A few days ago, Commission for University Education (CUE) Chairman Prof Chacha Nyaigoti Chacha decried the deplorable state of physical environment in public universities.
Curiously, he compared the sorry state to prisons, arguing that such an environment had far-reaching consequences, not only on the quality of higher learning, but also on the mental state of university students long after graduation.
However, what was interesting in the chairman’s lament was the fact that the deplorable physical state was juxtaposed with the adoption by universities of module two learning, popularly known as parallel, or the self-sponsored programmes (SSP).
The SSP initiative was to give universities extra income in a context of decreased spending by the State on higher education. This income was supposed to support university budgets, enhance infrastructure development and increase the research capacity of universities.
Despite raking in billions of shillings, few universities achieved these objectives. The only positive thing that SSP did was expand opportunities for higher learning to thousands of qualified students who were locked out of accessing higher education for ridiculous reasons such as lack of enough beds.
FINANCIAL WINDFALL
However, the financial windfall from SSP has been an unmitigated disaster for universities. Most public universities are in a worse off situation with regard to physical infrastructure, academic quality and financial health than they were before the SSP began. While SSP in itself constitutes a noble imperative, the aftermath has been catastrophic.
Based on sheer students’ numbers alone, the University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, Moi University, Jomo Kenyatta University and Egerton University appear to have reaped the most from SSP. From 1998 to 2012, these universities received billions of shillings enough to build a Standard Gauge Railway line and still have millions of change to spare.
While the question of what actually became of these monies is only beginning to emerge, this is also the right time to assess the extent to which the mercantile approach wrecked our universities from within.
First, like a lottery winner, universities were simply dazzled by the huge amounts of cash earned through SSP. In a context where university finances are treated with the opaqueness of a military budget, the worst possible abuse was inevitable.
As a result, there was rarely any budgetary discipline in public universities. Since the supply stream appeared deep, expenditures were impulsive and many times not well thought out.
INVEST WISELY
While a few universities invested wisely, drawing on these funds to build campus infrastructure, others, like a drunken sailor, ran amok, splashing cash on short-lived experiments and a wild expansionism. Horizontal growth was privileged over vertical expansion. The expansionist aim followed a mercantile logic; taking the university to the student (nay, customer) rather than the other way round. As such, most universities have little to show with regard to physical infrastructure in their main campuses for the billions of shillings collected in years gone by.
Secondly, the SSP financial windfall monetised teaching and rewarded those who taught most. As such, it transformed previously research universities into basic teaching factories.
University dons found it more rewarding to teach till the cows came home, darting from county to county, sacrificing their health, family time and career development at the altar of money. Gradually, the relationship between lecturer and student became transactional rather than interactional. Students were seen more as customers than learners.
Lecturers gave their energies to where they felt they reaped the most immediate financial returns. The long-term results were absenteeism, missing marks, poor pedagogical methods lacking in innovation, research and creativity coupled with unethical practices such as use of ‘class handouts’ and remote ‘teaching’ via email or mobile phone.
DEATH OF CORE DISCIPLINES
The third unintended outcome of the market-based reforms in our universities was the slow death of the core disciplines as universities transformed these disciplines into vocational, ‘marketable courses’. Some of the courses being offered as four-year university programmes are a blatant abuse of common sense. Others are simply sexed up courses cosmetically designed to sell old wine in new wineskins.
This mercantile thinking saw universities churn out degree programmes not out of their industry relevance, but on the capacity to attract fee paying students.
In many cases, the stampede to create new ‘marketable courses’ went largely unchecked and courses irrelevant to local contexts were designed and offered to the public. For instance, traditional service courses like Public Relations, Events Management or Projects Management were transformed into four-year programmes.
Notably, ‘non-professional courses’ like Sociology, Linguistics, Literature, Geography, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Religion and History were systematically impoverished of their value through both cosmetic and fundamental changes.
As a result, some programmes were forced into excessive interdisciplinary that dismantled and undermined the identity of these disciplines. The initiators of these programmes also sought to ‘professionalise’ these disciplines, which actually ended up ‘vocationalising’ them. It is now almost impossible to study Linguistics as most universities unnecessarily combine it with courses from communication or journalism.
In a case of wastage, programmes that should ideally be taught in vocational colleges and technical institutions were adopted by university as academic programmes. As the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani argues in his landmark book Scholars in the Marketplace, to teach vocational courses in a campus context is to indulge in an expensive and unjustifiable luxury.
The low level make-up and vocational orientation of some of the courses in our universities not only undermines meaningful research but also devalues higher learning. We now face an imminent risk of losing the core disciplines. It is only in universities that the core disciplines are taught. Serious universities do not vocationalise the core disciplines.
COMPETITION BETWEEN FACULTIES
As universities turned entrepreneurial, and heads of departments and deans became the faces of the neo-liberal approach, the cumulative result radically transformed academic departments both internally and in their relationship to one another.
Market forces unleashed sharp competition between faculties and departments, leading to turf battles amidst duplication of academic programmes. It is now common to have similar courses being offered by different units in the same university.
Strangely, in many instances, specific programmes are housed in departments that launched them first, rather than those that possess the relevant expertise to run them.
University bosses worsened the situation by rewarding deans and HODs who mounted the most, rather than the relevant programmes. The end result was an embarrassing confusion, where the forces of self-interest amplified by commercialisation eroded the institutional integrity of universities from within.
But worst of all, SSP brought the monster of corruption straight to the academy. With little audit oversight, the huge windfall attracted greed, impunity and unconcealed maladministration. With an endless supply of cash, universities were ‘captured’ by politicians, university bosses and wily brokers who turned them into employment bureaus through a hysterical hiring spree.
Cases of university bosses preparing briefcases as part of ‘escorting’ senior politicians’ harambee projects were not uncommon. But what is now common is that the plunderers of the SSP boon walk free and untroubled, as universities grapple with a gargantuan debt burden.
