The rot in Kenyan universities had to go

American Philosopher and Educator Mortimer Jay Adler had this to say: “Those who are not schooled to enjoy society can only despoil its institutions and corrupt themselves."

When  Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i met managers of public and private universities at the Commission for University Education (CUE) offices in Gigiri in December last year, he undertook to make radical review of the model of expanding access to university education.

While access to university education is an entitlement to those who qualify, he argued, its massification was threatening the quality of education. The action that CUE took to close down certain university campuses was borne of the finding that some of the campuses were not meeting the minimum standards required to provide first-rate university education. The closure or demand that the institutions in question meet the prescribed standards is, in the long run, in the best interests of all.

Society supports the establishment of universities to meet several functions for its stability, prosperity and renewal. It is from the university that modern society is increasingly looking to recruit who to govern its business and political institutions. Generally speaking, the students who qualify for university education have demonstrated that they have the necessary cognitive abilities for managing institutions that govern society. The universities are implicitly called upon to educate and train the multiple intelligences of these students for the benefit of society in various fields and inclinations.

The university is also called upon by society to train skilled manpower; doctors, teachers, lawyers, experts in finance, engineers, technicians, entrepreneurs and priests, among others.

Society looks to universities to produce new knowledge and techniques to help it meet the changing environment that creates new challenges and problems that governments and people face.

It takes well-educated citizens of broad perspective and dynamic entrepreneurs capable of independent and original thinking to ably manage this ever- changing environment and its concomitant challenges and problems.

The university is accordingly called upon to help students master such knowledge, values, abilities and mind-set, giving them “the ability to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, confront new facts, and find creative ways to solve problems” in terms that The Yale Report of 1828, a document with enormous influence on American undergraduate education, prescribed for the kind of education Yale University ought to provide to its students.

We should see government interest in the kind of higher education we are giving our students in the light of the ultimate functions of university education systems anywhere in the world. The Government is urging Kenyans to look beyond the degree certificates students get at the end of their university education.

Those papers must mean something. It must mean that the owner of that certificate has “power to read and do all that appertains to that degree.” It is this thinking that compelled Dr Matiang’i to argue that “it is either quality education or you quit!”

The secondary education we have given since 1986 has a robust curriculum; it has capacity, when well-executed, to nurture the innate abilities and inclinations of our students.

Some of our students who have been admitted to Ivy League universities in the US based on the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education Examinations have excelled in those universities.

They have the necessary entry skills for university education just like those who have received their basic education frpm American and European primary and high schools.

It means that those students who get C+ and above have the qualifications to ably undertake university education. They are entitled to the best undergraduate programmes; top-notch members of faculties who can teach in any university in the world; and the best teaching and learning facilities.

University institutions ought to care more about research, business and political institutions where their students hope to end up as researchers, employees and entrepreneurs.

The students who graduate from universities every academic year are products of some sort; products for consumption and absorption by the business and political environment.

The overriding concern that should define the strategic thinking of university administrators is whether the instruction their respective universities are giving is consistent with the needs of the society as whole.

“Are we meeting the purposes for which we were created and for which society tolerates us?” should be the question that haunts university councils and senates.

Anything less than this would be gambling with the future of our students; students who want their intellects and talents developed so that they can in turn make a contribution to the safety and well-being of society.