FUOYE’s new VC, Ogunwale, outlines key priorities

The newly appointed Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Professor Joshua Ogunwale, has outlined the policy priorities of his administration towards improving on the successes of the university.

The Vice-Chancellor, who spoke with journalists during the 10th Convocation ceremony of FUOYE, said that his priority was to strengthen the base of the university.

He said that the major task ahead for the new leadership of the university was to expand its carrying capacity in order to avoid reaching an inflection point.

“The immediate former Vice Chancellor had grown the university tremendously. The university has experienced vertical growth, and normally, when you plant maize, and it grows so tall, if you don’t take time, a small wind can break it down. So, my own plan is to strengthen the base as we go up.

“The university has grown from 20,000 students when Fasina came in to 60,000 within five years. Now, what that means is that our carrying capacity is just about 20,000 to 25,000 students.

“If we keep growing like that, we can be blown down. So, now, what we need do is to actually do everything to strengthen our carrying capacity. That implies improving on lecture theaters, looking at how we can digitally teach, and reviewing our core delivery system. Those are things we need do to sustain that growth. The university will be technology-driven,” he said.

The FUOYE helmsman further said that he would count on his experience as the immediate past Vice-Chancellor of Bowen University to, not just stabilize FUOYE but make sure that the university does not sail adrift.

“All along, what I do is training whatever team I have. For instance, in the next few months, we will be talking about top management training and chain management training. We will bring people to talk and review. When you tool and retool, the tendency is that you will have more compliance within your team than the other way,” Professor Joshua said.

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The new Vice-Chancellor also emphasized the need for an administrative culture shift and the need to decentralize the system of the university.

According to the Vice-Chancellor: “One of the things we want to do is to change the culture. For FUOYE, there are three things that must be done to move on. The culture that takes you to inflection, you must change it. That is what I was talking about. When you talk about changing the culture, we talk about the mindset of the people – the way they approach and see things, and so on.

“Secondly, you must change your product. Our products are students and graduates. And that is where I was talking about our core delivery system. And then, we must change our business model.

“We have run a faculty-based system, which is a centralized system. Now, we must think about a de-centralized process to make the university more agile. Reason being that if you have 20,000 students, it may be easy for every department or faculty to be waiting for the Vice-Chancellor to come so that he approves everything at once. But when you are growing big and you still want to run a central system, you are going to have problems.

“We must anticipate that we will be growing from 60,000 students now, and if we want to remain an agile university, a responsive university, and also safe cost, then we must decentralize.

“So, our business model must move away from a centralized system to a decentralized one. At this point, we must begin to emphasize high performance, or else we will be having challenges in our hands.”

The Vice-Chancellor said further that the FUOYE under his watch would be technology-driven and continue to lead in research and investments.

“FUOYE is fourth most subscribed university in Nigeria. We want to improve on that. The opportunity for us is one, making most of our admission-based processes to be digital. This means that you don’t need to come to FUOYE before you can do your screening. We screen you from anywhere you are. When we want to do exams now, for instance, students who for one reason or the other cannot be physically on ground, they should be able to do their exam anywhere in the world and we will invigilate them.

“Another opportunity is that FUOYE is in an agrarian environment. We intend to capitalize strongly on that to boost our Internally Generated Revenue. We are hoping that within the next two years, a FUOYE agro-allied company will start and with FUOYE having the largest shareholding. We intend to do that so that we can concentrate on our core business.