NOUN suspends law degree admission

Admission into the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) to study law as first degree has been suspended, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Abdalla Uba Adamu, has said. Prof. Adamu revealed this in an interview with Daily Trust over the weekend, attributing the decision to the ongoing efforts to get clearance from the Council of Legal […]

Admission into the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) to study law as first degree has been suspended, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Abdalla Uba Adamu, has said.
Prof. Adamu revealed this in an interview with Daily Trust over the weekend, attributing the decision to the ongoing efforts to get clearance from the Council of Legal Studies.
He said with the progress recorded from the discussions, there was hope that before the year ends, graduates of Law from the university since 2004 would be allowed by the council to join with their colleagues at the Nigerian Law School.
“In order not to compound issues, we decided to temporarily suspend admission into the programme. This, however  does not affect the students that are already admitted into the programme.
“It doesn’t make sense when you have a massive backlog of students that are not cleared and you continue to admit new students,” he added.
He said the idea that the university was established to function as a correspondence university was what irritated the council where they said they would not admit anybody who studied through correspondence or part-time.
“Since our motto says ‘Work & Learn’, perhaps to the Council of Legal Studies it means our programmes are run on correspondence and part-time basis which does not meet their requirements; they prefer studying on residential basis.
“We are not a correspondence but an open, distant learning (ODL) institution and this is the quagmire we are trying to sort out with the council and they are now beginning to understand.
“We hope before the end of the year we will be able to arrive at something that will get us out of this situation,” Prof. Adamu also said
He added that it was the clearance from the council that was holding back the university’s decision to commence post-graduate programmes in Law.
“We are waiting until we sort out this problem with the council. When we get to that Hallelujah moment when the council gives approval for our students to progress to law school, we will now commence the process of establishing the post-graduate programme.
“We already have pre-LL.M proposals which are being handled for us by one of our consultants in the United Kingdom,” he also said.