It’s wrong to think that varsities are made of only brick and mortar

On September 9, the State Department of Higher Education wrote a letter appointing a special committee to develop a policy on ‘Kenya elite universities recognition class’ aimed at establishing a ‘national university of Kenya.’

There was a swag to it. The memo, signed by the principal secretary, labelled the new university ‘Nuke’. Coming from a ministry where recovering bloggers hold senior positions, the memo first seemed part of the vernacular of fake news drawn from Kenya’s raucous digital space. Notably, the silence from the Commission for University Education (CUE) when this communication emerged was deafening.   

The memo suggested some urgency, that there was need to fast-track a classification of ‘elite’ public universities. But it is the second task that is more problematic, and which represents the troubling thinking that accompanies higher education policy in Kenya.

This task mandates the committee to ‘develop a model proposal for the establishment of a national university of Kenya’. This proposal is disturbing on many fronts. First, the so-called elite university is articulated as one that will be ‘exclusive’ and modelled on post-modernist utopian discourse such as those that preceded the overrated futuristic Konza City.

The contradiction of setting up a new university to compete with the Ivy League schools of the world when the State is running the existing ones badly is reckless.

The second, and even more troubling aspect in the ‘Nuke’ idea is the assumption that top-rate universities are not so much about research and talented researchers, but more about brick and mortar. About new and glossy buildings. Why would we be thinking of setting up a so-called ‘elite’ university when we can easily transform the existing ones into top-rate universities without putting up a single building?

All the top universities in the world started small, mostly as seminaries or single-faculty schools. That is how Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard or universities such as Makerere or the University of Cape Town started.

As the rankings show, the older a university is, the more rooting it has to grow and establish a culture of excellence. In Africa, as elsewhere, the top universities are also the oldest, whether it is Ibadan in Nigeria, Nairobi in Kenya, or Makerere in Uganda.

Research profile

It is important to set aside the older universities as exclusively research universities and fund them towards a heavy research orientation, scholarly production, priming graduate studies and hiring staff premised on their research profile. The rest of the universities can be categorised as teaching universities focused largely on undergraduate studies.

As a doctoral student in Germany, I was a beneficiary of one of Dr Angela Merkel’s signature reforms in higher education. It was an experiment that took slightly over a decade and achieved remarkable results. About 10 or so years ago, the Germans felt that their universities had lost ground to UK, American and other ‘English language’ universities. The ministry, through the department of research, came up with what was then known as the ‘exzellenzinitiative’ of universities.

The whole idea was premised on consolidating funds to universities in their niche areas and building selected competitive universities as research-intensive universities. Today, German universities, some as young as 50 years old, are able to punch way above their weight, according to global rankings.

The lesson here is that unless the existing universities are properly funded, top researchers identified and well-remunerated, and good scholars placed in positions of authority, all these committees and talk of ‘nukes’ are a waste of time, resources and, of course, tea.

When Uganda sought to rebuild its universities, a newly installed vice chancellor at Makerere came into office with big ideas. He knew that a good university is analogous to having good scholars. He sought the Senate’s permission and brought back some of Uganda’s top scholars scattered in the private sector and the diaspora, and negotiated individual terms with them. That is how Prof Mahmood Mamdani returned from Columbia University in New York, establishing possibly one of the best graduate schools in Africa, today.

Second, is it a coincidence that the committee has no scholar from the top five oldest universities in Kenya? Another thing. What message are we sending by creating an elite university and perpetuating inequality that is already a problem in our education system?

Finally, the committee’s formation also raises the issue of leadership. The Education docket is too large for Prof George Magoha to dart from managing national exams, juggling a wobbly curriculum and taming cartels to supervising university education. The idea of seeing universities as problems to be solved rather than institutions with intrinsic value to nation-building still persists. This needs to change.

- Dr Omanga is a former Moi University Senior Lecturer working for the Social Science Research Council, New York. The views expressed here are his own