The ICPC/NUC report and sexual harassment in Nigerian universities (2)
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By Rotimi FasanSEXUAL offence is therefore a fact of human life, perhaps more so now than in the past. In the particular instance of tertiary institutions, ‘sexual harassment’ is by no means the most serious of the problems confronting them. And this for reasons that there are regulations/laws within the university system, apart from the wider laws of society that can take care of this as that there are more pernicious factors that defeat the purpose for the existence of tertiary institutions than the advertised case of sexual harassment.
The primary purpose of universities is search for and dissemination of knowledge even of the kind that institutions that proclaim their purpose as the preservation of the moral wellbeing of human beings would consider ‘immoral’. This is not saying that knowledge should be devoid of morality but to every sector its business and the kind of issue the ICPC chair and the Punch editorial seem to be addressing is not the core business of universities.
In searching for a panacea for the downturn in the fortunes of our universities you would not find it without addressing the core issues of right personnel and infrastructure even if everybody in the universities swear to the vow of celibacy.
Sex is everywhere including, as we increasingly see, in assumedly religious/sacred places. And it should be combated in our universities as it should else where. Elevating sex and presenting it as the central issue confronting our universities where the physical rot that is debilitating to any mental/intellectual activity proclaims itself to the high heavens is a non sequitur.
The problem with our universities then cannot be sex but issues that impede the effective operations of universities as they are known everywhere else. What should be done is to provide the right facilities that will make it possible for the best people, both students and their teachers and other personnel within the system- conditions should be created that allows for optimal production and dissemination of knowledge that the larger society can by the rules/laws it has set for itself use in the manner it approves.
Generally, universities forbid sale of ‘hand-outs’ or unapproved books, for example, even though some lecturers still sell them at the risk of their jobs. But if lecturers and students can find the best and most current literature in the field in the library if not bookshops, say, what justification would a so-called lecturer have to compel students to buy pot boilers hurriedly put together from a cocktail of internet sources ranging from Wikipedia to comments picked off facebook?
Create the atmosphere for scholarship by providing the best infrastructure and allowing the best staff and students to come in and then the conversation can commence about Nigerian universities meeting world standard or be damned for devoting their time to sex escapades.
The so-called sexual rot in universities is surely being blown out of proportion especially if it now ranks in the view of some as the number one problem confronting universities. It is certainly not as pervasive or blatant as is being made out and the Pharisaic attitude that is now being adopted in its deserved condemnation would achieve little if anything at all.
Condemnable as it is the situation is far more complex for any armchair prescription and being a carryover problem from the larger society, a sign of the failure in homes, it is a no brainer to say it begins well before students take their matriculation oath.
To expect any change in four undergraduate years is sheer nonsense. Nor is it profitable to pretend it was caused by a few hormonally berserk mental patients misnamed lecturers and who, bored to distraction in their intellectually and physically impoverishing spaces called tertiary institutions, turn to sex. But combating it demands no more than ensuring the best human and material resources are in place and that students actually interested in university education not just those rich enough to pay for placements are allowed in.
The ICPC/NUC report and the editorial from it create the impression that our universities are now glorified brothels crawling with mental patients with high libidinal drives but who nevertheless impose their sexual will on hapless students. Not so simple- harassment is a two way traffic whose initiation can come from a lecturer to a student or the other way round.
Many students are far more worldly-wise than their parents care to know (although some parents only pretend) and since the university operates on the assumption that a student is at least a young adult at admission (in Nigeria a student must at least be 16 by October 1st of the admission year), they are able to freely exhibit those traits they had successfully hidden from their parents while still at home where those parents are not complicit in fostering the traits.
They leave their pre-university institutions hardly literate but their parents are determined to give them university education by any and all means and proceed to buy secondary and later university placements for them having registered them in ‘special centres’.
It is far easier to manipulate or ‘harass’ an academically deficient student where such students are not themselves ‘harassing’ their lecturers for good grades than it is one who made it to university by personal effort however mediocre. Is the phenomenon of ‘virginity’ test, an illegal and invasive act, that some school heads impose on their students not based on the observed rot at these lower educational levels by these self-appointed moral police?
There is no denying the bullying antics of some lecturers who can go to great extent to ‘harass’ students. But then bullies are everywhere and are best handled by direct confrontation. Where this fails there are existing measures in universities that make it difficult, sometimes very much so, for a lecturer to take advantage of a student or favour one who is weak but is ‘close’ to the lecturer in the manner popular imagination has it.
Otherwise, the universities would have fallen beneath the standards of a brothel which is what the ICPC chair seems to be saying. The point to know however is that there are other lecturers, male and female, and indeed non-teaching members of staff watching and ready to join issues with colleagues perceived as corrupt in this manner. Female lecturers are especially keen to take up such matters where female students are involved.
The impression lent credence by the ICPC report and the Punch editorial that lecturers are sexually-inflamed brutes imposing their foul breath on unwilling students is to no little degree simply that- mere impression. Things are far more complicated, the power relations far less one-sided, certainly more horizontal than it is vertical than the ICPC narrative impresses.
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