Three things to consider before promoting our lecturers

Five and half years ago, on 05 January 2013, I wrote this column as a contribution towards the quality of instruction and graduate supervision in our universities. The content is still relevant today as it was half a decade ago. Following are a few policy ideas that could help improve our universities and reduce the […]

Five and half years ago, on 05 January 2013, I wrote this column as a contribution towards the quality of instruction and graduate supervision in our universities. The content is still relevant today as it was half a decade ago.

Following are a few policy ideas that could help improve our universities and reduce the victimization of students.

Graduating postgraduate students before being promoted to professor

Graduating on time has become a big problem for postgraduate students studying in Nigerian universities. A couple of months ago, a friend requested that we congratulate him because his friends who started their master’s degrees ten years ago had finally graduated.

This sounds unbelievable, but it does happen in our universities. I personally know someone who spent six years doing a master’s degree in Nigeria without graduating.

He left.

It took him one and a half years to do it in Malaysia. It can be done in a year in UK and two years in the US. A master’s degree that takes more than three years for a full time student should be a cause for concern.

Getting a PhD degree in Nigeria is even worse. Many people spend 10 years without finishing.

Normally, earning a PhD is a rigorous – sometimes, tortuous journey. I agree with a writer who said a time comes during the journey of every PhD where the student asked whether s/he has the ability to accomplish it. I also experienced that self-doubt. It is normal to finish in four or even six years – that’s how tough it is.

Additionally, the attrition rate (i.e. the rate of those who started but couldn’t complete) is scary. The attrition rate was one of the reasons Maria Livingstone gave when she called for the abolition of the PhD degree. One of the leading factors contributing to attrition rate is poor supervision – this is true even in Australia according to a research by Curtin University.

However, in Nigeria, we don’t only have poor supervision; we also have absence of supervision.

A friend once told me a disturbing story about a professor supervising a postgraduate student in Nigeria.

His student went to see him and hung around his office for several hours. When the professor came out for the noon prayers he saw the student sitting there but he didn’t say anything.

They went to the mosque and prayed together. The professor said nothing. He came back to his office, but the supervisor didn’t call him for discussion. The student waited for more hours. When the supervisor was ready to go home, he called his student and gave him about 1,000 exam papers – of his undergraduate students – and requested him to mark them. He also gave him a deadline to return the test papers promising to discuss his research with him when he did.

When the student came back on the appointed date with the marked scripts, the professor said he couldn’t discuss his research with him because he had to travel.

This is how postgraduate students spend several months without getting to discuss their research with the supervisors. This egregious behaviour from our professors is unfair. It’s unfair to the students who labour to finish these degrees and it’s unfair to the nation which needs more people with postgraduate degrees in the academia.

That’s why I feel graduating a certain number of postgraduate students should be a requirement for a promotion in our universities. For example, nobody should be promoted to an associate professor or reader without first mentoring and graduating at least a couple of PhD students.

This is how it’s done elsewhere. For example, my first PhD supervisor had to leave my university because he couldn’t move from the senior lecturer position to associate professor because he had not graduated a PhD student – and obviously, he didn’t think I would graduate early enough to earn the position.

Personally, I feel nobody deserves to be a professor without first mentoring people who are themselves on the tract to be professors. I heard that it’s now part of promotion in our universities to graduate PG students before becoming a professor. What the system needs to do now is to peg how many of such students a lecturer must graduate and taking into account the number of years the students took before graduating.

Evaluation by undergraduate and postgraduate students

Another instrument of measuring lecturers’ performance that should be tied to their promotion is evaluation of their teaching by their undergraduate students and evaluation of their mentoring and supervision by their postgraduate students.

Students should be able to fill out an assessment form sent straight from the office of the HOD on the final class of the semester without any intervention from the lecturer being assessed.

The assessment should be anonymous and a staff from the office of the HOD – such as a secretary – should supervise and collect the forms immediately the students are done.

As for the postgraduate students, they can do the assessment online. But this wouldn’t be anonymous since such assessment would be linked to their accounts. However, only those concerned in the postgraduate school should see how they rated their professors.

Would student abuse this process and victimize the lecturer? It does happen. I’ve seen a case or two where some lazy students used the evaluation as a way to get back at their lecturers. But this is very rare in my experience; therefore, we shouldn’t knock back the idea because a few people might abuse it. I know that even in Nigeria such evaluations are done for accreditation of courses. They should be considered for promotion.

Attracting external research fund

Our university teachers complained about their institutions being under-funded by their owners – the federal and state governments.

However, this should not stop them from conducting research. Research funding is an international enterprise. Some organizations exist only to fund research; and industries have been built around how to access such funds. A simple search on Amazon.com of the term “how to write grant proposal” would yield several excellent resources that could help our lecturers in getting funds for their research. Being able to attract an external – especially international – fund is considered an accomplishment in academia. That also should count towards promotion. Again, this idea is not at all original; many universities reward their staff for attracting international grants for their research and use it as one of the metrics for promotion.