Every Nigerian who has seen the apparent vanity behind the acquisition of Ph.D  among our nascent middle class would no doubt feel a justified revulsion against the  mindless purposelessness of their paper ambition.

Professor Ademola Onifade’s piece titled “Who is afraid of the Ph.D?” published in  The Guardian of January 16, 2008 woke me up from my self-imposed journalistic and  creative silence. The stridency of Onifade’s piece was honed on his messianic message. He  opined that ‘a Ph.D degree should be a requirement for appointment as a full-time, career- oriented university teacher and researcher’. The professor of sports administration and  psychology then delivered his punch line when he said that ‘lecturer is expected as part of  his/her functions to teach research and offer community services’.

For my immediate task in this piece, I will purloin the ‘community services’ and work  on it to prove that the most profound conundrum besetting our professors is not research  and teaching but lack of ‘community services’ in the society where they thrive. The mindless  abdication of this ‘community services’ function in a poor and developing nation like Nigeria  demonstrates their lack of vision, their stupefying acquiescence in the face of tyranny, their  absurdity and their shocking stupidity to learn from history.

A professor, to my symphonic ears, connotes certain elements of distinctiveness:  knowledge, wisdom, confidence, high culture, high moral, rigour and awe. We paint a  professor in this canvass as part of our homage to human intelligence and determination.  Equally, the antithesis of this glowing description can be unnerving. A professor can also  suffer from arrogance, vanity, over-confidence, snobbery, rigidity, conformity, elitism and  worse, cowardice.

2. In Nigeria we have watched with righteous indignation the horrid growth of  pleasure-seeking, money-driven, contract chasing and cowardly professors who could not  speak truth to power during the tyrannical years of Babangida and Abacha.  Rather than use  their elevated positions to break the chains of oppression on the ruled, there was  systematic acquiescence to hold tenaciously to their university positions. In other words,  majority of our professors abdicated the ‘community services’ elements of their contract to  the people of Nigeria and metamorphosed, in broad daylight, into zombies and wimps.  They are not academic combatants in the mould of professors Wole Soyinka, Noam  Chomsky, Bertrand Russell and Edward Said.

I have deliberately picked out these academic  provocateurs because they represented the irrepressible voices of the oppressed in four  continents. Professors Russell and Said were rebels, wits, pessimists, humanists and radical  polemicists.  They were like jewels in any professorial crown. When I was younger my  affinity with these geniuses knew no bounds. They shaped and moulded my love of  literature, philosophy and diasporic activism as encapsulated in the life and works of the  irreverent polymath and orientalist, Edward Said. Professors Soyinka and Chomsky are the  living symbols of disillusion with our mad world. They represent the dying breed of  academic combatants with a divine mission to right the inanities that have entwined both  the United States and Nigerian governments. The resonance, immediacy, conviction and  anger of Chomsky’s thoughts on issues, especially on America’s exportation of terror  abroad, is unparallel. He is willing to step outside his professorial regalia and devote himself  to exposing the high crimes and misdemeanours of the US and its complicity with venal,  detestable and brutal dictators worldwide.

3. For more than 40 years, Professor Wole Soyinka has been the academy’s loudest and  most consistent critic of Nigeria’s policies at home and abroad. Soyinka belongs to a  tradition that is rooted in collectivism and community services as exemplified in his  belligerent advocacy for the enthronement of Peoples National Conference as vehicle to  redress the imbalance in our body politics. Here is a professor who embodies the voice of  the community at every critical and anxious moments of Nigeria’s turbulent history. The  ‘man’ is not dead in him.

My charge to Nigerian professors is to exchange their academic quietude and start  the vociferous regeneration of Nigeria with radical and robust ideas at the cost of physical  discomfort. Must our professors continue to hide behind the fortress of their bookshelves  while oppression continues? Should they keep silent in the face of the terrible madness and  moral assault of an unpredictable century?

Arguably, our ivory towers are crowded with cowardly and pretentious professors  who are unwilling to lead the people, even at great cost to their careers. How many of these  teachers can we call heroes and villains? Far too many professors are sheltering behind the  iron curtain of their campus kingdom unperturbed by the perilous state of Nigerian political,  social and economic conditions. When would they ignite their revulsion for the mindless  profligacy and criminality of our money-fuelled democracy? When are we going to see brave  hearts among them?Their ignominious silence and its consequences have impoverished  majority of our universities. Today, Nigerian universities are ticking time bomb awaiting  infrastructural explosion.

When would the professors who teach in these universities wear their  insurrectionary temperament and carpet bomb Aso Rock with a matter comparable to life  and death? No, rather than confront, they run into their cosy enclaves, living insulating lives  away from the daily horrors of our poor university students.

4. When the world was grief-stricken at the passing away of Edward Said, what welded  together the global respect for him was in the description of him as the human symbol of  the Palestinian struggle. He located a cause worth dying for regardless of the discomfort and  danger. Like Said, Soyinka has been notable for pursuing a parallel vision of intellectualism  with unmatched activism. These geniuses developed critical impulse to pursue,  overtake and empower the sleeping mass of humanity for a better life.What else can we say? Imagine a Nigeria that is blessed with hundred of Soyinkas,  then our national narrative would have been different. The mushrooming of such  irrepressible voices would have saved us from falling into the hands of thieves and  materialistic vampires feeding daily on our collective wealth.

However, what we have in abundance are professorial charlatans and harlots who  parade their brain waves on the pages of our tabloid newspapers to advance their selfish  interests. Even dodgy businessmen, media operators, television presenters, politicians,  hairdressers, illiterate moneybags are proud possessors of honorary Ph.Ds from home and  abroad to drive home the point that a doctorate is no longer exclusive but surplus to  requirement.

Worse are the dodgy professors who cannot rise up to the Nigerian challenge but  allowed the ‘man’ in them to die. The Nigerian project needs activist professors unafraid to  ruffle political feathers in honour of a grander vision of economic freedom, social justice and  the emancipation of the poor from the cruel hands of poverty.

Robot  Villager

# 1 var sbtitle2803=encodeURIComponent(A Professor...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 31.01.2008 11:17

truthsayer33  Villager

# 2 what about our female professors?they don't seem to exist in your world. Posted by truthsayer33| 31.01.2008 13:27

aguabata  Villager

# 3 I completely disagree with this writers view, being a professor does not make one a patriot, selfless, or less corrupt than anybody else. Infact a professor of engineering should typically be enmeshed in his work, being a professor makes you an expert in your field and you have acquired the skill for research and innovation, it does not oblige you to participate in politics or be an activist, and has no clear cut edge in leadership, Soyinka has a beautiful mind, and the passion he has for his country is personal and not an academic expectation, in the same vein those self seeking, conniving professors (i've met a few of them) do so purely for their personal ambition, being a professor doesnt make one moral Posted by aguabata| 31.01.2008 15:16