Nigeria: Of Toyin Falola, African Scholars and the Western Academy

24 January 2021
opinion

... the bottom-line is that doctorates from Nigerian universities would not be taken seriously in Euro-America unless, largely, the graduates from Nigeria are able to match the research skills of graduates from Euro-American universities... What makes a university is not the teaching but the research.

Professor Toyin Falola noted in a recent essay entitled, "Is the diaspora now about rubbishing those at home?" that universities in the cultural West would not grant faculty positions to people holding Nigerian university doctorates, unless they demonstrate exceptional talents. To support his point, I know a few people from Nigeria who had to do a doctorate degree again in a Western university to be employable as academics in the West. Professor Wale Adebanwi of the University of Oxford is a famous case in point. Adebanwi obtained a doctorate at the University of Ibadan and got another one at the University of Cambridge for him to be employed at the University of Oxford. This does not suggest that Adebanwi is intellectually more curious than the rest of us. In fact, doing a second doctorate does not demonstrate intellectual curiosity. If anything, it suggests that there was something inadequate about the first doctorate.

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