| challenges confronting developmental universities |
Academics are able to attract funding from donor agencies or contracts from government and non-governmental organisations for commissioned research on issues relating to development. Hence, they are quick to engage in these incomes augmenting activities that are time consuming, energy sapping and which distract them from the essential academic services of teaching and research.
Such developmental interests and projects come with other benefits for academics such as public recognition and greater exposure to real life problems of development. It also helps universities to retain competent hands that otherwise would have been lost to either internal or external brain drain.
But this has its flipside, which includes commercialisation of research, externalisation of the locus of research from universities and scholars, over-commitment to development issues and diffusion of interests and attention which leads to superficiality, erosion of academic and specific professional norms as the scholar’s reference group is no longer his academic community but external donor agencies.
With the above complications besetting the idea of developmental universities, the fundamental question to address now is:
How can universities remain faithful to its traditional functions of teaching, research and community service and at the same contribute effectively to national development?
Time allowed: one hour
To answer this question effectively, it would be helpful to examine what precisely the bane of development in Africa is.
We Shall be Learning Cultural Dimension of Development in this Module
