Thursday, December 18, 2008
UNIZIK appoints panel on 'sit-tight' students

By Emmanuel Obe, Akwa

The Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka has set up a five-man committee to look into the rising cases of students overstaying their tenure in the university.




advertisement

The Vice-Chancellor of the university, Prof. Boniface Egboka, who disclosed this at a media briefing on Wednesday, said the institution was no longer going to keep students that had overstayed the duration of the courses for which they were admitted.

The VC further said that none of the six young men that were killed last weekend in a purported cult clash was a student of the university.

The VC said the committee to be headed by Prof. Benjamin Okeke would collate the names of all the 'sit-tight' students that had overstayed, look at their cases and make recommendations to the Senate.

He said students undergoing four-year programmes were not expected to stay beyond six years, while students pursuing five-year courses were not to remain in the university beyond seven years.

He said the students that had overstayed on the campus would be asked to go home.

He, however, said that undergraduates who had good reasons to overstay could be pardoned.

He said the university had over the past years, stabilised its academic calendar and no student could attribute his or her overstay to the unstable academic calendar.

Similarly, Egboka said that lecturers who could not mark and submit examination scripts within three months of the examination would be sanctioned.

He said the university's administration had adopted the policy of allowing students to assess their lecturers. That way, he said, lecturers would be made to sit up.

While admittng that the dearth of student hostels on campus was a problem, the VC appealed to well-meaning citizens and corporate bodies to assist with the construction of hostels on a 'Build, Operate and Transfer' basis.

He commended some private citizens that were developing faculty complexes on the campus and urged more philanthropists to emulate them.



http://odili.net/news/source/2008/dec/18/413.html