The views of professors are very much valued. Professors are also well-regarded professionals in a number of fields, without a doubt. T his is so because the designation is customarily given after years of thorough academic work inside the confines of a tertiary educational community.
Good professors are astute debaters. They read a lot and know where the phrase, ‘Merry Christmas’ came from. They readily recall all the British classics they read and how they latched onto George Orwell’s works. Old professors around me remember the days when to be awarded a professorial chair you must have had works published in countless first-rated international journals.
Many eggheads celebrated wildly, after seeing their names in renowned journals again and again. In those days these publications, however laudable, didn’t give you an automatic professorial chair because professorial chairs were few. You waited earnestly for that opening. Not anymore, the embarrassing news from NUC that there are fake professors in Nigeria is disconcerting; small wonder too many people sit on a professorial chair even those who make students do their research work by giving impossible assignments which they couldn’t handle themselves because of the business interests outside academic work that they have to look after.
I wonder why the administrators where these fake professors work kept quiet until the embarrassing news came home to roost. Many of these fake professors are to blame for helping to make students what they are today. It is thanks to them that students give school management ultimatum and management sometimes ‘beg’ students not to go on with planned strike actions. People in their teens consort with elders, not only with ease, but they are given the chance to see the dotage as peers.
Most students don’t know why universities are there in the first place. What appeals to them is to get a degree as a gateway to success and not as a path to knowledge, the solving of society’s problem and the promotion of the common good. These fake professors have set the precedent for them to follow.
A university education, however important, is only for those who have the openness of character to learn, professors inclusive, they need not undercut the process for the award of academic titles. The university is unique because great minds go there to specialize and offer solutions to problems outside its wall.
University authorities must also not only live right with dignity but must be role models to students and teach young ones the philosophical/ideological basis for which universities were established, with the view that the conscience of our youths will be pricked and their minds transformed; they must redesign the educational paradigm. There is something called reward and another punishment. And a mantra called, “cause, effect and consequences”
The absence of punishment to presence of freedom and openness have destroyed the structure of universities, But if families need authority, if there is authority in heaven, why isn’t there order in schools but chaos?
Simon Abah,
Abuja
and then