Gown and town: The missing interface

Ayo Olukotun

Several years ago, Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, currently Chairman of the Obafemi Awolowo University Council, brought our minds to the phenomenon of a growing number of knowledgeable elderly citizens prematurely retired from their jobs with virtually nothing to do.

The essay, as I recall it, was entitled, ‘Executive Joblessness’ and it took its cue from one of the nation’s ambassadors sent into enforced idleness in one of the characteristic purges of the military years, his expertise and learning unharnessed.

Today, the more talked about haemorrhage of talents, in view of the explosion in our youthful population, concerns able bodied young Nigerians roaming around street corridors menacingly, unemployed and perhaps unemployable.

Complicating that cheerless, downward spiral is our failure to imaginatively put to constructive work many of our senior citizens, several of them former office holders brimming with information, intelligence and acumen that they share only in private capacities.

 Imagine someone who has been governor of a state for eight years with enormous pay off in insights into public administration, political behaviour and conflict mediation wasting away and untapped by any department of Political Science. And this brings me to the seminal failure of our universities to develop critical and topical interfaces with the communities which warehouse them.

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Patterned after the Cambridge and Oxford Universities of the United Kingdom, with their initial splendid isolation, our universities have remained fixated with a received colonial model, even when the originators of the model have moved on.

So, Harvard University, in the United States, opened its gates to Segun Adeniyi, a senior journalist, after his commendable stint as Chief Press Secretary to the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, enabling him to produce an engaging book on the last crucial days of Yar’Adua. I am not sure that any Nigerian university in the present circumstances of rigidity and arid formalism, bereft of the probing interface between town and gown, would have done that.

I am not blaming our universities, being myself a don and therefore, understanding the structural fetters that bind them to a stereotypical forte, for instance, the diktat of the National Universities Commission. However, as a nation, we are paying a steep price for the current uninspiring mould in which professionals, almost as a rule, are not allowed to be the watering holes of serious scholarship as we find elsewhere.

It begins from small details like universities formatted on an ivory tower model that no longer works, take no interest whatsoever in issues of infrastructure building, local governance, voting behaviour in the surrounding ecosystem. Industries, with a few exceptions, operate in university towns but develop, or are not encouraged to develop, substantial linkages with those universities. As far as the industries are concerned, and for that matter the universities, the other party may not have existed beyond the prescribed industrial training attachment whose potential is limited by its too often perfunctory character.

 True, there are interactions of a limited nature between gown and town, but these are mainly for purposes of fund raising or donations, award of honorary degrees and the occasional employment opportunity. That itself drastically confines, even distorts, the possibilities of research and development, as well as scholarship that is grounded in issues derived from addressing the problems of the immediate environment.

To highlight a different model, consider the relationship between Bayer Pharmaceuticals, a global brand, which, for 70 years, acted as a wellspring to the University of California, Berkeley, USA, in the areas of part and full time employment, research and scientific activity in bio-related pharmaceuticals.

There is also the tradition in the United States of appointing Professors of Practice, comprising professionals and industry hands who have distinguished themselves in their careers and from which university students and teachers in cognate disciplines have much to learn.

 The other day, I listened to the eminent professor of International Law, Akin Oyebode, remark on Channels Television, after a clip featuring remarks by the governor of Oyo State, Senator Abiola Ajimobi, that the governor sounded engaging enough to be invited by one of our universities, in some capacity, to share knowledge. I chuckled because I know that although Ajimobi is brilliant, the chances of that happening, on present terms, are slim.

British universities are, in broad terms, as conservative as they come, but have you noticed that in their departments of Mass Communication they now appoint tenured professors directly from the newsrooms? Two examples will make the point. George Brock was appointed professor at the City University of London after a 30-year stint in the newsroom in which he distinguished himself.

 He did not go through the academic mills and the tedium of appointments and promotion committees. In the same vein, a couple of years back, Richard Sambrok, who is currently director of the Centre of Journalism at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, was appointed from the British Broadcasting Corporation, first as a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, and subsequently as professor at Cardiff.

 I have often queried why distinguished journalists and media practitioners in Nigeria, such as Ray Ekpu, Muhammed Haruna, John Momoh and Biodun Shobanjo cannot serve as fellows in our several departments of Mass Communication.

What is wrong with a Femi Falana (SAN), Wole Olanipekun (SAN) and Kola Awodein (SAN), being pressed into the service of enriching the quality of legal education without the usual bureaucratic prescriptions?

The same thing holds for other professions where niches ought to have been created for star professionals under a collaborative town-gown framework.

Similarly, former distinguished senators, local government chairmen, governors, even heads of state, do not require a degree in Political Science for them to share information and set down their experiences in universities, which tend to put them at a distance.

Doing this takes nothing away from the enforcement of academic standards and meritocracy, considering that most of these knowledgeable citizens will serve in adjunct and non-tenured positions in those institutions insightful enough to see what contributions they are likely to make, both to particular and generic disciplines.

 It is a crying shame that Nigerian universities are yet to develop, beyond occasional flashes, structured modalities for warehousing enormous talents outside the academy. To reverse this syndrome, the National Universities Commission must be willing to relinquish some of the current powers it has appropriated over time or to become a change agent in the quest for excellence, and optimisation of the intellect beyond the ivory tower.

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 Merely awarding degrees does not capture the essence of universities as centres of learning and innovation. At the same time, as our universities are working to enhance the quality of their degrees, they ought to be building broad pathways to capturing distinguished professionals that are not resident in those institutions.

It is interesting that some of our best minds, including Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie, became distinguished, not by going through prescribed academic staircases, but by extending the frontiers of knowledge in unorthodox ways, thereby, attracting global acclaim.

The intellectual giants outside our universities, as well as others, whose experiences are worth preserving for humanity, will not gatecrash into the barricaded walls of academies. They need to be invited and courted for the mutual benefit of the gown and town. The time to begin such initiatives is now.