Thinkers have in the past described the word ‘university’ as a term derived from the word ‘universal’. One of the earliest records of the use of this word is found in early Europe. The word university was first applied between the 12th and 13th century, in Europe, to a secluded space that served as a means of providing further training in the professions of law, theology, and medicine; and as a centre of studies for the rediscovered works of Aristotle and the Arab scholars.
A University is established for three purposes: for Teaching, for Community Service and for Research purposes. A good University is supposed to be engaged with teaching and research to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
Without controversy, a University could only achieve these mandates in an enabling environment for teaching and learning. This has been the major, if not the only factor bedeviling our universities in this part of the world, especially Nigeria. Poor infrastructural facilities plus excellent intellectual productivities have not really enjoyed a happy marriage in most of our universities. Hence, the reason we are trailing behind foreign universities.
Today, many Nigerian students are perplexed whenever they interact with their foreign counterparts on topics mutually beneficial to their fields. They are surprised, not because their foreign counterparts are more brilliant, but because their lecturers have adopted modern teaching tools unlike the ancient of days lecture notes many Nigerian lecturers still rely on for teaching their students. A student in the University of Jos recently wrote a letter to his mentor, a professor teaching in Canada. He complained about how he has attended lectures in a class of over 500 students without a public address system, and how the facilities in the faculty of Agriculture are 'antiquated'(in his own words). These things are however peculiar to all Nigerian universities, including the much praised University of Ibadan which is nothing but that one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
"Generation by generation, universities serve to make students think. They do so by feeding and training their instinct to understand and seek meaning. True teaching disturbs complacency. They are taught to question interpretations that are given to them, to reduce the chaos of information to the order of an analytical argument and to seek out what is relevant to the resolution of a problem. They learn progressively to identify problems for themselves and to resolve them by rational argument supported by evidence: and they learn not to be dismayed by complexity but to be capable and daring in unraveling it. "–Geoffrey Boulton
Again, Harvard University, United States, established in 1636, was the first University in the U.S. just as University of Ibadan is to Nigeria. In the passage of times, Harvard has emerged through thick and thin to become one of the best five Universities in the world. The University today boasts of more than sixty departments, each with its web-site. Besides, the ratio of lecturer to students varies from 1 to 4 and 1 to 7, depending on the departments. Teaching and learning are electronically based.
But the reverse is the case with the University of Ibadan. Being the first in West Africa, its first-born position seems to have been sacrificed on the altar of redundancy. The allocation of suffocating, meagre funds by the government to education, coupled with intellectual theft of the funds is equally militating against its glory. It is a known fact that most political giants, award winning businessmen, relevant scientists, renowned literary giants etc, in Nigeria have either had a bite or full dish of knowledge at the University of Ibadan. In Universities like Harvard and other Ivy League Institutions, these personalities who have benefitted from the fountain of UI’s knowledge will be stalked, tracked down and made to give back to the institution for the continuous expansion of the frontiers of this temple of knowledge. However, it seems that this culture of giving back to universities is not in our DNA.
To remedy the poor state of our university system, the training and retraining of both young and experienced lecturers must be pursued with brutal vigour and tenacity. Lecturers should be sent on routine trainings abroad in order to keep abreast of the dynamic 21st century teaching and learning experience . The world had left Africa behind once as a result of slave trade and colonization. It must not leave us the second time as a result of poor educational facilities and outdated teaching and learning approach.
Furthermore, new courses should be created and lecturers be trained in these courses to meet up with our current realities. Our universities will fail to meet up with its vision of being a world class institution for teaching and learning if we continue to rely on old-fashioned ideas alone in our bid to be relevant in the 21st century. International relevance and problem solving skills in this millennium demand that we reconfigure our curriculum towards fighting unemployment, poverty, diseases and poor power supply. Is it not ridiculous that we have citadels of learning, in this country, that teach Electrical and Electronic Engineering in this country and yet we languish in darkness for the better part of our lives every day? Is it not utterly pathetic that after years of technologic progress in the area of broadband our country cannot conduct an electronic election? Yet we have institutions churning out graduates of Computer Science on a yearly basis. Any institution of learning that cannot contribute meaningfully in advancing the course of civilization in its surrounding, in particular, and the world in general, is not worthy of being called a university.
This tall order, above, cannot be realized without the commitment of the government and corporate entities. The Federal government must allocate a greater chunk of its budget to the educational sector if any meaningful development must be achieved in this sector. UNESCO has suggested at least 26% of the total budget on an annual basis. However, it still behooves the university administrators to manage the funds with utmost prudence and impeccable honesty, as many cases abound where administrators were accused of flagrant spending and gross financial recklessness in the management of the little funds allocated to this dying sector. Recently, we have seen our television screens awash with news of indictments of one university administrator or the other over university funds. This is really the height of intellectual betrayal.
Finally, building of additional well-ventilated lecture rooms will do a lot in eradicating the disease of limited venues for lectures in our universities. With the foregoing, if considered, University education in Nigeria will become an epicentre for teaching and learning and research in Africa, if not the world; for it is only then that our universities can be a part of our solutions instead of creating more problems.
