This book is undoubtedly one of the most significant publications on academic and social life ever written about Nigeria’s Ivory Towers. It focuses on administrative, academic, security and cultural challenges from the arrival on 18 January, 1948 of the first students of the University College Ibadan to the present day; how Nigeria’s higher institutions, particularly the universities developed in their formative years from their sublimity to the days of apparent decline. It is a story of transmogrifications from the noblest conceptions of the Ivory Tower to the succeeding periods in which ideals waxed and waned. The gains and reverses in the organic functioning of our universities have naturally fostered a sense of urgency for inquiry with a view to achieving the best ideals of the ivory tower as an indispensable element of our country’s development.
The author Eddie Mbadiwe, a gentleman of impeccable character, an adept reader and writer, an alumnus of the famed University of Ibadan and the University of East Anglia in the UK, wrote from a practical and in-depth experience of the Nigerian University system As a student, he served as an official of the then National Union of Nigerian Students and taught biochemistry at the University of Nigeria. In all this, both academic excellence and character easily found common ground.
Though trained mostly in the sciences, the author demonstrates literary proclivities. His vast documentation of events is aptly validated by a keen sense of observation backed by a consuming narrative and analytical simplicity.
Although the author did not divide his works into parts, I assume the liberty to do so, dividing these works into two parts namely part 1 in 9 chapters, highlighting the nagging problems of Nigerian Universities and the urgent need for remedy while the second part constitutes of what the author has appropriately titled “the underground” with its echoes made up of bile, bitterness, frustration, exclusion, neglect and alienation.
These first 9 chapters treated in this essay as part 1, is a comprehensive account of the various dimensions of student and lecturer activities, relationships and issues of communal living, such as politics and identity, romance and dalliance, harassment and exploitation. Those 9 chapters also examine inter racial marriages and liaisons, student clubs and clubbing, union politics and life after hours. Others include what the author calls male fishing in female hostels and vice versa, teachers of great impact where he pays tribute to academics like Dr. Agu Ogan, Prof. Olumbe Bassir among many others including even those in the social sciences and literary arts such as the late Prof. Ikenna Nzimiro and Prof. MJC Echeruo. In chapter 7 he talks about spillovers, carryovers and sorting, an allusion to students dalliance with lecturers. And in chapter 8, the author raises the vexed issue of serial sexual harassment that plagues our universities and other higher institutions today, for which some lecturers have lost their jobs. Then the twin evil of plagiarism. To solve this problem, the author proffers that some promotions such as senior lecturer to professor must involve outside assessors. He also recommends and rightly so that articles and publications assessed for promotions must be subjected to peer review.
Our attention is drawn in Chapter 9 to the ideals and requirements for the growth of a 21st century university. Apart from Government support, he draws attention to the need for the helping hands of the private sector as well as alumni associations, endowment foundations and other related interests. The author questions what appears to be the apparent insularity of our Universities, an issue of great concern namely; in the failure of universities to open up their faculties to international competition and scholarship; universities by their name being world communities of scholars for the purpose of teaching, researching, and benefiting from the varied experiences and Ideological orientations of its academic staff under conditions of unfettered academic freedom.
Government on its parts must encourage this process through substantial improvements in the salaries and allowances of University teachers, improvements in teaching facilities, in their accommodation and in promoting the favorable public perception of their jobs.
In part 2, we come to grips with the main issues from which the book derives its title – “Nigerian Universities: Echoes from the Underground” discussed in two chapters of 10 and 11. Students of the underground who are mainly off-campus are presented in this book as the incandescent hoi-polloi exposed to utter neglect and therefore capable of creating problems and taking their revenge on the university. It is a copious narrative about those recurring problems of Nigerian Universities – poor funding, poor facilities, corruption and favoritism such as in the allocation of residential accommodation etc.
For example, according to the author, “the explosion in student numbers has made it impossible for any Nigerian University to accommodate this surge in official University student quarters.” Students now have to rent private accommodation at exploitative rates, accommodation without tables and chairs and no reading lamps. Accommodations without tap water, poor toilet facilities and so on. It is also bereft of environmental sanity, the serenity for academic work and suffused by suffocating counter cultures of some neighbourhoods. Sometimes the students are exposed to danger and have to contribute money for their own security. This is complicated by the fact that the universities have no supervisory role over the hostels and the sense of alienation is beyond imagination. This is how cultism is bred. This is how and where antagonisms against the University managements foster.
This work therefore is largely about this situation appropriately called “underground” defined as “that large mass of students living outside the campus hostels, sometimes in squalid conditions and utter neglect and abandonment” He calls them children “outside the bed chambers ” whose feelings, informal structures, subterfuges can only be ignored at great cost to the universities. The author states that the “underground is the hotbed of student activism” and a lot of the problems threatening security and other disruptive actions are hatched in that environment. For a Vice Chancellor therefore to maintain peace on campus he must infiltrate and tap into the resources of this environment of the underground. The author has brilliantly documented and analyzed the problems of the Ivory Tower in both the historical and contemporary perspectives. The book is therefore a must read for all those who seek an understanding of the interplay of positive and negative forces that characterize that segment of our national life. It is a book for Pro-Chancellors, Vice Chancellors, Administrators, Educational Psychologists and all those who seek an environment of peace and development, devoid of the culture of denials that has dented the successes of our national institutions. It is a work that should be of interest, not only to those that hold certain pristine orthodoxies about our universities but also to those who question those orthodoxies and who draw attention to both the glory and gory of Nigeria’s Ivory Towers.
At this point, please join me to celebrate the profound thoughts of this scholar, this scientist once in parliament, a former student leader, humanist politician, a former Rotary President and Catholic Knight of St. Columba. Let us also pay tribute to the enormous contributions of Eddie’s family to the educational advancement of Igboland in particular and Nigeria in general. It was his uncle the late Green Mbadiwe who provided the funds with which those titled “the argonauts” that included the late Nnodu Okongwu, the late Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe, late Mazi Mbonu Ojike, Nwankwo Chukwuemeka and late Dr. Nwafor Orizu were sent to America in the forties in pursuit of the proverbial golden fleece, and came back to play a significant part in Nigeria’s educational and political evolution. This work we launch today is in furtherance of a fine family tradition of service to education in Igboland and our motherland.
I commend it to you.
Thank you for listening.
