Some lecturers ought to retake undergraduate programmes – Prof Adeniran

Professor Adekunle Adeniran, former acting Vice Chancellor, Ajayi Crowther University and former Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, joined the league of octogenarians on January 20, 2015.
The birthday was celebrated in grand style in Ibadan.
The professor of sociolinguistics, who has been a teacher all his life, in this interview, appraises the funding of university system, impact of teaching and research on national development, qualities of students and lectur­ers, direction university education should go in the country and why government should fund private universities, reasons some lec­turers should retake their undergraduate pro­grammes and other sundry issues in educa­tional sector. He spoke to OLUSEYE OJO.
Excerpts:
How would you appraise funding of university and its impact on teach­ing and research as they contribute to the national development?
There are three things that we have lumped together; funding of universities, the research going on in the universities, and how these two elements relate or impact on national development? They are connected. First of all, universities are set up for teach­ing and research. So, for digging deep – do­ing research, in different knowledge areas, research must be conducted because without research, there cannot really be development.
Now in most departments, they have RnD (Research and Development). It is very important because you have to know more about any particular phenomenon for you to work out how you can improve on it. The ul­timate goal is how all these things impact on national development. Ultimately, we want our society to develop and for things to better than what they are now
So, whatever that is going on now in the university should focus on how it can make life better for the members of the society, and the corporate society taken together. How do these things make life better?
Digging deep costs a lot of money, which is one thing that does not seem to be appreci­ated in this country that research costs a lot of money. But the money is worth being spent on research because if you look at what we call discoveries in whatever area of knowl­edge such as medical science, engineering or communication and so on, it is because peo­ple have taken time to dig deep.
Most university researchers are frustrated because they do not have the money. I am not in the basic sciences, agricultural sci­ence, chemistry or physics, but I do know that there are certain elements in nature the researcher needs to study closely and it could take time.
In this country, the government and agen­cies, particularly the government seem to be looking for quick results. It looks big to them when they release money for a research. When the researcher embarks on the work, what they have given him could be pittance.
For instance, in the University of Ibadan, for some time, I was the chairman of the Research and Grant Committee and we would get bulk sum from government and we would call for applications from differ­ent professors and their staff to let us know the areas in which they want to research. We share the bulk sum from government across the departments. Usually, what comes to the department is usually very small.
Unfortunately, those who provide the fund seem to think that they can get results imme­diately. The would say we have given you N500,000 to do research in a particular area. But some big research projects, the budget that comes to us is in millions. But government will make the money available in tranches.
If your budget for a particular project is N25million, this year the government may give N5million to start the research. After giving the N5million, they want to see what you have done with the money. They want the research to have been concluded, whereas the N5million may have just gone in just collecting data be­fore they go to the laboratory to begin to anal­yse.
But the funding agencies think that having given N5million, let us know what you have done in concrete terms. Things don’t work out like that. If you look into other places in the world, especially medical science, some re­search may have been going on for as long as 10 years; the researchers are still investigating. They haven’t got the solution. The conclusion is not yet there and the agencies keep on fund­ing them.
For 10 years, investigation into a particular phenomenon may have been going on. But in Nigeria, after giving that N5million, it looks so big and they think you ought to have con­cluded. But you have merely scratched the surface before you begin to dig deep. That is one issue with research in this country and that is why outcome of research is hardly seen be­cause those who are funding the research have not been patient enough, have not put enough money to get the researcher go on and on and on. We are over-anxious to get the results and that doesn’t help.
Although the researcher will be writing progress reports, the progress report is not yet the conclusion of the research. Often, the fund­ing agencies think that having written the prog­ress reports, that is the end of the research. It is not. Research requires a lot of funds, most of which is not always made available in Nige­ria. This is the reason we have not been able to improve.
A few years ago, one researcher, I think a geologist, who was in the University of Lagos. He was researching into asphalt that is used to improve the quality of roads in this country. I remembered reading his project. He started on it on a small scale. But to get him money to dig deeper into it, money was not available.
Most researches end in the laboratory. You take it out of the laboratory into the field and you encounter some new difficulties, which you did not see when you were in the labo­ratory. If you go back to the agency that you have carried this so far with faults, your exper­iments in the lab led to a certain conclusion. But when you get to the field, this is what you get. So, you need to go back. The agency may tell you that it does not have any more money for you. So, the whole thing is aborted and the researcher is frustrated.
So, research needs a lot of money. It needs hard work on the part of the researchers. It needs patience from the funding agencies and the country for the results of the research to be seen in concrete terms in the society. I am talking not only in the scientific experiments, even in social science.
For example, nobody is happy in this coun­try with what goes on among the youth in this country. There is violence, hooliganism and all kinds of vices. You would begin to wonder how the researchers in social sciences – psy­chology, sociology and so on, are looking into it. But it takes time for them to come to con­clusions.
This is what the teachers in the universi­ties are doing. I think I should relate it to my own discipline. I became a professor in the Department of Linguistics, which is a science of language. What is there to research since I speak my Yoruba very well? What else does anybody need to tell me? What new thing is going to be discovered about Yoruba? I just cited Yoruba, but the same is true of any other language.
In Linguistics, it is not just using my moth­er tongue to communicate and get around the street for something. But you want to see how we can use my mother tongue, first of all, to get children, the little kids in schools to think better, understand nature better and so on. We have to work out new vocabulary, what we called metalanguage – language with which you will impart knowledge.
There is something odd, which is unfor­tunate in this country, is that the elite in this country, because we have come from our co­lonial experience, we tend to think that every child from age three should be speaking En­glish. This is totally a wrong direction to walk. The point is that every language is a product of the culture of the people and the language reflects the culture of the people.
Now, we begin to lament that things are going awry, our culture is dying and so on, and we are not doing anything about; yet the language, which carries the culture is being neglected because we want to learn English. We want every little toddler to speak English.
So, in primary and secondary school, no­body is paying attention to the mother tongue anymore. We want everybody to speak En­glish but it is a total misperception because you have to look into your culture for you to be able to do things in a new way that will ben­efit the entire society.
The environment is not really English. The environment is not British. The environment is not European. The environment is African. The environment is Nigeria. But you begin to use English. There is no way English language can properly describe the Yoruba culture or Igbo culture or Hausa culture because culture is embedded in the language. If you ignore the language, then you are ignoring the culture, which is unfortunate.
These kids, when you teach them English, many of them will never get to America, Ger­many or England to see these things. So, they learn English perfunctorily, they do not real­ly understand the English Language because they do not understand the culture, which the English Language conveys to them.
Now, they have ignored their Yoruba culture or their Igbo culture. So, they are neither here, nor there culturally and that is unfortunate. If the culture of a people remains static or is retrogressing, then the people cannot develop. Everybody cites the examples of the Japanese, Koreans and so on; everybody now knows that the Japanese learn from primary school all through in Japanese. The Chinese learn all their primary, secondary and university in Chi­nese Language. So, they are thoroughly bred.
But we are neither British, nor Nigerian because we are using the wrong medium to teach. This is why it is difficult, except those who are specially endowed. That is why Af­ricans, Nigerians in particular cannot make headway in scientific discovery because the language in which they are doing their re­search is not part of their culture. If all these things I have mentioned and others are not there, all the glamorous things such as Vision 2020-25 will be a fluke.
It has been said many times that Ni­geria has leadership problem. Breed­ing or grooming of leaders starts from schools, how will you rate the quali­ties of students and teachers as well as the process of their recruitment?
When I was very young, you did not go to school until you are six years and above. I have read stories of people who did not go to primary school until they were 10 years or they were older than that. The point is that a little child who went to school after he was 10 years, he has mature in the culture of his village or his society. So, learning in school, he has something in his subconscious when he’s introduced to formal education. He has something in his subconscious, which has been engrained in his subconscious in terms of which he now understands what he is learning in the school. He can compare and say this thing is like that but in my culture, it is not like that. The same thing goes into secondary school.
The quality of students, especially at the university now, to say the least, is very dis­turbing. In my own days, a child would leave secondary school about age 16. The very bright ones, after age 16, go through the en­trance examinations to the universities. Their percentage is usually very small.
Most others go through the Higher School Certificate (HSC) level for additional two years before they enter university. So, the average age then, after HSC, of entering the university is 18 or 19 and they won’t graduate until another four to five years. The average age of the very bright ones would be about 24 to 25. People like me, who went through teachers’ training college or just home study, could probably didn’t enter uni­versities until we were already 26 or 27 years. We were very mature and we knew what we were in the university to do. Unfortunately, these days the quality of students who enter universi­ties is very low.
There are two levels into which we can cat­egorise Nigerian universities – the Ivy League, which are topmost universities and that are where the brightest ones go. These are the University of Ibadan, University of Lagos, University of Ife now Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) or University of Nigeria Nsukka(UNN). The brightest of the brightest go into these first-class first generation universities.
At a lower level than that are the state-owned universities. The bright ones also go to state-owned universities, but quite as bright as those who go to UI, UNILAG and OAU for instance.
Still below the state-owned universities are the private universities, which are now prolifer­ating all over the country. Private universities or private enterprise, if you like, now outnumbered the publicly-owned universities. But students going in are of doubtful qualities. What seems to matter the most in many private universities is the ability of the parents to pay because the fees there are high.
There are very bright ones who also go to pri­vate universities but I bet that those very bright ones could have gone to Ibadan or Lagos or Ife. But they must go to university and their par­ents can afford it. They are not necessarily the best kind of brain that university teachers enjoy teaching.
I enjoy teaching students who can challenge my knowledge because they are very bright ones. When I was in Ibadan, it usually gave us a pleasure that you get students who can question your position on any matter because he or she is very bright. He or she has probably read some things and so on.
In the private universities now, these are stu­dents who could not possibly get admitted to one of the topmost universities. But the parents can afford it and the school fees, depending on the discipline the child wants to pursue, is in the neighbourhood of N500,000 per semester. To maintain a child in a private university, you must have something like a million naira for his or her clothing, accommodation, boarding and so on.
It is fair to say when they get to these pri­vate universities, those who have the potentials, when they are exposed and they learn in the hands of dedicated teachers, then they re-discov­er themselves. By the time they are taking their degrees, they could be as good as some of their colleagues who went to the topmost universities. But majority of them in the private universities are not necessarily the kind of students you would want to teach.
What about the quality of teachers?
The National Universities Commission (NUC) has a system of ensuring that majority of those who are teaching in the universities have competence to teach in the universities. I speak of majority of them because I do know that there are some universities, where even the teachers need to be taught, though everybody needs to be taught including the professors. But there are some others who ought to be back in their own undergraduate programmes to really refurbish whatever degrees they said they have got.
So, university teachers are not all of the same qualities. The blame is to be put again on the funding system. The reason many of them in the private universities may not be doing well is be­cause their employers or proprietors do not have the money for them to do research, which is the basis of good teaching.
Unless you have researched a particular phe­nomenon, there is nothing new that you want to impact. You can as well simply tell your stu­dents: this is the textbook, go and read it.