Everything is for sale. Everything has a prospective buyer. But, nothing sells just on its own merits alone. Everything needs a promoter of some sort, because we are in a world of intense competition, where there are limitless alternatives. The marketplace of the academia is not an exception. The options are too many: from several alternatives in the humanities, in liberal arts and the social and business sciences, to myriads of opportunities in functional sciences, such as medicine, robotics, telecommunication, genetic engineering, and applied technologies in food production, Nano sciences, space explorations, and lots more. So, specialists in the disciplines have come to the realisation that they must learn how to and really deploy the arts of sales promotion, or face the consequences of not promoting their trade in a competitive world. The same understanding motivates tertiary institutions to now set aside huge budgets for marketing and promotional outreaches around the world, especially in developing nations, where they canvass fresh prospective ‘consumers’ for their newly designed set of courses.
Sometime in March 2015, a friend of mine posted a picture of himself in which he posed before a table that is well-furnished with assorted promotional items – handbills, posters, visitors’ registers, etc – on his Facebook wall. He earns a living researching, teaching, and writing history – African History – at Western Carolina University, having left the shores of Nigeria almost a decade ago to study for a Masters and PhD at University of Texas in Austin, USA. He is also the author of at least three books of history, dozens of journal articles, chapters in books, and encyclopaedia entries, as well as beneficiary of several academic fellowships. But wait! He now combines salesmanship with his job!
Or, what might he be doing at a sales promotion stand? What was his aim being the point man there, if not to sell, and what was he selling? He was doing sales promotion to prospective students of his trade. He was selling history! He was trying hard to market history as a discipline and to woo prospective ‘buyers’ – students, parents, etc – to the discipline for the next academic class.
He has had to go through the hassles of doing sales promotion in the spirit of the competitiveness and openness of the academic marketplace in which he finds himself, where no one just buys into any course that will add no value to their immediate intellectual needs or future career goals. He may have accomplished some of his own academic and professional goals, but what happens should someone ask what is in history and why he or she should spend useful years and hard-earned college savings to study? He should be able to provide an answer, and not just any answer, but a satisfactory one at that. If he fails here, he may have no one to teach in the coming semester, and his services may no longer be required by his employer. In other words, he must justify his earnings beyond merely teaching.
There is a lesson in this approach to scholarly salesmanship for the Nigerian academic system that must not be overlooked. There are at least over a million candidates seeking placements in various academic programmes in higher institutions of learning in Nigeria through the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) every year. Less than 25 percent of these applicants have the opportunity to be admitted into one of the over 500 accredited courses in tertiary institutions in the country, with even less being admitted for their desired courses of study. In desperation some of these remnants have to beg or bribe their ways into being offered admission to study just anything, with little regard for what the decision might entail for their future. Yet some departments in our institutions of higher learning are struggling to attract annual intakes of over 50, where some are turning down applicants. The difference is usually in the degree of awareness that is available at the disposal of prospective candidates about what is on offer and what they can make out of each of the courses.
Let’s even up. The situation is not because those courses to which many applicants are attracted are giving any extraordinary publicity, or because their handlers market prospective applicants. Rather, it is ostensibly because, in most cases, they have had to lower their admission criteria to woo more candidates, or more regrettably, perhaps, because applicants simply opt for these courses out of cheer ignorance – with the exception of those that are traditionally considered to be ‘lucrative’ or ‘prestigious’ courses.
Similarly, those departments that do not attract students are not so unlucky because they necessarily stick to some standards that prospective applicants find difficult to merit. Most of the times, it is because prospective students find these disciplines unattractive because they have little or no information about what they entail and what they stand to gain in terms of career prospects, if they subscribe to them. Their handlers are not making any serious efforts to market what they have on offer to parents and prospective applicants. In the two scenarios, departmental faculties just sit back with false certainty that there is a ready ‘market’ for their products and services. They await their pay cheque at the end of the month, not doing much to deserve it.
For example, a candidate who had initially wanted to study, say, Medicine, ends up being admitted for Linguistics; not necessarily because he or she is convinced of the correctness of the decision, nor because he is wooed over in a deliberate orientation session conducted by experts in the discipline under a competitive atmosphere. Rather, in most cases, the substitution takes place because of the helpless circumstances the poor candidate has found himself or herself. By this analogy, I do not imply that Linguistics is less valuable. It all depends on what the individuals want for their lives. What I am saying is that the unsuspecting candidates are the victims of a system that has no regard for competitiveness, fair play, and openness, because of the dearth of a culture of healthy competition that is backed by informed choices.
Philip Ojetola
