Truant professors, academic discipline in Nigerian varsities

The situation in the education sector is very bad already but it is expected to get worse in the near future unless urgent actions are taken to stabilize the situation. Shielded from the public glare behind her often imposing shells, the nation’s university system, the power house of the educational industry is crumbling rapidly. If this trend is not halted, it is doubtful if her products will be able to meet the need for research and teaching in the higher institutions and the manpower requirements of the industries.

Though the causes of the decline may including such highly visible parameters as financial strangulation, corruption, incessant strikes actions by staff and students with the attending prolonged closures, truncated academic sessions, examination malpractice, overcrowded class rooms and lecture theatres, absence of functional laboratories and workshops, other not-sovisible factors also contribute significantly to the threatening collapse. One of these is the decreasing output of senior academic staff, especially the professors who are at the pinnacle of their academic pursuit.

A major reason for the decreasing output is the increasing incidence of truancy among these senior academics. Many do not attend lectures at all; they do not teach; they do not supervise research projects; neither do they engage in any form of research. Most of the time, they are not even around the academic environment at all. But in the official records, they are not only allocated courses to teach, they are actually coordinating these courses. Virtually all of them have final year students allocated to them for research project supervision. But many dedicated students may never set their eyes on these professors throughout the four or five year duration of their studentship.

In many cases the project students and the allocated courses are transferred to their surrogates who are usually junior academic staff. These surrogates often lack the knowledge, experience and maturity of the professors who were supposed to give direction in terms of the philosophy and content of the courses. Many cases of extortion, sexual harassment, sorting, forceful sales of substandard textbooks, grade inflations, and sometimes direct involvement in examination malpractice are traceable to these surrogates.

If the professors are not in the classrooms or laboratories as expected, where would they be? Many of them hold multiple parttime employments in other universities to which they devote most of their time at the expense of their primary fulltime employment. Others are on fulltime administrative assignments and are only infrequently seen in the departments. A few others are into fulltime business ventures or chasing after contracts and have little or no time for academics.

The problem of absentee professors becomes even more pronounced during the examination periods when the burden of securing venues, supervision and discipline during the examination is left in the hands of inexperienced junior academics. In many departments, not a single professor is involved in the examinations during the entire period. Because of the inability of the junior academics to adequately enforce the relevant regulations the problem of examination malpractice is becoming more entrenched.

These professors do not know or appreciate the problems associated with training high quality graduates in Nigeria because of their absence from the academic arena. Rather than be available to give the needed academic counsel to “students-in-need”, they champion illegal senate decisions that allow students who fail core courses in their disciplines to graduate without remedying them. Contrary to National Universities Commission’s (NUC) regulations, they canvass for the extension of the maximum residency time for a four year undergraduate programme from six years to seven years on “compassionate” grounds.

This picture is completely hidden from the regulatory bodies such as the NUC, the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria and the Council for the Registrations of Engineers in Nigeria that are actively involved in regulating the quality of graduates from Nigerian universities. While accreditation of academic programmes is based at least in part on the number of professors in a department, most often such professors are of no particular advantage to their departments and may actually constitute a cog in the wheel on many occasions. They not only fail to give the required academic leadership, they also show bad examples to the junior academics who look up to them for direction. Curtailing truancy among professors is a daunting task for many university administrators considering the culture of academic indiscipline in many universities. This is even more difficult when the administrators are professionally junior to the said professors in the academic hierarchy. Truancy among professors and other senior academic staff often percolate down the academic hierarchy and ultimately affect the quality of teaching in such departments. Among other strategies to reduce truancy and forestall the spread of indiscipline in the university system, the National Universities Commission should begin to articulate policies and mechanisms to regulate part-time teaching among senior academic staff in the nation’s universities

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