Getting Our Universities Back On Track: Reflections and Governance Paradigms From My Vice-Chancellorship by N. Oluwafemi Mimiko (review)

Written by a former vice-chancellor of Adekunle Ajasin University, a public institution at Akungba-Akoko in Ongo State, Nigeria, this volume meets the expectation created by its subtitle—of a dual focus on personal reflections and a governance-focused account of university administration. As a professional memoir, it sometimes has the character of a tell-all, a genre more commonly associated with celebrities and politicians than academic administrators. In its focus on administrative reforms and institutional processes aimed at addressing pressing issues faced by a young, government-operated university, it reads as a manual of best practices in academic governance. A third mode of reading that presents itself is as an ethnographic account of the inner workings of a specific university administration, situated within its particular historical, political, and economic contexts.

Part A outlines the salient historical context of higher education in Nigeria, starting from the colonial legacies that structured the country's university system and continuing through various political and policy reversals, including the takeover of regional universities by the military government (later reversed), the abolition of subsidized student dining facilities, and the institution of national placement examinations, followed again by greater university autonomy in admitting students. Mimiko brings the reader quickly up to the beginning of his tenure as vice-chancellor (equivalent to university president in the US system), starting in 2010.

The state of affairs at the university between 2010 and 2015, while the author was serving as vice-chancellor, is the focus of part C and makes up the bulk of the book. During this period, the university faced notable challenges, particularly that of instability in functioning, a lack of professional development opportunities for staff (and concomitant low research output), and insufficiency of physical university structures to accommodate and teach students effectively. Other Nigerian universities faced many of the same challenges, considering that the country as a whole had, as of 2015, 147 universities for a population of 170 million, that enrollment since independence had increased from 23,000 to more than 230,000 (with the latter number representing only 20 percent of qualified applicants), and that only 43 percent of instructional staff held a doctoral degree. Despite frankly acknowledging these besetting issues, Mimiko rejects the discourse of "a falling standard of education in Nigeria," claiming that the country's universities continue to produce excellent, award-winning graduates, that requirements for entry into teaching and academic positions have risen, and that university curricula remain robust.

One of the clearest lessons to emerge from Mimiko's account is that even in resource-constrained conditions, it is important to put funds behind professed priorities for new policies to be successful. Two of the best examples of this are a work-study scheme, which allows students needing financial assistance to be hired (and remunerated) for on-campus positions, and a professional development scheme for faculty, which not only mandates conference participation as a criterion for advancement, but makes funds available for staff members to participate in one conference each year. The requirement of conference participation, in turn, is part of a larger endeavor, where teaching staff is encouraged—by a variety of measures that include sticks as well as carrots—to obtain their doctorates, publish scholarly articles, participate in university lecture series, and propose research projects to be undertaken during research leaves.

For a reader not intimately familiar with Nigeria's universities, the numerous descriptions of the author's working relations with specific individuals at various ranks in his administration, including the leaders of the university's unions, are impossible to judge. To the extent that there is, in Mimiko's estimation, "an epic battle between scholars and unionists for the soul of higher education in Nigeria" (p. 293), it is not far-fetched to think that there might well be some score settling at play in the frequent anecdotes about particular individuals—not only in part B...