The Chancellor, Afe Babalola University Ado Ekiti, Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), said on Monday that the indiscriminate establishment of more universities in Nigeria would bring about rapid decline and rot of the country’s educational system.
Babalola stated this in Ado Ekiti at a High Impact Research and Journal Advancement Workshop organised by ABUAD Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy.
The ABUAD founder said such universities’ establishment would result in a decline in the quality of graduates in the country.
He advised that the focus should be on quality with adequate plans for monitoring their standards and not quantity.
Babalola said, “We currently have over 270 universities in Nigeria, and proposals for the approval of another 200 new institutions are currently under consideration by the National Assembly.
“If we are serious about accelerating national development through research, the starting point will be for the National Universities Commission to return to the era of placing quality over quantity.
“What we expect is for the NUC to completely overhaul the university licensing process to ensure the highest standard and to take immediate steps to close those mushroom universities, many of which are illegal and are operating without the permission of NUC,” he said.
The ABUAD founder urged the government and the NUC to take steps about the large number of illegal universities in the country.
He added, “What we need is quality education. Poor education is worse than illiteracy.
“We cannot seriously speak of advancing sustainable development through high-impact research unless we address this menace of the proliferation of substandard universities in our nation.
“Mushroom and substandard universities recruit substandard faculty members, who conduct substandard research that is printed by substandard publishers, resulting in substandard and half-baked graduates that have little or nothing to offer to national development. Most public institutions owe teachers’ salaries. How can such universities acquire the latest equipment for 21st-century education?”
Babalola further lamented the mass approval of mushroom and substandard universities.
He said, “Strict compliance with law and rules has been brushed aside now. As a result of the ‘anything goes’ approach to university licensing and accreditation, NUC’s ability to ensure quality control and to stamp out substandard institutions appears to have been seriously compromised.”
A former Executive Secretary of the NUC, Prof. Peter Okebukola, in his keynote address, listed inadequate funding for research and development, weak research culture, infrastructure deficits, brain drain and low recognition of research outputs as some of the challenges facing High Impact Research Publications.
Okebukola canvassed the provision of training for researchers on modern methodologies, grant writing, and publishing in reputable journals, investing in research infrastructure, including laboratories, data centres, and digital libraries and facilitating partnerships among researchers and institutions to bridge gaps in expertise and resources as strategies to addressing the challenges.
