By Prof. Idowu Olayinka 

Nigeria is becoming a country of anything goes! A gentle invitation to chaos and drop in reputation of the citadel of learning. 

A Vice Chancellor is expected, among other things, to provide academic leadership to his/her institution. The prospective VC candidate should command respect among his/her colleagues by having good publications in peer reviewed outlets and at least be visible on many research Metrics as a surrogate for measuring research impact. Not necessarily  that he/she should be the individual with the highest number of publications, in the university. 

We have been in this business for a sufficiently long enough time to know that it takes hard work,  grit, persistence,  perseverance and patience to write one single research paper. Even if we were born at night, it certainly was not last night. 

It is a truism that you cannot give what you do not have. Your peers and students have little respect for your scholarship if you are an unknown quantity in your field outside the four walls of the university where you are based. 

There lies the contradiction in promoting a featherweight academic who had never served previously with Distinction as either HoD, Dean, Director, nor as Deputy VC, nor with any superior research output, beyond his/her level of competence as VC. 

When your university wants to interact with other topmost universities in Nigeria, the rest of Africa and outside the shores of our continent one of the first things they would do is to search for the academic profile of the leaders of your institution. With the world now a global village, there is no hiding place for any of us in this industry. 

As one distinguished  Minister and former State Governor would say in Nigerian Pidgin,  IF Ih NO DEY Ih NO DEY.

•Olayinka served as the 12th Substantive Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan between 2015 and 2020