Renowned educationist and Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE), Rumuolumeni, Port Harcourt, Prof. Alafuro Enos Epelle, says the Nigerian university system is under serial abuse and disability in the hands of majority of its subscribers and authorities.
Epelle who stated this last Wednesday in Port Harcourt while in an interview with The Tide on the state of the nation’s education, noted that in the past, it was senior academics that mentored the younger generation by imparting academic principles and values into them.
He regretted that the business of mentorship had broken down completely in the country’s university system.
The university don decried that so many Nigerian senior academics were no longer ready for the coaching of the younger ones, while on the other hands, the latter see no need for undergoing mentorship.
This, he said, has filled the university with “discrete individuals with multiplicity of wrong orientations”.
He described Nigerian academics as “internet scholars.”
According to him, “they are professors and lecturers who simply log onto the internet to copy works of other scholars and present as their works”.
The professor of Political science stressed that the wrong ideology was unhealthy for the education system in the country, explaining that such lecturers who plagiarise their way to professorship were the bane of research and development in Nigeria.
As he puts it, “in fact, reasonable proportion of thesis that went through some of our postgraduate schools contain massive plagiarised materials just as some of our latter day professors in the nation’s varsities are internet professors”.
Epelle further pleaded with the Nigerian government to increase funding of universities, while urging senior scholars to imbibe the academic culture of mentorship which, he said, was the only recipe for the stated disabilities.
He said that research was one of the things that distinguished the university system from others, pointing out that the quantity, quality and originality of research works in the Nigeria’s university system were nothing to write home about.

Bethel Toby