ACTING President Yemi Osinbajo has charged university lecturers to improve on their teaching quality, with a view to adequately impacting on students, to enable them compete favourably with their peers globally.
He maintained that there was a critical need for teachers to be in tune with growing dynamics of knowledge and explore the results of researches in the academic training of undergraduates in institutions of higher learning.
Osinbajo made the comments at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, during a Summer Institute convened by a professor of African and African-American Studies at the Harvard University, United States, Professor Jacob Kehinde Olupona, to stimulate researches and intellectual discourse that would solve the contemporary challenges the nation faces.
While commending Olupona’s establishment of an Institute for Advanced Studies in OAU, Osinbajo, who was represented by his economic adviser, Dr. Adeyemi Dipeolu, said the institute would assist in solving challenges confronting lecturers and also help them contribute to global research and international discourse.
“The establishment of the Institute of Advanced Studies in OAU is a laudable one, and this will contribute to global research and international discourse. I want to urge stakeholders in the nation’s education sector to contribute to our collective efforts of bringing Nigeria’s tertiary institutions back to their pride of place,” he said.
Speaking during the programme, Professor Olupona disclosed that the programme was designed to help scholars and lecturers alike to imbibe in the right work ethics that would propel robust relationships with their students and management of their institutions.
He explained that the institute would train young scholars in the academia and would have the opportunity of interacting with senior scholars from all over the globe that would mentor and expose them to the dignity of education in Nigeria.
Olupona said, “This institute will be of global and international standard. It entails bringing together young fellows; those who are about to finish their doctorate (pre-doctoral fellows) and those who have finished their doctorate (post-doctoral fellows), and they will be trained and assured by a group of national and international scholars.”