*Copied from a WhatsApp group*

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are funding bodies in advanced countries that have a road map to adapt for how to organize and manage funding from Govt.

The first way to solve this is to do a fundamental restructuring of academic assessment and rewards in the Nigerian University system and bring it out of the Middle and Dark Ages.

Saying each paper is worth 5 points and divide the 5 points by number of authors is so outdated it breaks my heart. The first author is not necessarily the most important author in life sciences.

In modern biology, genetics and genomics single author papers are unheard of. There is no way to do the kind of work that gets published in top journals by anything less than a large team.

To convincingly identify a new immune gene for instance these days and show that it is involved in an immune pathway, you may need an immunologist, computational biologist, biochemist, physiologist, biostatistician and physical chemist. You may be deploying mass spectrometry to identify proteins, generate a knock-out mouse model to test gain of function mutation effect, screen for variants in a large population, determine de-novo sequence structure, conduct genome-wide computational analysis, profile expression in different tissues and you cannot be an expert in all these areas. Doing this kind of work will take 5 to 6 years, cost $2.5 million and end being published in Cell, Nature, Science or PNAS.

I am not saying everyone does this kind of work and can spend this kind of money. My point is modern research is such that our current backward and broken system is not optimized to do world class work.

Folks from Dept of Zoology cannot use stuff in Dept of Microbiology and Vice versa much less collaborate. Even guys in the same department hide reagents bought by the department and relocate the only functioning pH meter so that no one can use it and get that promotion before them.

And please a paper in Science or Nature with 50 authors is not the same as a single author nonsense paper on "effects of particle size on leg width of ants" in *River Benue International Journal of Research*

I may sound harsh but our senior people bear the most blame. If a department or entire system is dysfunctional you cannot blame the low level people but the leaders who make and implement policy.

I keep saying more money in and of itself will not solve the sickness of the Nigerian academic system. We need to agree on changing the fundamental rules first. Leaders in the system must be selected on merit and evaluated on performance.

There are high impact papers on genomics these days in Nature or Science with 500+ authors. That single paper will cost millions of dollars, analyze say 200,000 samples for say 1 million molecular markers and involve dozens of research groups in dozens of counties on multiple continents.

The impact factor of these journals exceed 40...of course we are not saying we must be able to do this particular kind of work but they serve as models to aspire to.

At the risk of being misunderstood and offending many, our current academic leaders are underperforming like our political leaders, maybe even worse given how well educated they are.

Once again implementing good ideas alone will improve things long before you get any more money into the system.

Every time money was injected into the system it was mostly mismanaged. The World Bank gave us $120 million for staff development in the mid 1990s as my career began in the system..not sure how it was spent. Of course some were trained...

TETFund to be fair has injected hundreds of billions of naira into Universities but what we have mostly to show are large, fancy, sometimes empty buildings which may also have fancy non-functional equipment.

Yet folks aren't getting trained to do modern research, not taught grant writing skills to access TETFund grant funds because nothing to chop there.

And until we have a paradigm change that affects how our people are assessed nothing is going to change. Unless we go back to change the rules to reward merit, change how papers are assessed and make it worthwhile to write grants nothing will change.

How many Universities have grant offices? Provide serious grantsmanship training to faculty members?, encourage grant writing through action rather empty words?

We start by acknowledging the main problems in the system and that lack of money is not at the top or the most crucial.

No where in the world do they have enough money. Even Universities in the rich West complain of not having enough money.

If ASUU holds NUC's feet to the fire it will get the conversation started. I feel that NUC accreditation exercise is mostly a farce and a joke. How can say a Department of Computer Science lack a serious computer lab but they get accredited?

How can a Dept of Biotechnology lack a serious biotech lab and yet they are awarding degrees? I dont want to mention names but I know many such departments personally where you can't even measure pH, never mind extract DNA or RNA. How did they pass accreditation?

All it takes is just ONE Vice Chancellor to step up and decide to radically transform his or her University in a 5 year tenure. It will catch fire...generate buzz and get the ball rolling.

Imagine if you went to a University in Nigeria and toilets all work with WCs that actually flush with toilet paper? Each faculty can have a borehole, no?

Imagine if you visited the teaching lab and saw *functional* basic equipment and the students were in there learning by doing, even if it is 2, 3 or 4 per station?

Imagine if you went to a University and the Dept of Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering had designed a solar power system implemented by the University to make sure they got some power for a few hours a day instead of operating in near perpetual darkness or each faculty or department struggling to buy diesel for a generator that sometimes even HOD or Dean uses their personal to service or buy fuel? I personally know Deans who spend their money buying diesel so they wont totally be in the dark.

Imagine if you went to a University and found that a good deal of the large expanse of land inside campus has a commercial farm inside using outside contract farmers growing crops or raising livestock to feed the University community and sell to the public? Universities may be able to tap internal resources and external financing to establish commercial farms on campus if the folks in charge dont chop it all.

Imagine if you went to a University and found that it has a serious consulting firm that deploys the highly credentialed faculty members to bid for and execute projects for the public and private sector? After all it is the Universities that train the experts out there doing the same things, no?

Imagine if you went to a University and found that it has a University Grants Office or as we sometimes call it here in the United States, Office of Sponsored Programs headed by a director who has actually written and won grants? And this office operates a strong training program for faculty to learn how to write grants and provides support through advocacy, administrative back stopping and information on grant opportunities through say a quarterly newsletter to all faculty members?

Imagine if you went to a University and find out that it has a Student Employment and Placement Office that helps students with job hunting skills like resume writing, interviewing and networking? It goes out to talk to companies about employment and placement for its graduates.

Imagine if you went to a University and there is Center for Teaching and Learning to help faculty members learn how to better teach, provide pedagogical tools to students, feedback from students and improve faculty teaching skills? This Center will organize regular training workshops to help faculty create truly modern learning spaces and go beyond droning on and on during lectures putting students to sleep or simply giving student notes to photocopy, the same notes they were given as students decades ago?

Imagine if you went to a University to see that the students are not deathly afraid of their lecturers who basically terrorize students, make unfair and even illegal demands from students including extortion of money or sexual favors and other kinds of indiscipline?

Imagine if you went to a University and find a regular seminar series at the departmental and/or faculty levels that allows each faculty member to give a biweekly or monthly talk about their work creating an exciting scholarly environment to be intellectually engaged? In the vast majority of Nigerian Universities folks have no real idea of what their colleagues are doing by way of research.

Imagine if you visited a University and see that its Senate had revamped its promotion criteria to include encouraging folks to publish in better journals and the VC has set some money aside to help with publication charges, even it is a 25 to 50% subsidy? Each department is mandated to come up with a list of 10 to 15 best, better, good and average journals in that field and faculty are encouraged to publish in those journals. The University goes ahead to incentivize it by giving extra points calibrated to reward getting into better journals instead of *Crackpot International Journal of Science* with no website, DOI numbers or availability in Google Scholar?

Imagine if you visited a University and found that it has decided to tackle the issue of assessing publications using modern criteria instead of the current one from the Dark Ages? It puts emphasis on impact factor, quality of contribution, scope of research and recognition by peers instead of the broken and patronizing system we have now that just celebrates mediocrity and substandard work?

Imagine if you visited a University and found that the hallways and classrooms are actually clean, scrubbed and mopped? The seats and desks are functional, louvres on windows clean and transparent instead of caked with dust of the last 15 to 30 years, whiteboard exist and overhead projectors work (powered by a small inverter or solar panel on the roof of that particular building in csse of power failure)?

Imagine if you visited a University and see that there are nice classy name plaques on each door, uniformly done by the University and looks like what you would see abroad?

Imagine if you were trying to go to a University in another city and as you near the city you see several large sign boards with arrows directing you towards the University making it seem like it is a serious place that wants to be found?

Imagine if you visited a University and you see a serious Office of Alumni Affairs tasked with the job of hunting down former students to develop relationships with them, organize events, engender pride in their alma maters, sends out regular newsletters to them, gives out awards for achievements at the department, school/faculty/college and University levels to reward excellence in various field of endeavors? And this office mobilizes financial support from its alumni to help develop the University?

I could go on and on...very few of all the above require money to implement them.

Let me say this again, the Nigerian academic system may be under funded but its biggest problems are not lack of enough money. No amount of money will fix this system.

What we need are visionaries committed to implementing good ideas. These ideas are not rocket science and not hard to find and many if not most dont require a lot of money or even money at all. We need transformational leadership in the Universities.

Do we have VCs, DVCs, Deans, Directors or even HODs who will step up and be counted or are they all mostly just talk and no action

As for NUC, that is the subject of another post!

Via: MB Maina, PhD