Decline of our universities is a national tragedy

University of Nairobi (UoN) Towers. [File, Standard]

It certainly does not feel like the most pressing issue in the country, but the entrenched culture of mediocrity in the management of our public university is a national catastrophe. From the basics of personnel management (you should follow set procedures in hiring people), to more serious undertakings (universities need resources for research and faculty, among other things), we are simply winging it. We have reduced our universities to outfits that issue fake degrees to the connected, while churning out graduates lacking in proper training and socialization.

The decline of our universities is reflected in their flagging influence on society. Take the University of Nairobi. For a brief moment the government considered moving the institution out of city, in part to avoid regular disruptions occasioned by student protests as well as the risk of students radicalizing the general public. Eventually, those opposed to the move succeeded on account of the fact that such a move would be expensive and because the city would lose the "town and gown" cultural benefits of being a university town.

That was then. These days, one forgets that Nairobi is host to not just one but multiple large universities. The intellectual influence of the universities is muted, their cultural impact even less so. The same universities have also come to barely contributed towards the country's technological advancement. Not only do citizens graduate without proper formation, they also seem to lack basic technical skills that are supposed to be imparted by their degrees.

How did we get here? I would argue that the rain started beating Kenyan universities in the late 1970s. The forces of decline came in three forms. First, there was the increasing autocratization, which meant that the government increasingly limited freedom of expression and learning. This development eroded the quality of research and learning both in the arts and humanities and the science and technology faculties. Even engineers need some freedom to think. Second, the economic crises of the 1980s forced budget cuts. New faculty were not hired. Money for books and research dried out. Overcrowding became the norm, especially after the advent of parallel programs. Underpaid faculty were demoralized.

Third, and this is often underappreciated, there was also a general abandonment of standards by the state. Unable to execute on its development agenda, the state simply capitulated to informality and abandoned any pretext of leading the charge on a skills-based development agenda. Rigorous knowledge production ceased to be prized in the policymaking process.

The writer is a professor at Georgetown University