those summations from 2014 resonate with these from my latest essay on the subject, with new emphases in bold in advancing my point here:

The BA had been very good but the graduate program was dogged by orientations unhelpful to growth.

 ...most of the academic managers of the system in the department I worked and studied in were not committed to the greater independence for students and the creative leadership required to run an empowering graduate program or to the creative leadership required to help newer academic colleagues grow.

 ... 

Those dreams I had nurtured in Nigeria, the seeding of my mind by Nigeria's inspirational capacities, the thorough  education I had received but which I needed to build upon and go beyond, potencies my university and to some  degree, my country, were inadequately equipped to help me maximise, were creatively exploded into fruition through the enablements of the former colonial power...

The limitations of your reading of my accounts of my experience and  which another commentator on my  unfolding accounts once demonstrated, is in insisting that the negative must prevail always. That is not my experience with my former dept and university and of the Nigerian university system.

I have summed up here the inadequacies  my senior colleagues demonstrated with the graduate program.  Those observations  do not negate the fact that they delivered a very good BA program for us when I was there. That also is not invalidated by the fact that one or two of those lecturers were either not committed or had personality issues expressed in authoritarianism.  It also is not negated by the fact that the benevolence of some of these lecturers was not uniform at all times, across all students.

I attended three universities  in England  after leaving Uniben and experienced  magnificent growth opportunities, but underlying the magnificence of those opportunities the scholarly culture, discipline, knowledge and skills that enabled me take advantage of those opportunities, is the combination of my self education and my Uniben  BA and graduate programs, in spite of the greater inadequacies of the latter, the efforts of those who taught  me in that BA in particular  luminous in the sky of memory, around whom radiate those I met at the UK universities 

With broader exposure, the limitations of even that Uniben BA became clearer. We did not have a computerised university library.  Our exposure to theory was far behind current developments.

Situations understandable in terms of low technology in the country, and the near impossibility of buying new books from the West after the devaluation of the naira. 

Even then, most of our lecturers did their best within those limitations.

I have become a self taught scholar in the visual arts partly because of the thorough training I got in both literary analysis and literary theory at the University of Benin, transposing those knowledges to cognate disciplines.

My ongoing interactions with staff, students and parents from various Nigerian universities, such as Chijioke Ngobile's account of his studentship at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka,  convinces me that a totalistic negativisation of the system is false. 

At the same time, I try to contribute  to its improvement  through my writing, as in "Academic Standards in Nigerian Universities" and playing such a role as secretary in a 2019 petition by former female students of my former department and signed by a number of departmental alumni,  accusing lecturers in that department of sexual harassment, leading one of those lecturers  to  accuse me of trying to victimise him. 

Please, lets avoid uncritically  deterministic  and absolutist methods of writing history or describing social systems.

I was appalled at the totalistic brush you applied to the Nigerian academy.

The system is deeply challenged but the picture  of "it's all bad" or "it's mostly bad" your orientation suggests, does not look realistic to me.

The West is at least a century ahead of both Nigeria and its educational system. One can acknowledge that without insisting that the Nigerian academic system is equivalent to a rubbish dump.

You have earlier insisted that you make negativising generalisations in order to drive home  a point.

I am interested in depicting the complexity of a situation.

My referencing you in my latest essay on my experience with the Nigerian university system does not mean I agree fully with your views on that system. In the relatively informal context of the essay, I  also did not have to add that your arguments on the subject are often overstretched.

Thanks

Toyin  

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