Midnight lectures amid strike: PhDs in freedom, Masters in surrender

There is a peculiar species of Kenyan lecturer who can explain Marx, Weber, Foucault and the political economy of exploitation to bewildered students, yet becomes academically illiterate when exploitation knocks at his own office door.

He can lecture for hours on power, resistance and collective action. But when colleagues down their tools to demand better terms, he discovers a new philosophy: My personal class must continue.

Welcome to the university strike, where some lecturers demand dignity while others distribute online-class links, rescuing the very system whose failures they discuss over tea.

The public-university strike began on October 2, 2026, amid disputes over the 2025–2029 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), its funding, implementation and outstanding arrears. The unions argue that the government has failed to offer a satisfactory resolution.

A strike is not a picnic where scholars pause for tea before resuming their discussion of exploitation. It is a withdrawal of labour intended to exert collective pressure. Its effectiveness depends on solidarity, credibility and members acting together.

This makes the lecturer enthusiastically scheduling classes during a strike a fascinating specimen of academic zoology.

Imagine a student opening their phone to find a message:

“Good morning, class. Kindly join the link at midnight for today’s lecture.”

Midnight?

The student checks the date. It is neither a nightmare nor a message from a vampire professor conducting postgraduate studies in nocturnal pedagogy. It is an actual class link.

The student turns to a friend.

“Huyu lec amechizi?”

Another forwards the link to the class group. Someone adds a laughing emoji. Another asks whether attendance will count towards the lecturer’s next promotion. A third wonders whether the professor has mistaken an industrial strike for a sponsored webinar.

Soon, the link escapes its original destination. Students share it, not necessarily to attend, but to ask the question the lecturer appears to have forgotten: If we are fighting for the future of education, why are you teaching as though nothing is wrong?

A labour struggle has acquired a digital sideshow in which workers compete to demonstrate that they can work without the solidarity needed to improve their conditions.

Let us be fair. Not every lecturer conducting a class during an industrial dispute is necessarily a strikebreaker. There may be conflicting instructions, genuine concern for students, fear of disciplinary consequences, or disagreement with union strategy. Some may honestly be anosognosic! Especially where a lecturer deliberately undermines collective action while hoping to benefit from the improved terms it seeks.

The village has a proverb for the man who cuts the rope while still hanging from it. He may congratulate himself on independence, but gravity has no interest in his philosophy.

Psychology offers clues. System justification describes the tendency to defend arrangements even when they disadvantage the defender. Learned helplessness describes how repeated powerlessness can weaken belief in change. Neither diagnoses individual lecturers; both help explain why people sometimes defend systems they privately consider unfair.

There is also the fear of standing out. When obedience is rewarded and dissent punished, submission begins to resemble professionalism. Fear puts on an academic gown. Bowing becomes so sweet that standing upright feels like misconduct.

Village Wisdom calls this the curse of the educated: possessing enough knowledge to explain one’s predicament, but insufficient collective courage to confront it.

The irony becomes theatrical when we visit the academic household.

A professor leaves home in an ageing jalopy whose exhaust pipe writes a doctoral thesis in smoke. It coughs at the gate, wheezes uphill and produces a cloud so thick that neighbouring goats retreat in confusion. The professor turns the key again. The engine responds like a student asked to repeat a unit for the third time.

At the university, this professor lectures on technological transformation and sustainable development. In the parking lot, his car appears powered by charcoal, prayer and the fading memories of a mechanic who retired during the Moi era.

The jalopy is not the shame. Honest work and modest means deserve respect. The shame lies in a society demanding world-class scholarship while treating the conditions that sustain it as a private inconvenience.

Now imagine the professor’s colleague, equally frustrated by delayed agreements and inadequate resources, posting a midnight class link as though the strike were a minor interruption to the academic calendar.

What is happening in that mind? Perhaps concern for students. Perhaps fear. Perhaps the conviction that the strike will fail. Or perhaps the belief that obedience will eventually be rewarded.

But a village hen that repeatedly enters a fox’s den hoping to become head of security is not demonstrating strategic patience. It is confusing proximity to power with protection.

The solution is not to bully or threaten colleagues. Solidarity cannot be built by replacing one form of coercion with another. Union leaders must communicate clearly, listen to genuine concerns and explain their strategy. Those who disagree should engage openly rather than quietly sabotage a collective position.

Students, too, must not become hostages in a contest between lecturers and their employer. They lose teaching time, face uncertainty and worry about completing their programmes. Their frustration is legitimate. That is precisely why a durable resolution matters.

The strike should not become a contest over who suffers longest or who is the university’s most obedient employee. There is no heroism in teaching through exhaustion while the causes of that exhaustion remain untouched. Equally, industrial action needs clear objectives and a credible path to resolution.

A lecturer is not merely a salary number. The lecturer is a researcher, mentor, examiner and public servant whose dignity affects educational quality. When that dignity is compromised, the damage travels from the household to the lecture theatre and eventually to the country.

Village Wisdom therefore asks: if your education cannot help you recognise the value of collective action, what exactly has it taught you?

Do not mistake fear for wisdom, silence for professionalism or an active classroom link for evidence that the underlying dispute has disappeared.

A lecturer who cannot defend scholarship in his own working life risks turning education into a performance: excellent notes on freedom, delivered by a man too frightened to practise it.

When the strike ends, let us not merely count the classes recovered. Let us ask whether lecturers have recovered their confidence, whether the government has restored trust, and whether students can return to institutions that value knowledge and those who produce it.

Stand together, not because every colleague is perfect, but because no lecturer should have to negotiate the value of education alone.