How inbreeding has turned our universities into mental prisons

Amigo read history at a public university in Nairobi. The experience was both absorbing and enriching. He found the faculty approachable and knowledgeable. Without much prompting, he enrolled for a Masters degree in the same department, a decision that exposed him to more intense and close interaction with his lecturers.

With time, he developed some working chemistry with one of his professors, a maverick and astute researcher. The professor would later supervise his master’s thesis at the department where a year earlier he completed his undergraduate.

For Amigo, the relationship with his professor was both productive and symbiotic. Their partnership had since produced one research article. The gods smiled again at his direction; Amigo landed one of only two graduate assistantships at the department. As they say in Kenya’s urban parlance, Amigo felt he had ‘arrived.’ Though exciting and well paying then, the new position demanded that he remained on contract until he delivered a doctoral degree to his new employers. This was a no brainer. He enrolled for doctoral studies at the same department under the tutelage of his favourite ‘good’ professor. Although he now chairs the department where he spent over a decade as a student, the power relationship between Amigo and his professor remains asymmetrical. Amigo is his most ardent devotee. The only ritual currently owed to his professor is worship.

Amigo’s is a classic case of academic and intellectual inbreeding. Academic inbreeding is a common practice both globally and locally, where academic departments prefer to hire their former graduate students in those faculties. At a time when the importance of universities to a country’s economic and social development is becoming a matter of national concern, debates on academic mobility, knowledge transfer mechanisms, inter-university partnerships and scientific productivity will increase. It is in this context that inbreeding in our universities becomes an important talking point. For several reasons, most universities in Kenya prefer to hire their former graduate students. It is also difficult for prospective academics to secure jobs in universities other ‘than their own’. While those with doctorates have enhanced levels of mobility, the vast majorities of aspiring lecturers without doctoral degrees are most likely to be confined to the universities that granted them those degrees.

Academic inbreeding is widely thought to be insular and undermines the very principles of academia where free thought and fresh ideas are celebrated and coveted. The metaphor of inbreeding draws from biology, where research shows inbred animals to be more vulnerable to the elements, are genetically inferior and have low productivity at all levels. That is why experts liken academic inbreeding to intellectual incest.

Intellectual parroting

I must admit that inbreeding in Kenyan academia is nuanced. In my opinion, merely fetching all your degrees from one institution does not necessarily mark one an academic inbred. However, I wish to address myself to pure inbreds: they not only fetch all their degrees from one institution, but have virtually no external contact with another (often academic) institution. Such contact might include academic exchanges, post doctoral research, visiting fellowships or related industry engagement.

The reality and practice of academic inbreeding makes sense when universities are at their infancy, and need to develop some kind of identity. In the older universities in Kenya, the practice of inbreeding was contingent on the fact that new departments needed to develop knowledge capacity, team cohesion, reinforcement of institutional belonging and organisational stability. Inbreeding was also necessary in situations where only one or two institutions offered specific niche programmes that could not be found elsewhere.

However, current trends of inbreeding in Kenyan universities do not augur well for the knowledge industry. When universities hire their own graduate students, there is a reproduction of learned knowledge, practices and a consolidation of social structures. While this is helpful where loyalty is valued more than thinking, it leads to academic parochialism. Inbreds mainly assimilate knowledge already contained in the institution, which, upon becoming faculty, they in turn pass down uncritically to students. Inbreeding therefore runs the risk of not just reproducing scholastic insularity but also academic mediocrity .

More crucially, research done in several countries has shown that inbreds are less productive insofar as research output is concerned compared to non-inbred academics.

This is partly blamed on the culture of inbred academics to focus more on knowledge that circulates and is reproduced within their university than knowledge that is built with external contacts. Indeed, inbreeding only consolidates knowledge already held by the older professors and does not challenge this knowledge.

As such, inbreeding favours defying existing power structures of knowledge and is averse to alternative, critique and disrupting status quo thinking. It is unsurprising that some theses produced in our universities reveal a culture of repetitiveness, academic fossilisation and a worrying pattern of knowledge atrophy. In its extremes, inbreeding leads to the establishment of ‘mental prisons’ and intellectual parroting, which often impede creative change or slow it in favour of inertia.

Also, in our toxically ethnicised campuses, inbreeding can be the biggest threat to diversity. With the mushrooming of universities across the country, more and more Kenyans elect to pursue graduate studies at universities ‘nearer home’, where the prospects of employment are assumed to be more enhanced. In this context, inbreeding is akin to feeding the ethnic dragon. Making deliberate decisions to discourage academic inbreeding is helpful in making our universities more diverse.

As society places more demands on universities to be more flexible, open, dynamic and creative, inbreeding is unlikely to be an option for the future Kenyan university. In Germany and the US, universities have adopted a practice where academics finish their degree at one university, go and work for a few years in another university, and if they demonstrate themselves capable, they can be hired back by the university where they graduated in the first place.

Exchange programmes

Thus, our universities must provide strong incentives towards mobility, they must be more transparent in academic recruitment processes and more importantly, they must seek to internationalise if the current trends of inbreeding are to be contained.

Since non-inbred academics are more competitive, connected and creative, progressive universities make deliberate efforts at encouraging their staff to build international networks. With all their financial woes, Zimbabwean universities have maintained a tradition where within a certain period, faculty members must spend at least one month in an overseas university to contain the caustic effects of inbreeding.

Just as genetic inbreeding reduces the possibility of new genes entering a population, for academics like Amigo, their career path is likely to be patchy, predictable and uninspiring. Kenyan universities must put structures that make it easier for graduates from other universities to be hired there. Insisting that all staff work towards a PHD is the best starting point. However, more needs to be done to enhance academic exchange programmes, joint PHDs and institutional collaborations.

- The writer is Head of Department, Publishing and Media Studies at Moi University ([email protected])