The Lagos State University of Science and Technology (LASUSTECH) is relatively young but very ambitious. And its managers are not just dreaming but working hard to surpass its aspiration. In this interview with GBENGA SALAU and SULIYAT TELLA, the Vice Chancellor of the university, Professor Olumuyiwa Odusanya, spoke on the recent accreditation of its Mass Communication Department by the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) among other initiatives aimed at achieving the institution’s goal of becoming a highly competitive, much sought after world-class university. Excerpts:

LASUSTECH recently got the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) accreditation. How does this reflect on the university’s overall academic goals and commitments to excel?
In this university, the B.Sc programme in Mass Communication is the most subscribed, and the department has built, even from the legacy institution, an enviable status, and maybe slightly strange, in the School of Science and Technology. But it is a testament to the quality of the programme, the content, the offering, and the leaders, particularly, the academic staff and the facilities that we have in that programme.

I have in that department a very articulate, dynamic, handsome person as the Head of Department (HOD) in the person of Dr. Steve Adesemoye. And when you have a leader who knows what he is doing, the troops follow. We have had very distinguished professors to support us. We have put in facilities that will give us top of the state readiness for any form of ranking or review.

Therefore, it is only fitting, rather than say it is a matter of surprise, that that programme should receive, and rightfully so, five-year accreditation by the Advertising Regulation Council of Nigeria. It is something we are very proud of, and a testament to hardwork, excellence, and the quality of what we are offering to the graduates of that programme.

But it says something to us – we cannot rest on our oars. It is also a testament that we have managed, in some small way, to bridge the gown and town relationship, where everything is not just about lectures, about conceptual frameworks, and about the theory of the field. Because once the present HOD took over, I saw an upward swing in visibility, in conduct, in the seriousness the students attach to the programme. So, for us, it is but a sign of better things to come. We have also done the NUC accreditation and we are expecting to get full accreditation. So, it is a programme that we look forward to growing in the years to come by probably unbundling it to stand as a college of its own.

Aside the ARCON accreditation, what town and gown relations is the institution putting into its programmes?
When I became Vice Chancellor, I developed what I called the IMPACT vision. It is a strict strategic initiative area, looking at infrastructure, manpower, productivity and prosperity of the university community, A for university culture, C for catalysts for Lagos State Agenda, and T for town and gown leadership.

Academia is great, but we don’t have everything to transform these young minds. Nobody was born an academic; others have chosen to plough their field in the industry. So, the balance of the interplay you need is for those who have chosen to pursue an academic career and become professors and teachers to also know that they need to be enriched with industry practitioners, which is the language of growing an up-to-date curriculum.

I will give you an illustration: Alex Ferguson was at Manchester United for 26 years. When he retired, he went to Harvard to become a professor of practice, not because he was an academic. But what further evidence of mastery do you need if a man wins 13 premiership titles? What other evidence? If they grew that brand to be the most watchable brand in the world, what other strategic management do you want?

So, for me, it is important to bring in role models and successful people who have done the business of communication.
But beyond Mass communication, we have a relationship with an industry in Ogere, a recycling factory. We have been working even with our host communities to train people, to give them some start up kits in tie and dye through our Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies. And we are growing that brand of enlarging and welcoming people who can add value to the university.

Our goal is not to come and say, come and give us. It is to say, this is who we are, this is what is available, and how can you enrich our curriculum? That is the whole essence of the Student Industrial Work Experience (SIWES) and we have had people come to us. And with the career centre now, we have a long list of people who have come to us; we have some companies around us. I don’t want to advertise for them; they are already partnering with us so that our students’ experience can become richer.

In fact, the rule of entrepreneurship is that graduates should have the skills required by the industry. In Europe today, you cannot start a graduate programme that has no industry relevance. The industry people are called to say, what kind of graduates are you expecting? The curriculum is then defined around those core areas, and we talk about three areas – knowledge, the person, and the skills. That is what we are doing in LASUSTECH.

You mentioned the unbundling of Mass Communication department in passing. Can you share the details of your plan for the unbundling?
Even in the present curriculum, there are three streams: Journalism, Public Relations/Advertising, and then broadcasting. So, even if we don’t want to unbundle anything, those three areas could become full-fledged degree awarding streams of mass communication to start with.

But to my knowledge, I believe there are about seven streams according to the National Universities Commission (NUC). Now, nobody can jump into all the seven because of resources and manpower. So, we need to look at where we have strength and take it. And finally, when we want to unbundle, we will then be starting with resource assessment. Of course all the people there will teach but we must have specialists and experts in any of the programmes we are unbundling to.

In fact, it is in my report going to the Council this month (April). It is something we have said to the deans and they should transmit it down that we want to start. So, maybe a year or two from now, we should be able to do resource assessment for one or two streams in mass communication and admit into that programme. It is a moving train that no one can stop, and the goal, like I said before, is that if it is big enough it can become a college on its own.

I would like us to be looking at things like social media, and be teaching the issues about AI, fake news and regulation. I mean how people can also do a back-end check of links that you have because you can set a town on fire by one fake news. If you remember the 2000 Ikeja cantonment explosion, it was wrong information and people perished. It was unexploded bombs that were exploding; if everybody stayed where they were, nothing would have happened. They were just going and there was no way to spread the information. If that was to happen this year, we have multiple outlets, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, and X. So, as we guard national assets and resources, we must also ensure that we have credible and verified information, which is what mass communication is about.

LASUSTECH has secured a radio licence. How far has it gone with the operationalisation of the radio station?
We need to go back to the department and I believe that we need to put our mouth into where we want it to grow the radio, grow its frequency, grow its outreach and eventually even have a campus television. The challenge is a new school with a small overall student population. So, it will take time. And then for the welfare of the people of Lagos State, the state government has been very magnanimous and has kept the fees very low.

So, until we grow the numbers, and as we grow numbers, we also have to grow teaching and learning resources. But it is something that I know we have had issues with; but we would improve.

And once the radio station kicks off, once any one drives in here or into and within Ikorodu, the radio station should be the preset and default radio. It is something that I’m sure they will be able to do. So, they will have the support of the university administration to make sure that we grow the campus radio.

Given the importance of resources and manpower in running a university, what is your view on the proliferation of universities in Nigeria?
For over 200 million people, for which about close to 50 per cent are young people, and maybe another 20 per cent are people who are university eligible, the number of the universities that we have is not sufficient.
Also, there are about 275 universities in Nigeria and about half are privately-owned but that half, about 140 do not admit up to 10 per cent of the total numbers. And two things are important here – one, access due to high cost, and two, manpower. May be what we should be doing is to expand present universities to become mega schools.

Our largest school is may be about 50,000. That is small if you compare it to the University of Alexandra in Egypt, with about 200,000 students. But you see, a university also has political and developmental dimensions. When someone occupies a political office, people want to see what he has brought to the community or state. In fact, someone said that if you want to build a great city, create a university, it attracts manpower. It builds the community’s economy and all sort of things; student hostels, transport and all grow with the university.

So, it is not out of place to grow more, but with a strategic intent for the old ones and the new ones do well. I believe one cannot wait for the other. Maybe another way is to expand online access to education. For example, look at India; the Open University in India is about four million people and it is same with the university in the UK. In Nigeria, may be about a million people. Now, we have licenced a new private open university. It is to open up all channels.

Even in some of those cities with Ivy League universities, there are small universities that do not have a large number and they are serving their purpose. So, the approach is not exclusive, but rather inclusive and solving the problems. This is because if you look at it, about a million candidates do JAMB and about 500,000 is admitted. So, each year, about half of those who wrote JAMB cannot come into the schools. Thus, do we need more, may be yes, but more importantly to equip the universities appropriately. And that is why Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been talking about the proportion of the education budget.

It is a work in progress and a commitment to see that we continuously develop the young people of this nation so that they can own today and create a future of their own for tomorrow.

You said Mass Communication is the most subscribed department in your institution. You have also spoken on the need to expand admission, as a school. What is the school putting in place to ensure that the offering of a department does not diminish and the expectations of those who subscribe are met when the expansion happens?
We have a new building which is being completed now that will be a new asset for teaching and learning, because that new building is a plus for us. We also know that with the current admissions status, there is a number of student-teacher ratio. We also do not want one person to teach over 1000 students at a go. So, you must have numbers to match in terms of the teachers and students. That is the whole essence of accreditation, such that you must have the resources – library (electronic, physical and e-copies) and also the tools of trade like internet access so the students should be able to create their own content.

They should be able to see their teachers do many things. They should be able to see their teachers take interviews, and in fact, write regular columns, and be active on social media, so that they can be proper role models for these students. Our watchword is “Excellence or Nothing” I am very confident in the faculty in the department.

What I have told them, which they probably need to do, is to create far more visibility for the institution. I want to pick my phone and click on google and see LASUSTECH. I want to see us active about what we are doing on X; I want to see us where we are beginning to dictate the intellectual discourse. Nothing stops our students and staff from commenting on political issues in Rivers State, from an academic and balanced view point. We can even then interview lawyers so that people can see the perspectives, including projecting what should happen in another six months. What should the various parties do? What are the lessons? So, if a young person who is not a card-carrying party member brings that to the fore, it may go unnoticed. But he is beginning to assert himself as a voice of reasoning and that is where great journalism comes in.

As the VC, what are your success and challenging stories? And what legacy do you want to leave behind?
Maybe we should start with the challenges. This is because anybody can boast of what he has done. When you transit from a polytechnic to a university, it is a huge gap and jump, because the ethos and culture are different. It is not just staff and qualifications, and then from a programme with a lot of part-time students. With such large numbers, quality control can be challenging. So, how are we going to ensure a smooth or seamless transition, which through the help of the grace of God, we have managed?

Then, we were also coming from a school that was totally self-funding and self-sufficient, to one that was starting and needed to be on life support or oxygen, in terms of money. Three, and I commend the people who ran the polytechnic, but they were too understaffed. If you look at our contemporary, Lagos State University and Lagos State University of Education, they are almost three times our size, and then the resources also, particularly teaching and learning resources, we are far and in between too few, obsolete and outdated.

So, these were very big challenges, and of course, creating a proper university culture. And in terms of what we are doing, when I was coming in, I mentioned about the IMPACT agenda. So, we all set up lofty goals, having done a rapid assessment and situation analysis. And I believe that these six areas are key to the survival and growth of any world-class university.

Like I said, our goal is to become a highly competitive, much sought after world-class university, and those words are picked with intention. If you look at the fact that our acceptance rate is about 25 per cent, you can say we are slightly competitive. But if you go to Harvard, it is about nine out of 10 per cent acceptance rate, even when you have all the money.

Then most sought-after university is that we want to make sure that we are the school everybody wants to come to. Maybe we are already getting that in mass communication; we have about 3,000 students seeking admission for a space of about 100 to 150. That ratio tells you that there is a lot of demand far more than the supply. And we are looking at becoming a world-class university. So, when I came in, it was like I was thrown into the lion’s den, because the transition model had its own issues.

In some programmes, there was hardly one person to teach. Yet we had agreed we were going to do 37 programmes at the start, in five colleges, because that model was built around survival of work and teaching staff. There were programmes that we had no experience to teach; Botany and Zoology for instance. So, it was to admit students and then begin to find who will teach them. Also, the standard of teaching in the university and we have also moved to CCMAS, which is Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standards, which requires that 70 per cent of the course content is nationally developed and standardised, and that university can do 30 per cent. Even to do the CCMAS for all our 37 programmes was not easy.

So that was a major achievement, coming from not having the prerequisite skills. Also, we were able to get resource verification for four programmes – Chemical Engineering, which is on stream now; Insurance, Tourism and Hotel management, as well as Biochemistry. So, we have 41 academic programmes, and we now have students in all the 41 programmes.

Maybe another major success story is the accreditation we did last year. And growing the assets, in terms of manpower, we have employed quite a number, and putting in new laboratories, preparing documentation, having several rounds of mock accreditation, that we know that when the NUC brings up its results, any time from now, we should have a cause to hand over to Mr Governor and say, thank you for all you did for us.

And as a university, one of our staff in Agriculture won the Nigerian National Research Grant Fund from TETFund. He got N33 million. We have had a large round of training as we keep expanding and pushing the boundaries. We have been able to run uninterrupted academic calendar, and results are released in time, within two to three weeks of the last examinations, the results are approved by the Senate.

We are laying the foundation to ensure that in this university, four years is four years and when you graduate, you can know whether you have made a first class, second class upper or second class lower. And finally, we have had a good relationship between the staff and management.

And in the remaining two and a half years, I will say we should expect more action. We have turned this place into a construction site. There about 10 constructions ongoing and none of them will be abandoned. So, we expect that to come to fruition; we expect growth in the number of body of students, and staff, teaching and non-teaching. We expect growth in terms of facilities that will be available. And the university should begin to be known both in Nigeria and outside.

By October this year, we shall start the final year of our pioneer students such that by July next year, they should graduate and go for National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). We have told them graduation date is February 2, 2027; it is a Tuesday because that is the day the university was signed into law. We have kept celebrating Founder’s Day. We expect to have more programmes as we go along, and also to start a post graduate school. By the time I am done, with the grace of God on my side, we should have a few post-graduate programmes running and three years after, we should produce the first set of PhD degree of LASUSTECH.
So, our vision is very clear, where we are going, we know it. The ship has set sail and we cannot return backward.