Academic

Standards in Nigerian Universities

Within the Global Framework

of the
Economics, Social Contexts and
Philosophies of Higher Education

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

The Comparative Study of Ways of Developing, Assessing,
Storing, Applying and Transmitting Knowledge
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

Summary

This essay, inspired by a discussion in the listserve

USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, examines the
challenges of Nigerian academia in the context of book and
journal publication, main instruments in the creation and
dissemination of new knowledge, a central goal of the
university, the other component of that goal being the
development of human power represented by students, a
goal pursued through pedagogy using the knowledge largely
developed by universities or knowledge gained by
employing methods central to the cognitive processes at the
heart of university education and research. The essay
explores the subject by contextualizing Nigerian academia
within the economics, social contexts and philosophy of
higher education in a global frame, particularly in dialogue
with the dominance of global academia by the West
constituted by Europe and North America.


Cover image : College of Medicine, University of Ibadan,
Nigeria.

Image source: University Of Ibadan Student
(graduate/undergraduate) Chat Room -

Education.Nairaland.

Accessed24/06/2016




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Contents

Relative Levels of Prestige in Academic Publishing
Economics of Academic Publishing for Publishers
Monetary Costs
Unpaid Academics a Central Labour Force
for Academic Publishing
The Question of Indigenous vs Non-Indigenous Journals
and Publishers
Need for Consistent Access to Developments in
Scholarship Through an Ideally Global Scope of
Academic Journals and Books
Book Writing and Publishing
Academic Standards for Professors
The Future


Relative Levels of Prestige in Academic Publishing

A critique of Nigerian academia is described as "bean
counting", which I understand is seen as the practice of
substituting number for quality in assessing academic
publications, implying that academic journal articles, and,
by extension, books, are not weighted in relation to the
quality/prestige of the journals in which they are published
or the publishers who publish them, but are simply counted
in numerical terms, with ASUU, the Academic Staff Union of
Universities, depicted as central in protecting this status quo
ensuring
low
performance.

While recognizing this as important, particularly in the
context of the development of the culture of academic
journal publication as developed in the globally dominant
Western academy and questionable practices demonstrated
by a number of Nigerian based journals across time, along
with the lack of sustainability evidenced by some of the
better academic journals based in Nigeria which developed
an international reputation in what may be described as a
high point in Nigerian tertiary education in the 60s, such as
Odu, on philosophy and Black Orpheus, on literature and art,
I would be wary of dismissing ASUU or its staff on such
grounds beceause the conditions vital for developing a
thriving culture of academic journal and book publishing in
the same manner as the Western academy, which is used as
an exemplary point of reference on the subject, might not
have existed in Nigeria since the social and economic
upheavals recurrent in Nigeria with and after the Nigerian
Civil War of 1967-1970.

Economics of Academic Publishing for Publishers

Monetary Costs

Academic journal publishing and academic publishing in
general are particularly time and energy consuming, even
more so since they require a strong economy or creative
marketing and publishing strategies for them to be
economically viable for the publishers. This viability
includes the ability to make enough money across the
spectrum of publications running from textbooks vital for
providing insight across subjects and more specialized
works addressing breakthroughs in aspects of particular
subjects.
Along those lines, a member of the staff of Oxford University
Press once stated that his publishing house never runs at a
loss unlike a number of academic publishers, not surprising,
if true, given the scope of strategies Oxford UP employs to
reach a broad readership, the most striking perhaps being
their Very Short Introductions series which presents the
latest research on particular broad fields in ways that the
average reader can follow easily, a strategy I dont know any
other academic publisher doing as successfully, with
Cambridge's Canto Classics series, impressive at it is, not
approximating
the
visual
and
practical,
colorful, pocket sized appeal and breadth of subjects as the
Oxford series. I read of a related effort from a US academic
publisher but still not at the level of the balance of plus
factors as the Oxford approach.
Unpaid Academics a Central Labour Force for
Academic Publishing

Academic journal publication at present also operates in
terms of access to a large workforce of academics who are
prepared to work for free as assessors of journal articles. I
wonder the likelihood of building such a workforce in large

numbers in an environment like that of Nigeria bedevilled

by system failure- low levels of access to public services
such as electricity and water, recurrent loss of priceless
energy and time in seeking fuel for cars and generators, high
cost of fuel even in those circumstances, political instability
leading to instability in the educational system,
demonstrated in graphic terms by the recent controversial
replacement of vice-chancellors in the universities founded
by the immediate past Jonathan administration, further
entrenching a culture of subservience to political powers
outside the university to whom vice-chancellors are
primarily beholden for their offices, perhaps contributing
to the temptation for the VCs to become overlords within
their constituencies, lording it over those constituencies
from within as the VCs are lorded over from outside.
The Question of Indigenous vs Non-Indigenous
Journals and Publishers

Academic journals and academic book publishers may also
be seen as operating in terms of explicit and implicit
philosophies arising from their local environments, making
them promoters of perspectives that align with such views
above others. It can be argued that academic journals are
largely international organs transcending national or
cultural boundaries, making it unnecessary to argue that a
nation or a trans-national cultural unit needs to have
journals run by its nationals if it is to maximize its academic
productivity, but is that international vision at best not
a yet unrealised ideal?
As far as I can see in the humanities, although I have not
examined the subject systematically, I get the impression
that to a significant degree , the editorial policies of journals
are not always representative of possibilities that may
emerge from the various parts of the world where the
discipline the journal covers is studied, with Analytical

University of Ibadan, most likely in its early years

Architectural designs by husband and wife team Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew
Image source : "Introduction to Contemporary Architecture"
in http://memarimoaser.blogfa.com/post-124.aspx
"After World War II through a series of acts of parliament Britain decided to
invest money in the education of its overseas colonies.
One of the outcomes was the setting up of the first university in the British
colonies in West Africa on an undeveloped site of forest and farmland in western
Nigeria".

"THE BRITS WHO BUILT THE MODERN WORLD : University of Ibadan"

Architecture.com by RIBA : Royal Institute of British Architects

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Accessed 24/06/2016

Philosophy described as being dominant in England and the

US and Continental philosophy in non-English speaking
Europe, Indian philosophy only relatively recently being
discussed as a partner in addressing philosophical questions
in such books from Western academic publishers as Self, No
Self? : Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and
Indian Traditions (2010) published by Oxford UP ( whom I
particularly admire) rather than being treated as books for
area studies scholarship outside the mainstream of
philosophy as understood in the West, although Oxford UP's
Art History and Art Theory volumes in the Very Short
Introductions series briefly discuss non-Western art and
thought, but from within the perspectives of and from an
emphasis on Western art and thought.
Need for Consistent Access to Developments in
Scholarship Through an Ideally Global Scope of
Academic Journals and Books

Academic journals and books are also shaped by economic
imperatives that control access to these knowledge banks
and their products, economic imperatives in which weak
African economies are disadvantaged.
Operating at the highest level of scholarship represented by
the most demanding journals and academic publishers
requires access, over years, for an academic, and for a
university or group of universities, across generations, to
the latest developments in the fields in question as they
emerge in academic journals and books, and taking active
part in those developments, a task the Western universities
stretch themselves to enable for their staff and students.
With the journals and publishers that command academia
being based in the West, publishing in them means such
work is often not accessible to people in countries where
access to these journals is not readily gained, leading to a
loss in the ability of researchers from weaker

economies publishing in those journals to contribute to the

knowledge base of their own local environment.

Even Harvard, perhaps the world's richest academic
institution, recently declared its difficulties in maintaining
its subscription to its traditional corpus of academic journals
and Timothy Gowers, Field Medal Prize winner at Oxford,
led a boycott of Elsevier to protest what many describe as
unrealistically high subscription costs from the publisher
even though the academics the publisher relies on for the
academic work that makes its journals possible are doing
the work for free, developments fuelling the move to open
access publishing, at times using media that require no input
from publishers, such as blogs.
How would Nigerian universities and academics cope in a
world in which even Harvard is complaining of high
subscription costs of journals? Compounding such
developments , academic books are among the most
expensive in the world. Two of the latest books in Yoruba
art are Rowland Abioduns Yoruba Art and Language :
Seeking the African in African Art, an indispensable work in
Yoruba and African aesthetics, and Suzanne Preston Blier's
Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba : Ife History, Power, and
Identity, c.1300, both published by Cambridge University
Press. The cheapest price for Blier's book, quoting prices
for purchase and delivery to Nigeria, on Bookfinder , the
best book selling site I know and which gathers information
from book sellers in the West and Asia, is $86.00 while that
for Abiodun's book is $140.33 with such books being
published on a daily basis by Western academic presses.
Those who are better informed about individual and
institutional purchasing capacities in Nigeria are in a better
position to assess the implications of these prices and the
volume of production they represent in relation to keeping
abreast with the disciplinary developments these books
demonstrate.

University of Lagos Students Congregate by the Lagoon

Near the University Campus
Image source : "Unilag Lagoon Front" post of July 24, 2012 on Lagos




City Photo Blog by Lolade Adewuyi
Accessed 24/06/2016

10

Book Writing and Publishing

Another challenge Nigerian academics might be facing is a
disincentive to publish books since books might not be given
assessment in weighting for promotion in Nigerian
universities relevant to the effort it takes to prepare them, a
situation exacerbated by a publishing industry challenged by
operating costs increased by systemic problems ranging
from access to electricity to low or non- production of
publishing machines and difficulties in acquiring these
machines on account of low purchasing power from
within the Nigerian economy contributing to a situation in
which I have observed that almost all the best books on
African art I know of are not published in Africa because the
mobilization of the scholarly and material resources vital
for the research and publication that produces such books
seems to be best achieved outside Africa with the aid of
wealthy institutions that can finance such research and
publication.
Yet books are indispensable on account of the level of
elaboration they involve and can't be replaced by the briefer
remit of academic articles, vital as those are. A way out of
the challenges of paper based publishing is represented by
the Internet, which needs to be maximized in spite of
challenges of Internet access in Nigeria. A beautiful example
of such maximization is Critical Interventions : Journal of
African Art History and Visual Culture , the journal begun
and run independently, to the best of my knowledge,
by Sylvester Ogbechie for some years, although he did it
from his US base, and it was readily affordable, charging 5
to download an article, until perhaps after the journal's very
successful outing of bringing together a consortium of
scholars in addressing the subject of African fractals across
an interdisciplinary spectrum, with the major writer in that
field, Ron Eglash, as guest editor, its publication became
managed by a traditional academic publisher, Taylor and

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Francis, and one now needs 83 per issue as an individual

to read articles in that journal. Ogbechie discusses issues of
journal costs and open access in a post "Proliferation of
Academic Journals" on his excellent blog.
The Internet provides great opportunities for reshaping the
academic publication market, opportunities that represent a
wonderful window for scholarship from relatively weak
economies. Paper, to the best of my knowledge, is expensive.
Production costs can be cut by producing Print on Demand
books which are stored in digital form and printed only
when a copy is ordered.

Websites are as good as book platforms and perhaps even
better in some ways than the traditional paper format or
even PDF files, which reproduce the paper format in digital
form, because websites enable links to information sources
in other parts of the Internet, although science publishing in
particular has gone a long way in making the publication of
its academic articles fully Web intertextual, linking to other
sections of the Web, including other academic publications.
Social media is also very useful for scholarship, facilitating
sharing and discussion, even in relation to sophisticated
subjects, bridging gaps between various groups of people.
Open access sites like Academia.edu are excellent, while
open access journals and books such as those created by
Open Book Publishers are blazing a vital trail in academic
knowledge development.

Academic Standards for Professors

Another problem I observe in Nigerian academic
assessment, though I dont have a broad overview on the
subject, is the idea that the professor does not need to
publish, leading to stagnation that could inspire the
temptation to make professors insistent on keeping
younger staff from rising to meet them at their level of

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The Open Air Sculpture Museum that is the Ekenwan Campus of the
University of Benin
Image source : The Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Benin
Accessed 24/06/2016

13

stagnation and hypocritically raising the bar for assessment

while not making any effort to provide any incentives for
members of the professoriate to perform at a higher
level than the lower standards at which they gained
their professorships in the first place.
A method has to be found to re-describe the professorship
as a level of expanding creativity, perhaps borrowing from
the older German conception of the professor as I seem to
have read it somewhere, as a person professing on a subject
at a level of achievement equal to a unique world view, or
something
along
those
lines.

The Future

Nigerian academia needs to be understood and engaged
with in terms of its challenges and prospects if its potential
is to be maximized. Magnificent as the achievement of the
West is in terms of its higher education system which has
enjoyed almost a thousand year growth or more since the
European Middle Ages and the founding of the earliest
Western universities represented by the universities of
Bologna, Paris, Salamanca, Oxford and Cambridge ,
institutions eventually building on the older ancient Greek
achievement transmitted to Europe through the Arab and
Persian worlds, the Nigerian university system is not being
built by anybody in Europe or its North American cultural
outpost, or anywhere else apart from Nigeria.

Before Nigerians found their way to the West and other
developed nations to work in their institutions, the people
who lived there, through centuries of great sacrifice, had
built the systems those Nigerians can now take advantage of,
from Socrates who practically committed suicide by
surrendering himself to execution by the state rather than
stop his public quest for knowledge, a quest that through his

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admirer Plato and through Plato's student Aristotle,

remains foundational for the Western academy, to Jesus
Christ who also surrendered himself to death in the name of
his mission, in the process laying the foundation for a world
view that has shaped and continues to shape Western
civilization and thought, with the Western university, as
represented by the earliest examples, Paris, Oxford and
Cambridge being primarily religious institutions in their
earlier centuries, to scholars who lived only for their work
and had practically little of another life, such as Isaac
Newton and Immanuel Kant, while people like Giordano
Bruno were executed for heresy in the course of their
pursuit of knowledge, William Tyndale, the first translator of
the Bible whose work was printed in English in a
production on which the iconic Kings James Bible is
based, was "executed by strangulation, after which his body
was burnt at the stake", even as others like Galileo Galilei
escaped death but were punished anyway and some like
Newton avoided danger by keeping their heretical views to
themselves, if I recall accurately on Newton.

These are some of the sacrifices that have built the
institutions which Nigerians are now able to enjoy after the
truly difficult work has been done before the Nigerians
found their way to those places. The work of building the
foundations of the Nigerian university, or the universities of
the nations that may emerge from it if the nation breaks up, ,
is still in progress. Those who are doing the building should
be bold to acknowledge their inadequacies as well as their
strengths while taking the great work forward as far as
possible.

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University of Lagos Student by the Lagoon Near the University Campus

Image source : "Unilag Lagoon Front" post of July 24, 2012
on Lagos City Photo Blog by Lolade Adewuyi

Accessed 24/06/2016

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