Unter den Linden is one of the grandest boulevards in Berlin, Germany’s plush capital. I have promenaded on that street with friends, passing the ornate parliament on the distant right, the famous (or infamous) Hotel Adlon said to have been a favourite of Hitler’s and his mistresses, on to the Brandenburg Gate. The road leads up to neo-gothic buildings of Humboldt University. As I walked past, I meditated on the greatness of this university, founded in 1810 by the German statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the equally famous scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. By the standards of Europe, Humboldt is a comparatively new institution. University of Bologna in northern Italy, which I have also visited, was founded as far back as 1088. The other old European universities include my alma mater the Sorbonne in Paris, founded in the 11th century and Oxford, founded in the twelfth. Beyond Europe, the University of Al-Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco, was founded as far back as 859 AD while Al-Azhar in Egypt was founded in 970 AD.
What sets Berlin’s university apart is the fact that it was the first to be founded strictly on the ideals of the modern research university as we know it today. Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that the purpose of the university is the pursuit of universal excellence in teaching, knowledge and research. The university, in his view, should be committed to the development of what Germans term Bildung – the highest ideals of education and culture. Humboldt was so successful in his effort to the extent that by 1914, before the outbreak of the First European War, Berlin was the scientific and intellectual capital of the world. Nearly a half of the world’s leading Nobel laureates in science had Berlin as their home, as it was that of Albert Einstein and the founders of quantum physics.
The greatest research universities in the world today – Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, MIT, Chicago, Tokyo, Singapore – have all copied the Humboldt model of the university. The debate, however, has by no means been settled. In medieval Europe, the greatest universities – the Sorbonne, Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna and Salamanca – operated in the manner of a refugium – a privileged citadel of learning far removed from millennial tumults of a benighted Europe. In the medieval cloisters of Oxford one can still hear echoes of that glorious past. In the eighteenth century the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant taught that the ideal of the university ought to be centred on reason alone and not on any political purposes of the state, however exalted. In the following century John Henry Cardinal Newman, in a famous lecture, underlined the purpose of the university as the forming of ‘the gentleman’ imbued with the virtues of excellence in character and learning. In the United States, the Jeffersonian concept of the university was anchored on the need to produce active citizens and leaders who have that broad amplitude of mind and temperament that would conduce to the fruitful pursuit of industry, progress, liberty and happiness.
In our century, universities have become corporations that link teaching and research to the world of industry. The conservative British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, defines the university as “a corporate body of scholars each devoted to a particular branch of learning….where a tradition of learning is preserved and extended, and where the necessary apparatus for the pursuit of learning has been gathered together”.
Be it in Europe, the Americas, Asia or Africa, the ideal of today’s university is that of a self-governing cosmopolitan community of scholars, scientists and students all committed to the pursuit of universal excellence; a learning organisation that pursues original research with the objective of its wider application to solving society’s most complex challenges. That is the Gold Standard of the University as I understand it today.
According to The Times Higher Education Ranking of world universities for 2016, the top ten are: California Institute of Technology, Oxford University, Stanford, Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Imperial College, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and University of Chicago. Of the world’s top 800, only one Nigerian institution makes the list, namely, our premier University of Ibadan, which comes at number 601.
There are some who would dispute the accuracy and reliability of these global ranking for universities. They may not be 100 percent accurate, but they reflect more or less what is on ground. Some of the indices used include quality of teaching and research, citations of research papers produced by faculty, staff-student ratio and the rest of it. What cannot be easily measured, in my view, is the quality of the products of those universities.
For my part, I get the impression that the overall quality of our graduates is not what it used to be. In those good old days, Ibadan produced such outstanding people as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Gamaliel Onosode and Emeka Anyaoku. These people were so confident of themselves that they went ahead to achieve world renown without even having to do any post-graduate degree. They had attained the Gold Standard provided to them by Ibadan.
Sure, there are some really top Nigerian graduates who have excelled in the top Ivy League institutions in America and elsewhere. Nigerian students have consistently performed above the top quartile in mathematics and the sciences across the world. In 2013, twenty-year old Anne-Marie Imafidon graduated top of her class with a master’s degree in mathematics and computing at Oxford. A mathematical genius, she passed her GCSEs in Mathematics and Information Technology when she was only 10. At the tender age of 12 she had already pocketed a scholarship to Oxford, matriculating at the age of 15. Even before graduation she received job offers from leading banks, educational institutions and governments.
Last year, another Nigerian, a student of robotics and electrical engineering, Ufot Ekong, broke a 50-year record as overall best graduate of Tokai University in Japan. He also successfully solved a mathematical puzzle that had remained unsolved for 30 years.
We were also elated to learn of the formidable achievements of 26 year old Fatima Bombom Sani, who graduated with the best First Class Honours in the Nigerian Law School in October 2015, breaking the institution’s record in terms of the 9 awards she received. What is remarkable is that this ravishingly beautiful native of Kogi state graduated from Abuja University, an institution which does not have a particularly good reputation even by the standards of a third-generation university. The achievements of young people like Ms. Sani give us hope that not all is lost.
Despite these isolated stellar performances, I am sorry to say that not many of our graduates today can measure up to the Gold Standard. The employability of the products being churned out by our education system these days is deplorably low even by the standards of developing countries. Since the 1980s when the higher education system collapsed, a whole process of decay began to unravel. The universities used to attract the brighter graduates to come back as Graduate Assistants to do their postgraduate and to pursue academic careers. The older universities even had resources set aside to sponsor the new recruits to pursue doctoral studies abroad. Unfortunately by the late eighties, the brightest people left the university system in droves. The terrain was taken over by the second division league. Imagine a weak graduate who decides to become a ‘lecturer’. He thinks nothing of hounding impressionable young females for sex in exchange for grades. The lecturers themselves would complain that some of the young women willingly throw themselves at them in a bid to offer sex in exchange for passing their exams. I hear these days that even male students are being harassed: you have to give your girlfriend or arrange some other female companion in a hotel fully paid for, for soi-disant lecturer to indulge himself for the weekend. Only then would you be guaranteed a meal ticket. Those who could not do that join the campus cults as a pressure group to ensure they pass their exams by hook or by crook.
Some of these evil practices are so pronounced that some of our universities are not worth being called universities at all. The whole process of education up to graduation becomes a drama of mutual deceit. Not too long ago, the Director-General of the NYSC lamented that some of the graduates sent to him could not fill the requisite forms. I have been told of one truly pathetic case involving a graduate from a second-generation university in the south who could only speak pidgin. This young woman had been posted to a secondary school in Jos for her national service. It did not take long for the school authorities to send her packing. Further investigations revealed that she was one of 70 ‘graduates’ who had been issued with brightly minted degree ‘certificates’ by a devious clerk in the Registry of the university. None had ever passed their JAMB, not to talk of having matriculated in any university.
I have spoken to several people in industry and I hear the same despair about the quality of our graduates. Those of them who can speak or write English without a grammatical mistake are rare indeed. I have come across lawyers who mix their tenses and cannot write a simple legal opinion in which you will not find a fault. What is even more baffling is the professoriate. I have been alarmed and embarrassed to come across professors who cannot speak or write proper English. Some of them are in the business of self-printing in their quest to meet up with the quantitative volume of publications required to make the grade. If the quality of the teachers is so poor, what would you expect the end-products to be?
The problems are so fundamental that we have to revisit the foundation itself: the quality of lecturers, the rigour of teaching from primary school up to the tertiary level, and the emphasis on numeracy, literacy and clear writing and speaking without the most basic mistakes in the English language. At Oxford University, you can never get First Class Honours, no matter what you write, if a single grammatical error is found in any of your scripts. The belief is that if you cannot express yourself flawlessly you cannot be a first-rate thinker in any sense of the word.
So, what are the basic requisites for the Gold Standard? What are the skills-sets needed for our graduates to be employable in our highly competitive global economy?
I would say, first and foremost, we have to go back to the basics: numeracy and literacy. We need young people that, no matter their discipline, are basically numerate as well as literate. You must be able to do basic mathematics. You may not have to be adept at the integral calculus, but you should know how to add and subtract, how to do percentages, how to interpret statistics and data. And you must be able to express yourself clearly in English. It would not do to say, “I no be Oyinbo, na grammar we go chop?” Whether we like it or not, English is part of cultural heritage. It is our national official language. It is also the most dominant international language for science, commerce, industry and diplomacy. You do not have to write or speak like Wole Soyinka, but you must be able to understand and apply the correct rules of grammar. There is a standard for all university graduates, at least in the English-speaking world. A graduate who mixes her tenses operates below the Gold Standard.
I also believe that basic knowledge IT is vital to being employable. We live in the computer age. Computers dominate our working lives. Anyone who is not IT competent will soon find that their employment options are highly diminished.
I would also stress the importance of communications skills. Being able to express oneself with confidence and clarity is important. Written and oral communications skills are vital in today’s world. Students must be taught how to prepare and present reports and memoranda and to do so without basic errors.
Problem-solving skills are another important asset class. The purpose of a university education is to train the mind to be able to think laterally and to look at any problem from a 360-degrees angle. A basic understanding of concepts is essential. Problem-solving entails being able to define a problem, dissecting it in terms of its multifarious elements and dimensions, marshalling relevant facts and figures and applying conceptual knowledge, evidence and analysis to draw conclusions about the problem and the way forward. Sadly, our Nigerian education system at all levels puts more emphasis on rote learning and regurgitation of information rather than critical thinking and problems-solving. The professors operate with closed minds. Any student that dares challenge them risks being failed in their examination. A Cambridge student, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, once corrected a mathematical error in some of the proofs being laid out by the great astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. Instead of rebuking the young man as a Nigerian professor would have done, Sir Eddington commended him. Subrahmanyan went on the win the Nobel Prize in physics.
We must therefore encourage our young people to be critical thinkers, to question all received paradigms and never take anything on mere trust or on the basis of authority and tradition. If Bill Gates had been adept at rote learning and unquestioning submission to intellectual authority he would have been an obscure manager in a little factory in Seattle. If our system is to produce the thinkers and innovators of tomorrow we need graduates that have capacity for critical and independent thinking as well as ability to solve problems.
At the core of the competencies required to be employable is the central imperative of standards. A graduate of History must be competent in the universally accepted standards of what a History graduate should know. Same applies to graduates in Medicine, Pharmacy, Building Technology, Accounting, Economics, Political Science, Engineering, English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Architecture or Applied mathematics. Every discipline has its core competency requirements. Graduates who have not mastered the core competencies of their discipline have fallen below the Gold Standard.
Let me also mention the importance of continuous learning. What a college education offers is not just a meal ticket – a paper certificate that guarantees you a job. There are more than a dozen professions that did not exist when I graduated as a 21 year old in blissful summer of 1978. In the coming generation there would even be more and more professions that would emerge that did not exist before. What this means is that a graduate worth her salt must be a life-long learner. An intellectual must of necessity be an open-minded person — open to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. If the facts no longer fit what you were taught by your teachers, damn your teachers! Graduates must continue to learn new skills if they are to be adaptable and employable in the coming years.
Finally, people skills are vital. Education is not only about intellectual learning; it is also about understanding people and managing teams to achieve set goals. It has to do with imbibing values such as character, tolerance, virtue ethics and integrity and respect for everyone in the work environment. I am the first to acknowledge such an ideal is worlds apart from the cultism and prostitution that have blasphemed the hallowed precincts of the Academy. There are also those who would insist that leadership and people skills cannot be taught within the four walls of the academy. I would beg to disagree. Our curriculum needs to be more innovative by including the teaching of leadership, entrepreneurship and people skills. Ultimately, the Gold Standard is about the education of the whole man and the whole woman. The national rebirth we dream – the reawakening of the New Nigeria of our dreams — requires nothing less.
Obadiah Mailafia
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