Some academic staff in our tertiary institutions maintain their relevance through questionable patronages that they compel from desperate academic shoppers, who are left with little or no choice than to succumb to their whims. The situation is prominent with regard to stale students who are meant to select new elective courses especially across disciplinary boundaries, say, at the beginning of the academic session or semester. The tendency among this set of students is to go for what they consider the least tasking courses, whose attractions are simply in the cheap scores their handlers are willing to dole out as a means to woo subscriptions, and not necessarily because the handlers have provided the prospective students with accurate and informed orientations about the relevance of the courses to their immediate academic requirements and overall career goals. By pandering to the expectations of their regular customers – students seeking cheap scores – this way they fake continued relevance within the overall academic agenda of the institution. These categories of lecturers are able to keep their jobs for as long as they want, inasmuch as they keep their customers coming year in year out. I do not know whether they are worse than their counterparts who maintain a ‘siddon look’ stance, and would not package and peddle their trade, of course legitimately, in order to make them attractive to prospective students, just because they see no need for the trouble of doing so.
I am told that most of our university lecturers that go on sabbatical in universities abroad, especially in Europe and America, must have a need they want to fill before they are allowed in as faculty members in those institutions. In fact, upon arrival, they have to canvass prospective students to subscribe to their courses, without which their services may not be needed. Why can’t they do the same here? Is it because the system does not hold them adequately accountable for how many prospects they have made that are willing to take the courses that they teach? That is why a whole department with ten lecturers can afford to fold up for want of students, or, alternatively, keep running on very high cost with very minimal students to teach. This is out of tune with the reality of the competitive world in which we now live. There are many of them on our campuses that are at the verge of collapse, even when there is no reason why any discipline should die due to lack of patronage.
The idea of developing a Faculty or a Departmental Prospectus could not address the issue adequately. These so-called prospectuses do not say much that could aid prospective subscribers to some courses make intelligent and informed decisions. Sometimes, the prospectuses are just reprinted over several years, without any major reviews; not even curricular reviews, and you could still find the names of some handlers of some courses who have been on retirement three years on listed among active departmental faculties. Some of them do not even have the current O ‘Level subject requirements to guide prospective students for admission into undergraduate programmes, let alone clearly stating the courses that are on offer for the current academic year.
The course advisor system too is not performing any better. The challenge is that course advisors are meant to provide advisory services on all the courses available! How is this possible? Only programme advisor, say for undergraduates, or postgraduates should do so. I think they are meant to provide advice to prospective students on the courses that are on offer for the academic year or semester in the department, and how to combine the courses in order for their programmes to be effective. The course advisor for each course should be the handler of the course for the session or semester. This way he or she would be in the best position to market the course and provide advisory information to subscribers on its usefulness over its equivalents or similar courses in other departments.
In order to avoid this one-size-fits-all approach, our tertiary institutions, especially the universities, should develop the culture of reaching out to prospective students through their faculties. For example, an open day could be slated for the period between the close of a session and the beginning of a new one, at which prospective applicants and their parents or guardians could converge and have the opportunity of meeting representatives of departments ahead of the next UTME. At such event, every department in every faculty should maintain a physical contact point, usually a distinct display stand in an area set aside for the purpose, where experts who are still actively engaged in each of the departments would have the opportunity to provide informed sales propositions and practically market the usefulness of their disciplines to visitors. This should hold separately from and ahead of the usual orientation week that opens every session, which should be meant solely for students that have been offered an admission.
The import of this approach for sustainable market relevance is that, if academic disciplines were to be a marketplace, there will be a niche for every discipline as well as prospective buyers in that niche, provided every discipline has its own unique selling propositions that its practitioners could pitch to their would-be ‘customers’. As such, it should be made clear to prospective lecturers at the point of employment that their services to the university go beyond teaching and researching. They should be able to develop new intellectual ideas and attractions around the courses they will handle and move with global trends in the discipline as well as strive to stay relevant at all times. In addition to academic excellence, there should be drive for sustainability in the marketplace. After all, what is the essence of a PhD in a discipline that one cannot effectively ‘market’ to prospective entrants and sustain their interests in it? Promote your discipline or perish. This may sound like a new agenda for academics. What is your take?
Philip Ojetola
