US-based Nigerian professor’s assessment of Nigerian Universities (I)

This essay is a compilation of two postings I made beginning 28 August, 2013 in which I responded to a discussion on the listserve USA-Africa Dialogue Forum occasioned by a Call for Papers by the editor of the Unilag Journal of Politics. The subject of the heated debate was the propriety of demanding upfront payment […]

This essay is a compilation of two postings I made beginning 28 August, 2013 in which I responded to a discussion on the listserve USA-Africa Dialogue Forum occasioned by a Call for Papers by the editor of the Unilag Journal of Politics. The subject of the heated debate was the propriety of demanding upfront payment from prospective authors by a supposedly peer-reviewed journal. In that intervention, I also promised to do a proper write-up of some of my two-year sabbatical/Fulbright and LEADS Scholar experiences, particularly as it concerns higher education in Nigeria.
I am a full professor of Political Science in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe. Given the time constraints I face (especially readjusting to life in America after two years plus the incinerating heat of the Sonoran Desert), this may never happen if I wait for the opportune moment. Consequently, I have decided to post short accounts of my experiences from time to time and whenever time permits.
I just completed a 2-year sabbatical/Fulbright Fellowship LEADS Fellowship at the National Defense College, Abuja in Nigeria during which I participated in six (6) National Universities Commission (NUC) program accreditation visits to one federal, two state and three private universities for Political Science and International Relations, Economics and Sociology.
I learned a lot about the opportunities and challenges of university education in Nigeria. I’ll never forget many of the exceptionally brilliant students my panels and I interacted with as part of our assignment. Some economics departments have advanced electronic labs for their formal modeling/econometrics courses, while some programs have easily accessible subscriptions to various research databases for their electronic libraries. When time permits, I’ll do a proper write-up on my experiences, more broadly.
I would like here to respond to the “Call for Papers” from the University of Lagos (Unilag) that asked prospective authors to also send money. During the accreditation visits (which are really meticulous and rigorous), I found that while quite a number of colleagues are doing serious scholarship, the overwhelming percentage is engaged in what you call “Vanity” journal (and book) publishing. Every department–100 PERCENT–that we evaluated had its own “journal” which is “edited” in-house. Thereafter the authors literally put a gun on the head of administrators to count those “publications” as part of the percentage of scholarship that can be locally published. Even Colleges of Education and Polytechnics have departmental journals in Nigeria–there was a CFP from one of them on this list recently.
None of these “journals” is indexed, either locally or internationally; so, colleagues who live/work five kilometres away from the institutions may not even know that such publications exist. Some institutions have been posting some of their publications online to give them visibility and possibly generate citation counts. There are claims (I have no proof; it wasn’t my charge) that some of the articles are plagiarized or may even be exact copies of papers published elsewhere with a new author and institutional affiliation.
Sadly, there is no nation-wide outlet to present, publish and/or professionally review recent work in the fields I evaluated since, for instance, the once-famous Nigerian Political Science Association and its journal died following the zoning of its leadership to the North who must have their “turn” at leading the association. A similar fate has befallen many scholarly groups–the Historical Society of Nigeria seems to be one of the few exceptions. Asked why these colleagues shouldn’t be reading and/or publishing in outlets put out by older institutions with seasoned academics with more credible track record, I was hushed down with: “Why should we be reading their own? Why can’t they read our own [journals]?” A PhD is a PhD, I was told, even if it’s awarded by a two-year old caricature of what others know as a university.
It’s worth noting that in one state university we visited, of the nine (9) lecturers on the Sociology faculty, six (6) obtained their PhDs (as well as their BSc and MSc degrees) from that very same department. Not only do you smell “in-breeding” you can assume they were also taught and mentored by senior colleagues who rose through the ranks based on publications in departmental journals. Indeed, many colleagues on the Deans and VC ranks today cut their academic teeth in the “Volume 1, Number 1″ syndrome of the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s worth noting, though, that no more than 68 percent of faculty in all Nigerian Universities have doctorates; not easy to produce one, really.
It was amusing to find senior lecturers, associate professors/readers and even full professors with 50-100 “scholarly papers” almost 9/10 of which appear in these in-house and other publications. I’m not making any judgment regarding the quality of these publications since I have not read them. Yet, I find the culture very worrisome. Sometimes “books” (especially edited volumes) are published without a clear reason why such a “scholarly book” should be published. I earned some reputation as a snub whenever I explained my inability to honor “Prof, can you please contribute a chapter for my book” requests.
Many of these colleagues with very long list of “scholarly papers” have fewer than five (5) citation counts on Google Scholar, if at all they do. Of course, many of us Diaspora academics have relatively very little citation counts. It must be stated that, as at this point, the NUC has not taken up the responsibility to regulate this aspect of academic quality—not sure it should. What are department heads, deans, Senate and vice chancellors supposed to be doing?