American University of Nigeria (AUN) is Yola’s largest employer. The university has affiliated grass-roots community institutions: a hotel, a health clinic, elementary and high schools and kindergarten, a printing press, and business centres. For Africa’s first development university, it was gratifying to observe that the university puts its resources where its mouth is. Nigeria’s unemployment rate, which hovers around 19 percent, requires that innovative steps be undertaken to assist in ameliorating national concerns on the economy. To what degree can AUN help the community in ways that are not ordinarily feasible? In some circumstances, human labour is used even when robots could have done a task faster, perhaps better. Echoing a deep commitment to corporate social responsibility, then, AUN employs local residents, engages them in labour-intensive tasks, and enables them to earn much more than a living wage.
AUN students are as dedicated to academics proper as they are as resourceful—and innovative—in community engagement. During my stint there, I taught a course titled “Globalization, Development and the Media,” which acknowledged AUN students’ grass-roots engagement. They developed and implemented “Feed and Read,” a programme that seeks to encourage literacy among host-community youths, while ensuring that they also have adequate and balanced nutrition. Other forms of community engagements are also taking root. Similarly, one of my students was singlehandedly connected to a “divorced” 18-year-old woman who had five children, was bereft of employable skills, and depended on the largesse of family and friends to make ends meet. The AUN student counselled her, assisted her financially, and encouraged her to be hopeful—and optimistic—once again.
AUN aspires to be a world-class university—a goal that can be accomplished in no time if its strengths are harnessed strategically in four key areas. First, exceed expectations and standards of Nigeria’s National Universities Commission in teaching, community engagement and research.
Second, encourage and support faculty to engage in more research projects that have a national or international relevance and published in outlets that have a high h-index, and meet criteria for the i-10 index, Google Scholar h-index, and those of the Social Sciences Citations Index—and its equivalents in STEM fields. The common parlance of a Nigerian faculty member’s having publications in “international journals” simply does not pass muster in the global context. There are scores of “international journals” whose editorial-review processes are either weak or non-existent.
A standard practice in United States’ world-class universities is the use of “The Legitimator” as a yardstick of scholarly excellence. It means assisting and supporting junior faculty members to have at least one publication in a top-tier, discipline-wide, peer-reviewed journal by the time they are reviewed for tenure and promotion. In my own discipline, “The Legitimator” includes Public Relations Review, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (formerly Journalism Quarterly), and the Journal of Communication. In sociology, it includes the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Social Forces. In political science, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. In business and management, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.
Third, establish a teaching and learning centre that exposes instructors to the effective use of cutting-edge instructional technologies in the classroom and to emerging instructional styles, such as the “flipped” classroom and “knowledge scaffolding,” which provides students levels of support, comments and criticisms to guide them into a deeper territory of acquiring knowledge and skills.
Finally, because communication underpins all endeavours and professions—politics, corporate and non-profit management, clinical health, community engagement, academia, and public agitation—it is important that public speaking be a university-wide requirement. Some U.S. universities—e.g., Pennsylvania State, Purdue, and West Chester—require all students to take at least one public-speaking course, regardless of their undergraduate majors, to fulfil graduation requirements.
It is important to note here that all is not honky-dory in U.S. higher education; therefore, it is imperative that U.S.-style educational institutions in Africa and elsewhere tread cautiously on what practices need to be adopted, adapted, deep-sixed. For example, grade inflation is a scourge on most U.S. campuses—a concern perhaps not oblivious to AUN’s School of Arts and Sciences dean who, in a memo to all faculty in his school in fall 2017, broached the spectre of undeserved course grades in some AUN courses.
Some of the major challenges of U.S. higher education are detailed in two books: Nathan D. Grawe’s Demographics and the demand for higher education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); and Bryan Caplan’s The case against education: Why the [U.S.] education system is a waste of time and money (Princeton University Press, 2018).
Grawe, a former associate dean at Carleton College, identifies three such challenges: (a) headwinds that, beginning in 2026, will result in a rapid decline in the native-born, prospective-applicant pool and that will reshape the demographics of U.S. universities, which will increasingly depend on full-pay students in response to shrinking enrolment numbers; (b) change in interstate migration, with the South and West of the United States indicating an increase in student demand for four-year college, the Northeast, a significant decline; and (c) decline in research funding at the national level. In contradistinction, tailwinds in Nigeria are fuelling enrolment trends, necessitating growth in the number of accredited universities, but without a commensurate growth in institutional funding.
Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, bemoans (a) the intellectual apathy of a majority of U.S. students he described as “philistines”—those who cannot be inspired, even by the best teachers; (b) the gap between skills students learn on campuses and those workers use; and (c) the penchant among students for “easy A’s.” As Caplan notes, “students frequently flee to easier majors” to earn “Easy As.” It would be in the best interest of Nigeria’s private universities to rein in any tendency toward diluting academic standards just to ensure a high “customer satisfaction.” Caplan calls for vocational and on-the-job trainings, casting doubt on the U.S. higher-education model. He writes, “. . . educators teach what they know—and most have…little first-hand knowledge of the modern workplace…” (p. 10).
A strength of the U.S. model is the exposure of students to “the modern workplace” through cooperative programmes by which they spend significant time—usually during the summer—to burnish their on-the-job credentials and to iterate their bona fide interest in their academic majors. The drive is not necessarily to accelerate the pace toward graduation; it is to work toward combining academics and workplace know-how in preparation for the mammoth challenges of the professional world. AUN is not oblivious to such a need and, to its credit, encourages a systematic synergy between the classroom and the industry.
My semester-long presence on the campus of Africa’s first development university tells me that, to the degree Nigeria’s private universities serve a continent that, among other things, has 41 of the 50 nations with the world’s highest fertility rates, the opportunities to etch an imprint on Africa’s educational landscape are robust. A failure to seize such opportunities in making a transformative contribution to developing a skilled and an educated workforce is not an option.
– Concluded.
- Pratt is a professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication and vice president of the Temple University Faculty Senate. He taught communication courses and conducted research during fall semester, 2017, on the main campus of the American University of Nigeria, Yola.
