By Tony Eluemunor

Remarkably, universities around Oghara presented goodwill messages at the Convocation ceremony of Western Delta University, on Saturday, November 10, 2018. May symbiotic relationships develop between neighbouring universities. 

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Mutual relationships are pertinent as Nigerian intellectual hubs are emerging.  Lagos now hosts the UNILAG, LASU, Yaba Tech, a Law School campus, Anchor (owned by Deeper Christian Life Ministry), Christopher, South-Western, Redeemer’s (Mowe), Pan-Atlantic, Caleb, Babcock and Augustine universities. UI, the Dominican University, Emmanuel Alayande College of Education, Federal College of Education, (for people with special needs), Lead City University, The Polytechnic, Saints Peter and Paul Major (Catholic) Seminary, Federal College of Agriculture, and the    Federal College of Animal health and Production Technology are in Ibadan.

Yet, no relationship exists between the tertiary institution in Lagos or Ibadan unlike in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, where 25 universities exist within the city’s 40 square miles. They include Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Suffolk University, Tufts, Brandies, etc. Miss Leigh Anne Miller, who studied at Tufts University, Medford, less than five kilometres from Harvard, testified: “You can intern with/audit classes of Professors at most any institution.

I was an intern for the Belfer Center at Harvard (JFK School of Government) while a student at Tufts, so I routinely had access to classes to help with research and speech writing. Second, Professors can collaborate with anyone anywhere. During my time with my Harvard Professor/mentor, he sustained a long-term collaboration with another friend of ours, a research scholar at MIT.”  Harvard’s or MIT’s libraries were open to her too.

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With three tertiary institutions in Oghara, is the town getting any benefit apart from the high rents and the high demand for goods in the market because of the vast number of students? What about the town-gown relationship?

May we please take a cue from Boston; the most education-intensive city in the most education-intensive region of the world. Two hundred and fifty thousand (yes, a quarter of a million) full-and part-time students attend the Greater Boston area’s 65 institutions of higher learning—the highest concentration of students and teachers globally.

Around Boston, education is the second largest employer of labour after HIGH TECHNOLOGY. So, education has shaped the region as the graduates of the tertiary institutions break new technological grounds and sustain top-class consultancies in energy, military, monetary and other sectors. Recently, another hub of new innovations—in telephony/computer research and development—has formed far from Harvard and MIT, in San Francisco Bay area, California, USA.

And its core is Stanford University, where “teaching and research is dedicated to finding solutions to big challenges and preparing students for entrepreneurship” as the school proclaims.  It was not always so: after World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported the lecturers and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

Stanford differs from MIT even in its research. MIT incepted in 1861, in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States; adopting a European polytechnic/university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and (heavy) engineering. So Nigerian universities and polytechnics should not be the same in every material particular. Universities of Technology must know why they exist.

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Now, is the gown-town relationship developing in Oghara? A WDU student government leader, Mr. Collins Awikpe, said that months ago, the students cleaned up Oghara, throwing away the refuse but harvested plastic containers to be studied and re-cycled by the Environment Management and Toxicology Department.

This department, in conjunction with the Institute of Delta Studies (the first of its kind in Nigeria) should lead the way in cleaning up Niger Delta region’s polluted environment. If universities lead the way in plastic products re-cycling, sachet water and plastic bottles/drinking straws that deface Nigeria would become useful.

Government may then introduce a recycling policy. For instance, 10 kobo could be added to the cost of every bottled water, beer and mineral drinks…to be earned by whoever redeems a bottle. With time, a new industry would spring up.

Oghara inhabitants would have noted that WDU’s kind gesture. One Saturday morning, across the Atlantic, Northeastern University in Boston gave away 4,000 flowering plants at an annual neighbourhood beautification drive. The school’s former President (for eleven years), Kenneth Ryder, called it: ‘’a symbolic gesture” that says “let’s work together to improve our environment.”

For centuries, the town-gown relationship was of conflict instead of an interdependency. But that began to change since the 1970s.

Even in Nigeria, there was a town-gown marriage that was not noticed. The Academic Staff Union of Universities President in I986, the late Dr. Festus Iyayi, told me that he was bringing ASSU to pair up with Nigerian Labour Congress to save Nigeria from the military. He explained: “We have the brain, NLC has the brawn; together we would be irresistible.” Gen. Babangida fought back, sacking the Ali Chiroma-led NLC leadership in 1988 and crowned Pascal Bafua as labour leader.

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Some universities were service-oriented and were founded just to help uplift an immediate community. Boston YMCA founded Northeastern University in 1898 as a night law school for young workers hoping to improve themselves. Now, NU is uplifting people; it provides three first-year scholarships to each of Boston’s public secondary schools, and 100 full scholarships to residents of poor Boston neighourhoods, it holds a summer ‘’academy’’ for underachieving junior high school students. ‘’It’s a subtle way of introducing these kids to college as something not beyond reality,’’ said Kenneth Ryder, a former NU President.

Is any university in Lagos doing anything to uplift kids from slums such as Ajegunle or Bariga? Has UNN fashioned planned to make the neighbourhood schools lead to its campus? Has the University of Maiduguri designed a way to attract the sort of people Boko Haram use as foot soldiers?

Has the universities in Edo state made a concrete statement to young girls that their campuses hold the map to a life better than what prostitution in Europe could ever offer? Prof. Okobiah, Western Delta’s V.C, said WDU has deliberately kept school fees about the lowest in the country to make education affordable to the masses.

Nigerian universities must aim at social intervention or they might face what once befell Oxford. In 1209, the people of Oxford sacked the university and even hanged two clerks. The scholars dispersed and for five years learning stopped.

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Some of the students and lecturers fled as refugees to the village of Cambridge, 82 miles away, and another university was born; England’s second!!! But not all thrashed schools are that lucky. The Nigerian society is suffocating. The universities must either find the answers to societal problems or perish with the society they failed to save.