Universities of indiscretion

There is a damning report, published in the Punch onThursday, 13 August 2015, that documented a culture of sexual harassment, fraud, academic dishonesty, and plagiarism that have undermined the image of Nigerian universities as centres of high quality teaching, research, and learning. The issues raised in the report, even though they are well known, have blemished our tertiary education institutions and destroyed the notion of academic integrity.  

Universities are established to advance teaching, learning and research, and to assist in community service.

These objectives can never be achieved when academic staff turn their institutions into centres of corruption, human rights abuses, criminality, and militancy — all of which contribute to disrupt attainment of the core objectives of the universities. The quality of teaching and research in universities can never be improved under the current environment in which corruption and sexual abuse of students are widespread. 

Professor Peter Okebukola, a former executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), outlined the unflattering range of accusations that have become the butt of cynical jokes about the quality of teaching, research, and learning in to universities.

He said: “The large proportion of forged certificates and transcripts paraded by supposed graduates from our universities; spurious data reported by some researchers in the system in papers submitted to international journals; instability of academic calendar; high incidence of examination malpractice; and the number of degree mills (unapproved universities/programmes), form the basis for this accusation. If we pluck out these blights, our global rating in academic integrity will be elevated.”

I regard university academics and researchers as professional colleagues. However, when it comes to abuse of academic integrity, a line has to be drawn so that colleagues who cross that critical line should be punished severely because they bring disrepute not only to their institutions but to their innocent colleagues who work in the universities.  

Universities are not set up to trade in fraudulent practices, to exploit and harass their female students, or to train sexual predators who seek out female students arbitrarily for sexual abuse. The long-held notion that male university staff use female students as a means of satisfying their lewd and indecent sexual obsessions has been elevated unfortunately from that rarefied realm of tittle-tattle to the plane of actuality. That is disgusting. The point has to be made that female university students deserve respect and are entitled to their fundamental human rights not to be held hostage by the universities in which they are expected to receive moral lessons as part of their knowledge acquisition. No student should ever be turned into a university lecturer’s fodder for sexual gratification.

Senior university administrators, regardless of whether or not their own universities were implicated in previous investigations, should be ashamed to be associated with a higher education institution that has deviated from its core objectives.   Anyone who has not read the report published in the Punch edition of Thursday last week should endeavour to do so. When I read the report, it felt like my entire being had been violated. Something drastic has to be done urgently to restore honour to our universities.

It is not only Nigerian universities that are guilty of these sleazy practices. Polytechnics, colleges of education, and even secondary schools have all contributed to the decomposition in academic standards. However, my focus is on universities. The other institutions will be scrutinised at a later date.  The breakdown in quality university education is being facilitated by a persisting culture of widespread fraud, corruption, and intellectual property theft (plagiarism) that has become institutionalised ways of living and doing business in tertiary education institutions. Sadly, these despicable practices were not the grounds for which Nigerian universities were widely respected across the world five or more decades ago.

Stakeholders in the higher education sector, including the National Universities Commission, and the Federal Ministry of Education must rise to stem the growing outlandish behaviour of university staff. It does not matter whether only a handful of university academic staff are involved in the criminal behaviour. It does not matter whether junior staff are the only ones incriminated in these grubby, crooked, and immoral practices.   What is bad is iniquitous. These practices must be condemned and eliminated from higher education institutions, in particular universities that are perceived as places of knowledge development. Whether it is university staff engaging in exploitation of their students through sexual harassment, whether university teachers overreach themselves by selling their lecture notes and compelling every student to buy the commercialised lecture material, whether it is university students violating the rules of fair conduct of examinations, whether students engage in certificate forgery in collaboration with their teachers, these reprehensible practices are inexcusable, unjustifiable, appalling, and have contributed to sully the image of Nigerian universities.

Our system is too rotten, too debased, too morally sloppy, too wasteful, and too inept. It is a system that operates on a tradition of mateship in which culprits are overlooked and rewarded while victims are made to feel guilty, abnormal, and showing characteristics of paranoia. Owing to that system that tolerates corruption, fraud, and sexual exploitation, many students have died many times in silence because they believe it is better to absorb injustice than to complain and be found guilty of “false allegations” against academic staff.

This is precisely why it has become difficult to identify, punish, and eradicate elements in the university system who believe they are above the law and have the licence to behave anyway they like. For how long shall parents, students, guardians, sponsors, higher education regulators, and the government tolerate a situation in which the quality of university education continues to plummet in tandem with the standard of morality among academic staff?

I have often wondered whether Nigerian universities are conscious of the disreputable image they emit in the public sphere. Vice-Chancellors and senior administrators of universities ought to be worried by the despicable behaviour of their staff. Corrupt staff constitute not only an embarrassment to their institutions, they also pose serious threats to academic integrity. When people speak ill of universities, it tends to rob off on the character of the good and bad staff.  Following allegations of unparalleled levels of corruption in universities, the Federal Government moved in 2012 to intervene in order to stop the rot. Whether the intervention of the government made any difference is highly contested. In February 2012, the Federal Government published its response or “white paper” with regard to the reports of the visitation panels that investigated 26 federal universities.

The visitation panels uncovered extensive abuses of the university system which included evidence that universities often supervised programmes in which they had absolutely no convincing expertise.

Government response to the visitation panels’ reports picked out Vice-Chancellors as the inventors of the widespread exploitation of the system. The report showed the Vice-Chancellors randomly set up spurious offices and single-handedly nominated their mates to supervise the positions. That was a clear case of senior university administrators giving special treatment or preference to their friends. The chaotic style of selecting staff to head non-existent departments or units infringed on the universities’ policies and procedures. It undermined the selection of qualified staff and privileged the elevation of poor quality staff who cannot oversee effective management of the departments and units into which they have been appointed.
While I admit some universities have adopted zero tolerance for academic dishonesty, many others look the other way when complaints are brought to the attention of senior university management. One university and certainly not the only one that has shown zero tolerance for academic dishonesty is the University of Calabar (UNICAL). In 2013 the governing council of the university imposed severe penalties on 15 academic staff who were found guilty of academic deception.   The university dismissed four staff members for perpetrating plagiarism. One academic staff member was expelled for financial fraud. A report in The Guardian of Saturday, 16 March 2013, noted that 10 staff members were downgraded because they published “their works in fake or cloned journals and proceeded to submit same and obtained promotion in the process”.

On a general level, many universities are known to breach rules that guide appraisal of academic staff. There is no way that fairness in performance evaluation of staff can be achieved in a university system that allows some staff members to cheat or to mount frivolous claims in order to rise in the institution. When academic fraud and corrupt behaviour are not punished severely, hardworking and law-abiding staff members get the message that such dreadful behaviour is probably acceptable to senior management.
There is something fraudulent when the elevation of academic staff is based on false, unproven, and deceptive achievements in innovative teaching, scholarly research, and outstanding service to the community.  The Federal Government and the National Universities Commission must pay close attention to how vice-chancellors and their senior officials are administering universities in the country. Too many cases of academic dishonesty, sexual abuse of students, staff compelling students to buy their lecture notes or fail their courses, examination malpractices, and certificate forgery underscore the urgent need to reform the rotten university system. These abuses are growing and they have to be stopped.

This article was first published by The Sun newspaper.