Kenyan universities have lost the edge

Moi University Main Campus where local leaders protested the announcement of Prof Laban Ayiro as acting Vice Chancellor (VC) following the exit of Prof. Richard Mibey. PHOTO: FILE

NAIROBI: The role of universities in African social and economic development cannot be refuted. Their most explicit role is to equip individuals with high level skills for the job market. Consequently, quality university education is imperative. However, the traditional university’s roles are constantly being challenged.

The word university comes from the Latin word “universitas” which means “the whole’. This signals the role of universities in promoting balanced knowledge in everything. University education helps students to distill all that is best in human potential. The graduates use their skills to catalyse social improvement.

During these times of radical social, political and economic changes, the university in developing countries, has the added role of helping to build new civil society institutions, says a report titled, “The role of Universities in the Transformation of Societies” by UK Open University and Association of Commonwealth Universities.

In this “techno-whirlwind” era, enhancing our university education should help the continent to catch up technology-wise with the rest of the world. This is not necessarily in spearheading Research and Development. Rather, the university ought to encourage new cultural values, train and socialise new elites that would help us adopt in a new world. This is imperative now that the global economy is shifting from West to East, with Africa becoming the fulcrum. This will require people socialised differently in readiness for the new reality.

But with increasing cybercrime, political crises, gender violence, cults and child abuse it is safe to argue that the university is not playing its role as an agent of social transformation. The Open University report says that one problem is that the university has been left behind by other institutions.

“While businesses are constantly discussing ways to engage in corporate social responsibility, universities have been slow in recognising the role they can play in the community.” This tardiness, the report says, has entrenched the stereotype of universities as ivory towers; where people spend all their time theorising on irrelevant ideas with little link to reality.

By failing to change, universities, as Michael Crow aptly says, have become “people factories”. They have failed in their key role as “neutral conveners, assemblers of talent, unmatched idea factories” where the passion, creativity, idealism of great minds converge in trying to advance social and economic wellbeing.

But the whole education system was never configured to address the problems afflicting Africa.

Writing elsewhere, Bitange Ndemo recently decried the perpetuation of colonial mindset by our education systems. He is right. It is one thing to have nice buildings, impressive student enrollment figures, a galaxy of professors and equipment.

We may have wonderful content. But the critical question is: Whose content is it? Is what we are teaching at the university ours? These are not rhetorical questions.

If we don’t own the content offered, how then can the university address Africa’s needs? The problem is that like many other things, we inherited the university system lock, stock and barrel from those who colonised us. There has been little attempt to indigenise the content. It is has remained a sponsored content.

Further, the African university faces many contradictions. There is the rising demand for places. The university is expected to fund itself. Yet the Government still has the final say in what is taught and who teaches there but it is not ready to fund key components enabling the university to effectively play its transformative role.

Various factors stymie the transformative role of the university. Content delivery is so charged that no one has time for anything else. The African university is a people clearing and forwarding centre. The work of dons is to bite the content and regurgitate it. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to use education as praxis in the sense conceived by Paulo Freire in “the pedagogy of the oppressed”; An education targeted to change structures. The university is no longer the digester that breaks down content into socially reactive morsels.

The Steve Jobs, the Zuckerbergs or the Bill Gates of this world dropped from college. There are thousands of youths who feel frustrated by the stultifying atmosphere in the universities. An atmosphere that does not promote critical thinking. To be fair, some universities like Kenyatta and Strathmore have incubation centres where creative students pitch ideas.

The current scholarly thinking is “university linkage”. The idea is to link the university with industry. But on the contrary, research and development is not a key university role. We know Oxford and Cambridge as centres of excellence in social engineering. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford have mentored some of the best technology innovators of our times.

The university is a mentor. Research and technology is now for institutions like KARLO or KEMRI. It is not a mistake that more research funds are channelled into these organisations. This paradigm frees the university to concentrate in “provoking” ideas.

But only for synergy. To be transformative, the university has to climb down from the perceived ivory tower. To be relevant in social entrepreneurship, the university has to break out from the cocoon of “traditional courses” and indigenise the content.