The function of the university is not simply to teach
bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a center
of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment
between real life and the growing knowledge of life, and adjustment which forms
the secret of civilization.
– W.E.B. Du Bois.
For republican
institutions to function progressively, they had to be continually modified.
— Thomas Jefferson.
The university is an
institution where the highest academic qualification can be obtained. It is
also an institution that is supposed to prepare graduates for the professional
needs of a complex and technological society. Although Nigerian universities
are producing graduates in large numbers in sciences, engineering and
technology and other fields, they are not prepared for the professional needs
of a complex and technological society due to lack of standard laboratories,
lack of good libraries, lack of good instructional material, poor university
funding among others.
The Academic Staff Union
of Universities (ASUU) is a patriotic union that wants the growth of Nigeria
not only educationally but economically and otherwise. But since most Nigerian
leaders are unpatriotic to Nigeria, they don’t care about what happens to
Nigerian education. Because of avarice, most of them are hankering for a
wealthy lifestyle and have partially or completely turned their back on
Nigerian education and other sectors. ASUU is not only fighting for the
university system to be revitalized but also other institutions of learning.
Once the universities in Nigeria are well equipped and improved upon, other
institutions of learning will also be taken care of so that academic
achievements will be great in Nigeria and will have potent impact on the nation
and the entire world.
ASUU had gone on many
strikes in the past but such strikes did little to move the Federal government
into action. When the ASUU challenged came up, the Federal Ministry of
Education (FME), again, did not handle matters in a coordinated way. The
university teachers have been having issues with the federal government since
1992, and Adamu was not the first Minister to have been confronted with the
challenge. But when a largely uncoordinated FME team decided to take up issues
a highly experienced ASUU side, it became clear that a stalemate would occur.
It is painful to note that
over the years, the education sector has been characterized by endless strikes
without any hope of addressing the inherent problems even when the country has
what it takes to put things right.
The former president of
ASUU, Prof. Ukachukwu Awuzie in June, 2009 said that the federal government’s
lack of seriousness forced the strike option on the dons. According to him, in
December, 2006, the Federal Ministry of Education inaugurated the FGN/ASUU
Re-negotiation team, chaired by Mr. Gamaliel Onosode, with a single term of
reference of re-negotiating the 2001 FGN/ASUU Agreement. The 2001 agreement
dwelt on increased funding of the university sector, university autonomy and
academic freedom, 70 years retirement age for academic staff, as well as
salaries and conditions of service.
Shortly after the
three-month industrial action embarked upon by ASUU was suspended, Awuzie
warned the Federal Government to avoid any action and situation that are
capable of destroying the existing harmony among the unions on the campuses and
affecting the attainment of vision 2020. He made it clear that if Nigerian
university system is not revitalized by the Federal Government, it will be
impossible for Nigeria to become a great nation without it.
The present president of
ASUU, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi has been on the same page with Prof. Ukachukwu
Awuzie as he was in 2009 about the ASUU demands. And the failure of federal
government to meet its demands forced another strike.
No nation can achieve
greatness without education. There is no country that can be a great nation without
standard education. If political leaders
think that there are shortcuts to being a great nation, then they must be
day-dreaming.
ASUU is patriotic to
Nigeria because it knows that without standard education, Nigeria’s anticipated
greatness will be far-fetched so it wants the leaders to put things right to
make most Nigerian students to be competitive internationally and more
productive.
There are a lot of things
the Federal Government needs to learn from countries that used education to
become super powers today. And one of such countries is the United States of
America.
The years from 1870 to the
beginning of World War I in 1914 saw the United States transformed from a
predominantly agricultural to an industrial society. America’s
industrialization generated momentous alterations in the national character and
economy and in the nation’s social and educational institutions. The federal,
state, and local governments used education to encourage industrialization.
During the prosperity of
the 1920s, government, education, and society in general encouraged individual
initiative and action. The role of education was to prepare the agents of the
new prosperity: the inventors, investors, entrepreneurs, and corporate leaders
of the new economic order. Education administration, in particular, modeled
itself along business and corporate lines. For many school administrators,
schools were to run as effectively and efficiently as business.
If the federal government
wants Nigeria to be a great nation, then it must approve adequate funds for
modernization of Nigerian institutions of learning. Funds should be made
available for most lecturers and other educators to further their education or
conduct research abroad or study the school systems of all the countries that
are world powers today and recommend areas that should be incorporated in
Nigerian universities, colleges, secondary and elementary schools. The federal
government should also provide funds that will create an environment that will
accommodate the aspects to be incorporated. Nigerian university system and
other educational systems need complete transformation especially in science,
engineering and technology. ASUU wants complete transformation of the
university system because it is a patriotic union that knows that university is
the bedrock of knowledge and development.
In October 1957, the
Soviet Union launched a space satellite, Sputnik,
into orbit around the earth. The initial American reaction to Sputnik was a skeptical disbelief that
the supposedly technologically backward Soviets could have beaten the United
States in the race into space. This initial reaction led to a public search for
the internal weaknesses that had caused the United States to lose its hitherto
unquestioned scientific and technological superiority over the Soviet Union.
Although critics such as Bestor, Rafferty, and Rickover had been condemning the
U.S. public school’s academic softness since the early 1950s, Sputnik stimulated widespread demands
for more rigorous academic standards and programmes.
Sputnikbroadened the debate over the quality and condition of
American public education that had been going on since the early 1950s. In the
broadened context of Sputnik, the
discussion of American education, in professional as well as public circles,
turned to priorities. If the United States were to meet the Soviet challenge,
then it had to improve its scientific, engineering, and technological
capabilities. There was a return to more rigorous academic subject matter; the
emerging priorities also had a quantitative dimension in that more funds were
to be expended to prepare more teachers for classrooms. The Sputnik era also anticipated the
educational criticisms and reforms of the 1980s.
As the 1950s neared their
end, the long-standing debate over federal aid to education was interrupted by
fears that the United States was losing its scientific, technological, and
educational superiority to the Soviet Union. The Soviet success in orbiting Sputnik and well-publicized American
space failures at that time produced a mood of national crisis that “something
was wrong with American schools”. Although grossly exaggerated by Cold War
fears, this climate of opinion brought contentious factions together in
congress to enact the National Defence Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. The NDEA
rested on two premises: first, national security required the “fullest
development of the mental resources and technical skills” of American youth.
And second, the national interest required federal “assistance to education for
programmes which are important to America’s national defence”. The NDEA also
provided grants to the states to improve secondary school guidance and
counseling programmes.
John F. Kennedy was
elected president in 1960, a year when Cold War tensions remained high. In his
State-Of-The-Union Address on January 30, 1961, Kennedy called for legislation
to provide federal funding for public schools, higher education, basic
research, and medical training. This was followed by his “Special Message to
Congress on Education” in February, which outlined specific proposals for
education, such as:
1. federal assistance for elementary and secondary school
construction and raising teachers’ salaries;
2. federal loans
to colleges and universities to construct student housing;
3. a programme to
encourage scholarships for talented and needy college
students;
4. appointment of a commission to recommend improvements in
vocational education.
In his educational message
of 1962, President Kennedy advised Congress that significant advances in the
discovery and transmission of knowledge needed to be translated into the school
curriculum. While the institutes of the National Science Foundation and the
Office of Education had helped to keep teachers up-to-date, Kennedy believed
that the opportunities for attending these institutes were two limited. He also
urged efforts to raise standards in teacher education programmes. The president
stated that:
“… the key to educational
quality is the teaching profession. About one out of every five of the nearly
1,600,000 teachers in our elementary and secondary schools fail to meet full
certification standards for teaching or has not completed for years of college
work. Our immediate concern should be to afford them every possible opportunity
to improve their professional skills and their command of the subjects they
teach”.
On January 23, 1963, Kennedy
expressed his commitment to aid higher education when he said:
“Now a veritable tidal
wave of students is advancing inexorably on our institutions of higher
education, where the annual costs per student are several times as high as the
cost of a high school education, and where these costs must be borne in large
part by the student or his parents. Five years ago the graduating class of the
secondary schools was 1.5 million; five years from now it will be 2.5 million.
The future of these young people and nation rests in large part of their access
to college and graduate education. For this country Founding Fathers called “an
aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity”.
The phrase “a democracy of
opportunity” demonstrated Kennedy’s determination to provide greater access to
higher education for more students. His use of the term “an aristocracy of
intellect” reflected his resolution that, although enrollments were increasing,
American higher education would maintain its standards of excellence. Under the
auspices of the Kennedy administration, the Higher Education Facilities Act of
1963 was passed. In focusing attention on the need for expanded facilities,
President Kennedy stated:
“The long-predicted crisis
in higher education facilities is now at hand. For the next fifteen years, even
without additional student aid, enrollment increases in colleges will average
340,000 each year. If we are to accommodate the projected enrollment of more
than 7 million college students by 1970 – a doubling during the decade – $23
billion of new facilities will be needed, more than three times the quantity
built during the preceding decade. This means that unless we are to deny higher
education opportunities to our youth, American colleges and universities must
expand their academic facilities at a rate much faster than their present
resources will permit”.
The Higher Education
Facilities Act of 1963 provided grants to colleges and universities to
construct buildings, laboratories, libraries and other facilities. The act made
private and church-related as well as public institutions eligible for federal
aid. However, facilities constructed in church related institutions were
limited to those being used for instruction or research in the natural or
physical sciences, mathematics, modern foreign languages, engineering, library
use, or other secular areas.
The Higher Education Act
of 1962, enacted during the Johnson administration, provided federal funding
for community service and continuing education programmes, college libraries
and library training and research, developing institutions, and student
assistance. It offered grants to qualified high school graduates the
exceptional financial need who could not afford to attend a college or university.
After his landslide
victory over Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate, in the election
of 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who wanted to be known
as the “education president” moved to get general federal aid to education
legislation enacted by Congress since 1945 efforts at general federal aid to
education had failed in Congress.
Johnson was successful in
getting congress to enact the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
(ESEA), an aid bill that provided more than $1 billion in federal funds to
assist schools. Although still categorical, ESEA was broad in scope. As part of
Johnson’s War on poverty, the major thrust of the ESEA sought to equalize
educational opportunities, especially in inner-city and rural poverty areas.
The federal government
needs to comprehensively understand that standard education is what has made
the United States the world’s most political and industrial world power and has
given it the reputation it has today. When Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, the U.S. did
rigorous reforms in its educational system which made it to have the first and
second men (Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin) to land on the moon, on July 20,
1969, including other inventions.
By Terfa Naswem