By Adagbo Onoja
This piece has two provocations. The main provocation is the Daily Trust headline ‘British Council, NUC Partner On Development Of Varsity Curriculum.’ It was the headline that reminded me of the Web piece someone had insisted I must read. It turned out to be a Facebook stuff by the US based Nigerian academic, Prof. Moses Ochonu. I had opened and saved but didn’t go far in reading Ochonu’s piece. The NUC – British Council partnership story took me back to it because the Ochonu piece had as its jump-off point the American and the British higher education systems in relation to Nigeria. At the end of the day, I was no longer sure which of the NUC story and Ochonu’s piece was more annoying. I am lumping the two here in this attack, hoping there will still be coherence by the time I am done.
Prof Moses Ochonu
The highlight of Ochonu’s piece is the notion of the American higher education system being more about understanding while the British is concerned with regurgitation. This may be a crude representation of him but an adequate one at that if one takes into consideration the sentence where he credited the American (university) system with being more progressive, innovative, flexible, dynamic and receptive to new approaches and applications, while British higher education is less so. And the question that one battled after reading the stuff remains how Ochonu could say that. I had thought the only acceptable statement in terms of the relationship between the two is that they are different because it will be difficult to find the grounds to substantiate a superior/inferior ranking of the two systems. I could thus only come to the tentative answer that Ochonu could say so simply because he was writing a Facebook stuff and he was, echoing someone else’s position. Otherwise, it is doubtful if Ochonu would stand on that position in a serious essay or piece of work to his name. He wouldn’t because the reverse of his position would appear to be the case.
Let’s start by accepting that the American system has a mystique about it. Several of the landmarks in the case of the social sciences, for example, found the United States the fertile intellectual site to take root. Deconstruction is a landmark development in the social sciences. It was not only first elaborated upon on American intellectual soil, it grew very strongly there too. Richard Ashley who wrecked Kenneth Waltz’s Structural Realism in International Relations was a US based academic. Nearly all the pioneers of critical geopolitics are either based in the US or were all products of the American higher education which I use interchangeably with university system here. When we move from deconstruction, we still find that (Conventional) Constructivism also came out of the US soil to the extent that Wendt gave it the canonical push before the subsequent critique that followed. Before Wendt, Kenneth Waltz rescued International Relations from Morgenthau and his psychodynamic proclivities by publishing his Theory of International Relations which held sway from 1979 till Ashley came around in 1984. And Alexander Wendt is on the rise again by leading the scholarship on Quantum International Relations. His fellow traveller, Prof James Der Derian, the Chair of International Security at the University of Sydney, grew his scholarly teeth in the United States although he did not train there. He trained in McGill before his intellectual godfathers thought he must taste Oxford. And before we forget, the Perestroika revolt for pluralism in methodology was an American intervention. Even the current consensus about what constitutes science vis-a-vis methodology was led by an American philosopher of the social sciences, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. His 2011 book on the Philosophy of Science in International Relations is still standing high. There is thus an American footprint if one takes the social sciences and it may be safe to generalise from there and give the American university system an edge over its British or any other counterparts.
The problem with the temptation to do so is that doing so would be an act of organised forgetting of two works that have become timeless. The first would be Stanley Hoffman’s 1977 essay – An American Social Science: International Relations. Luckily, this is an open access work and we do not have to belabor the point beyond that its contention is hanging out in the title. In Europe, Professor Steve Smith, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Exeter and one of the editors of The Globalisation of World Politics as well as Prof Ole Waever, the University of Copenhagen theorist of securitization have taken Hoffman’s essay to greater heights. The point about why Hoffman’s essay is crucial on this theme is that he reminds us of the defining features of the discipline as a made-in – America product and he does so in a very radical manner. That is, it is not anything to search far why International Relations is entangled in inwardness; exclusionary of alternative explanatory models and techniques and largely a defender of the logic of Empire. In what way(s) could such a knowledge system be superior to any other?
The unsteady regulator
Europe is, of course, hooked to the logic and practice of Empire but just as it is also locked into the logic of continental philosophy. And it has the broadmindedness and courage to watch continental philosophy devastate the logic of Empire, even if we take just what Jacques Derrida has done. Jacques Derrida, like Marx, is not without criticism but he lessened Europe’s complicity in Empire by wrecking Western metaphysics. Lastly, is it possible for a university system largely based on analytical philosophy to be superior to one based on continental philosophy? And was it not American social science Robert Cox had in mind when he took on ‘problem solving’ theory in his 1981 essay which is still the starting point in contemporary critical theory? Cox’s “Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond IRs Theory” is the second text it would be organised forgetting not to reckon with.
I would therefore stick to the position that it is only possible to say that the American and the British higher education systems are simply two different systems and would never go as far as suggesting that one is superior or inferior to another. Each has made seminal contributions. This is what the global university ranking outcomes speaks to in never having any permanent or fixed number one. Yes, American universities predominate but not in all of them. It is possible that Ochonu could afford to be casual because he is in the American system and has more details about how it operates? In that case, he should bring out those details and let’s match them unto other details that are also available.
The more puzzling dimension of Ochonu’s piece is how Nigeria came in to his argument. Nigeria does not subscribe to analytical philosophy, continental philosophy or any philosophical system in terms of the underlining metatheory that drives the university system. So, Ochonu was comparing a mango fruit to an apple in even mentioning the Nigerian university system in his piece. The Nigerian university system used to rest on continental philosophy but its Empire version. By the time the French 7 but also Heidegger and Husserl before them started rupturing Western metaphysics, the Nigerian university system was already staggering, dazed by authoritarian blows between 1983 and 1993. So, the system is currently stuck with the version of Western metaphysics signified by Weber, Hegel and Marx, especially Marx who is though not fundamentally different from Hegel. One is an idealist while the other is a materialist but they both have a meeting point in Western metaphysics and therefore complicity in the horrors of the 20th century – colonialism, the world wars, imperialism and Auschwitz. Most Nigerian academics will be outraged by this sort of claim, especially the Marxists and their hook-up with classical Marxism. They mistake the ideological greatness of Marxism outside its epistemological roots.
Ochonu is absolutely right that most of the disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in Nigeria are simply incapable of venturing into a range of new themes. Being stuck in Enlightenment epistemology substantially accounts for that because of the limiting radius of dialectical teleology. And that is the trouble when the NUC which should worry about these issues is obviously lost itself. And there may be no better proof of a regulator which has lost its way than its partnership with the British Council on curriculum development. The British Council is no doubt a fascinating outfit for spreading cultural hegemony but it is debatable if it is the partner to seek for a country in Nigeria’s scale of troubles with its university system. The type of people the NUC consults in search of solutions to the problems of the system – academic experts, government (represented by NUC), professional bodies, and the private sector represented by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) – do not see the problems beyond employability skills and hence its overdrive in entrepreneurship, critical thinking, innovation, venture creation and stuff like that. They got it wrong or upside down because it is unthinkable that a sound graduate of Philosophy, Literature, Anthropology, History, Linguistics, Political Science and so on will not also be good in any and all of these areas. There is no way any undergraduate who passed research methodology in the third year will not stand out in innovation or entrepreneurship or whatever.
The Nigerian educational system is very sick but it is sickness which can easily be cured because the ailment is neither cancer nor any of the terminal infections. The problem is that the wrong doctors are put in charge. I do not canvass for anybody to be sacked from NUC. No. But it must learn to work with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). That is not because ASUU is right in everything it has done but because ASUU has a more honest and openminded disposition to solving the problems. ASUU also has the advantage of concrete proposals. As long as the NUC keeps demonstrating that it doesn’t know where the problems are coming from, there will be no let in the call for its disbandment. The evidence before everyone from the insecurity crisis today has shown that quality education has no alternative. Instead of spending billions buying arms to fight bandits, terrorists and sundry rebels, why not spend the billions on qualitative, liberatory education?
Prof Ochonu deserves to be convicted for attempted misleading of his readers through inappropriate comparison. All other things considered, his punishment is reduced to six months of unpaid hard, academic labour in a Nigerian university. But the Nigerian Correctional Services is instructed not to send him to UI or any of the first or even second-generation universities. Instead, he should be sent to one of the universities established by either Goodluck Jonathan or Muhammadu Buhari. After six months of being the only proper PhD holder there, he will be more knowledgeable about where exactly the Nigerian university system is.
