From time to time, universities roll out new and newly minted sets of professors into the academic world. From the sciences to the humanities, the professors and associate professors are, by their appointment, handed significant responsibilities that surpass the euphoria of scaling the often tough assessment standards that universities typically have in place to ensure that their crop of professors and top academics have global academic status. This, of course, is to be expected. Professorship is not just a title that one bandies about for social recognition. It carries a weight that goes beyond its honorific essence.
There is more. Being a university professor also possesses a generational responsibility. This comes with the urgent need to reach very deep into the minds of the younger generation with the educational substance of eternal value (of knowledge) that is required for them to live a good life. Condoleezza Rice, the American former secretary of state, beautifully expresses the profound joy that comes with being such a professor: “I’m a very happy university professor… the best thing about being a university professor is that you see young people as they’re being shaped and molded toward their own future, and you have a chance to be a part of that.” This is a most beautiful joy that carries a very deep burden of academic mentorship. This piece, which continues the conversation we had after my inaugural lecture of the Lead City University, Ibadan on the 21st of November, 2018, is just to initiate a trajectory of discourse that I think can enable us rethink the deeper inflections of the professorship and the university.
A university, by its very stature, is a critical point of institutional reform and experimentation that ensures that ideas, insights and paradigms are mixed and fused together in dazzling and creative manners that challenges traditions and orthodoxies. A university is a laboratory of ideas and innovative thinking. Ultimately, rethinking the relevance of the university challenges the concept of a professorship. The current understanding of a professor, as a purveyor of received knowledge, has endured for many decades. From its 14th century etymology, it refers to someone who professes a particular branch of knowledge in the sciences or the humanities. The trajectory of the meaning eventually stretched to mean the highest post-doctoral academic rank that a university teacher could attain after some productive number of years. However, while this rank has persisted in this traditional form in Africa, it has had to undergo critical re-assessment in North America, for example. And this re-assessment of the tradition was facilitated by foundational reflections on the essence of the university and the responsibilities of the professors within the mission statement of a university.
Let me mention two significant features of European universities and pedagogical orientations. First, there is a clear distinction between a teaching professor and a research professor. Underlying this distinction is the attention that a university must give to quality, first, and division of labor, second. A research professor, for instance, would not be burdened by the same teaching load that will attach to the task of a teaching professor. Grading or promoting a teaching professor would not be on the same research capacity that attends a research professor. The impacts of both on the student’s intellectual formation are different and unique. American universities also feature the endowed professorship or chair. This has several advantages. One, since the chair or professorship is endowed, the salaries and emolument of the professor is paid directly from an endowment. This allows the university to redirect the salary of the professor to some other administrative issues. But more important is the fact that the endowment is awarded to an excellent faculty member who has distinguished him or herself in a specific field. An endowed professorship allows a university to attract top scholars from other universities.
The most fundamental of the professorial and pedagogical reform in the western higher education framework is the establishment of the professorship of practice. This is critically different from the tradition of an honorary professorship. In an honorary, unlike the traditional, professor is not burdened by the responsibility of teaching or research. It is essentially an award that recognizes unique individuals whose lives represent excellence and other scholarly virtues. An honorary degree holder adds his or her illustrious profile to the status of the university itself. On the contrary, a professorship of practice, as distinct from honorary professor, hinges on the urgency of unraveling the dynamics of the relationship between scholarship and existential and professional realities for the students. Curriculum and its pedagogical implications, that is, are dynamics that are meant to expose the students to the critical relationship between ideas and their practical and existential dynamics and relevance. This is entirely lost when we lock the students out of the rich experiential knowledge that the society itself provides through its industries, organizations, the civil societies, entertainment, cultural dynamics, and so many other sites of production and performances.
The recognition of this framework of interactions is what led to the emergence of the idea of professorship of practice; the idea of bringing the town into the gown; of reorienting theory with the practical. The global practice recognizes a professor of practice as a distinguished professional—in the military, civil service, entertainment, private organizations, religious organizations, etc. Such a professor is integrated into the academic community, and a particular faculty, on the strength of his or her special practical experience. A Condoleezza Rice as a former secretary of state in any university’s foreign policy programme is a significant addition. A professorship of practice is evidently evidence-based. Appointing such professors is based, in the first place, on the evidence of accomplishments in their fields of endeavors. But much more than this, such persons are expected to bring their wealth of experience as dynamics for reflecting on teaching and research. An evidence-based practice brings much more to academic learning than the narrow understanding derivable from textbooks. A professional in any field represents dynamic combinations of so many variables that textbooks may not anticipate—a time-worn and clever admixture of psychological and emotional balance, communication capacity, customer relations, practical intelligence, esprit de corps, entrepreneurialism, leadership skills, and many others.
Nigeria’s postcolonial realities places a more significant urgency on the universities to explore the relationship between theory and practice, and between scholarship and social realities. This simply means that the professorship of practice is not something that Nigerian universities can ever hope to ignore.