The New Funding Model! Killing universities without closing them

New Funding Model has shifted universities to businesses.[iStockphoto]

There was a time when a university was the last institution expected to advertise itself. It was a sanctuary of ideas. A place where knowledge was pursued for its own sake, where professors worried about research grants rather than student numbers, and where lecture halls (not marketing departments) defined a university's reputation.

Today, that world is quietly disappearing.

The New Funding Model has performed an astonishing miracle. It has transformed lecturers into sales representatives, professors into brand ambassadors, and universities into desperate businesses chasing customers before the end of the financial year.

Open a lecturer's Facebook page today.

Gone are the discussions on research, philosophy, science and innovation.

Instead, the timeline has become a digital billboard.

"September intake ongoing."

"Applications still open."

"Join our university today."

"Limited vacancies available."

One almost expects a professor to interrupt a lecture and announce, "Kindly remember to recruit two more students before next semester."

Knowledge has been reduced to marketing.

The irony is painful.

Government insists that money should follow the student. Beautiful economics. Dangerous education.

It means universities no longer compete through scholarship. They compete through survival.

A university with fewer students quietly suffocates. A lecturer's salary now depends less on academic excellence than on whether enough teenagers choose the institution during KUCCPS placement.

Scholarship has been handed over to market forces.

Yet perhaps the greatest tragedy began long before this funding model.

For years, politicians discovered the cheapest campaign promise in Kenya.

Not factories.

Not industries.

Universities.

Every election cycle produced another campus. Every fundraiser demanded another constituent college. Every funeral became an opportunity to promise another university. It no longer mattered whether laboratories existed, libraries were stocked, lecturers were available, or funding had been secured.

The ribbon came first.

The budget would, hopefully, arrive later.

We built universities the way campaign posters are erected! quickly, loudly and without asking whether they could survive after the election convoy had left.

Instead of strengthening a few institutions into globally respected centres of excellence, we scattered universities across the country like campaign souvenirs.

Today many of them stand like magnificent buildings waiting for oxygen.

And now the same government that celebrated their birth tells them to survive by attracting customers.

Universities are not supermarkets.

Knowledge is not washing powder.

A degree is not a promotional offer.

The tragedy grows even darker.

The very political class presiding over this slow starvation never tires of decorating itself with academic titles: Dr, Professor, Engineer, Honourable

Their speeches overflow with respect for education, yet the institutions that produced those titles are being quietly pushed towards financial collapse.

It is like admiring the fruit while poisoning the tree. The Constitution envisioned education as the great equaliser. The New Funding Model risks making it the great classifier.

Students are now grouped by financial bands before they are recognised by intellectual potential. Universities wait anxiously for delayed government disbursements while parents struggle to raise balances and lecturers wonder whether salaries will arrive before the next semester.

That is not planning.

It is gambling with the future.

Village wisdom, where truth walks barefoot, has always warned against eating the seed meant for the next planting season.

That is exactly what Kenya risks doing.

Universities are not expenses to be managed.

They are investments that outlive governments.

A nation may survive without new highways for a year.

It cannot survive for long after losing faith in its universities.

For when professors become marketers, lecture halls become showrooms, and scholarship begins chasing customers, the first casualty is not the university.

It is the future of the Republic itself.