The University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Umuagwo, Ohaji, has held its first Anniversary Lecture. The event which took place last Friday at the Entrepreneurship Centre of the University was preceded by a Thanksgiving Church Service at the Catholic Chaplaincy in the University. According to the Vice Chancellor of the University, Prof Patrick Ekezie Egbule, the thanksgiving mass preceding the public lecture was a way of putting God first in the affairs of the university, adding that the Anniversary Lecture fundamentally commemorates the founding of the specialized university and the need to sustain the core tradition of the university system.

The public lecture has the timely theme: “Many Universities, Few Universities, No Universities: Is Nigeria suffering from the Endangering of the Ideas and Culture f the University?”In an address of welcome at the well-attended event, the Vice Chancellor profusely expressed gratitude to the governor, Sen Hope Uzodinma, for all his support which has made the university a reality.

He recalled that the university was established by an act of parliament and licensed as the 9th State University and 171st in the federation in 2019, with an NUC-approved curriculum of 29 degree programmes run under five faculties of Agriculture, Environmental Sciences, Science and Computing, Engineering, and Arts, Social and Management Sciences. The university boss also announced that he had a seven-point agenda that has ensured a seamless take-off of the university and its repositioning as a top destination for university education anchored on knowledge, innovation and excellence.

Meanwhile, Prof Egbule has challenged philanthropists and corporate organizations to support the young university by ways of establishing endowments, laboratories, ICT facilities and other relevant infrastructure as no university thrives with only government funding, just as he describes university education as “the jewel in the crown of our state.”The guest lecturer did justice to the topic of the Anniversary Lecture, presenting a 25-page discourse that brilliantly expands the theme of the lecture while answering germane issues raised in it.

Essentially, the guest speaker, Prof Chinedum Nwajiuba, a former Vice Chancellor of Alex Ekwueme University, Ndufu-Alike and currently a visiting scholar at the National Universities Commission spoke on the theme: “Many Universities, Few Universities: Is Nigeria Suffering from the Endangering of the ideas and Culture of the University?”, a topic generally acknowledged as a current and topical conversation whose time was ripe for interrogation.

In the preamble, meanwhile, Prof Nwajiuba articulated the challenges of pioneering a university while commending the Vice Chancellor, Prof Egbule, for the enormous work so far done in the young university. deploying the instrument of parallelism, Prof Nwajiuba stated inter alia: “Pioneering is not an easy responsibility. Pioneering is challenging. Pioneering a university may be even more demanding, compared to other areas of human endeavour considering its uniqueness. I therefore recognize and appreciate the enormity of work you must have put in here in the last year. It certainly would not have been easy.”

The guest speaker went ahead to trace the historiology of the modern university system which he acknowledged was not an African creation. He identified the University of Bologna, Italy, established in 1088 as the first university in the world, just as he acknowledged that the origin of the Nigerian university system is traceable to the practice in the United Kingdom whose oldest university was established in 1096 AD in Oxford, closely followed by the University of Cambridge in 1209 AD. It was this system according to the guest lecturer that essentially produced the University College Ibadan in 1948 “as an appendage of the University of London, awarding degrees of the University of London, until 1962 when the University of Ibadan emerged as an autonomous degree awarding University.”

He however decried the idea of “asoebi” universities in Nigeria which practically embody a uniformed motto, and lacking in innovative ideology. In this regard he singled out the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) as being unique in its motto of “To restore the dignity of man” which is symbolically different from others that basically profess the quartet of “Excellence, Integrity, Knowledge, Service”.

The university don also condemned the wave of ethnic consciousness in Nigerian university system, describing as injurious to the system citing the recent case at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, where locals protested that the new Vice Chancellor should have been chosen from the town of Ife, warning that universities must strive to avoid local professors who are essentially non-existent in global visibility and ranking. Fundamentally, the don condemned what he termed as incest in scholarship, where scholars fail to seek knowledge beyond a particular university.

According to him “When you have a university system in which someone born in the university campus, attends primary and secondary schools in the same campus, takes first, second and third degrees from the same campus, commences a career in the same campus, rising from GA to AL, LII, LI, SL, Reader/Associate Professor and full Professor in the same university. That cannot be healthy. It is, simply, incest […]”

Essentially, therefore, Prof Nwajiuba aligns his thoughts of an archetypal university with what is envisioned in the National Policy on Education of 2014 which “requires that the university system engage with producing high quality and high-level manpower to drive national development, with entrepreneurial skills.”

An understanding of this phenomenon according to the don implies that the “idea of the university is principally that of gathering of teachers and learners primarily engaged in the business of seeking and extending knowledge.” In his thinking, this scenario would likely produce “an assemblage of thinkers and philosophers capable of thinking and not imagining that they are thinking, capable of philosophizing, extending the frontiers of knowledge which by implication, means that researches that qualify to be so described as researches, are engaged with the serious matter of the search for knowledge, and the extension of knowledge, and that humanity is served.” In the end the university is able to achieve its tripartite role of teaching, research and community service.

The Anniversary Lecture was chaired by a former Vice Chancellor of Imo State University, Prof. Ukachukwu Awuzie, who commended the guest speaker for refocusing the consciousness of staff and students of the University of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences on the core tenets of teaching and learning in the university system. He gave kudos to the Vice Chancellor of the university for choosing the topic which besides its timeliness is essentially anchored on interrogating the extent to which the Nigerian universities have upheld the ethics of the university education system and praxis. Many higher institutions within and outside Imo State sent goodwill messages to the epoch-making event.