Misreading the world university ranking in Nigeria

A world university ranking industry has come to stay. Nobody is particularly enchanted about it beyond the marketers promoting it but everyone is gripped by it. University administrators, recruiters, parents and sundry other interests are imprisoned in heightened expectation of the release of one ranking exercise or the other.

In Nigeria, this paradox has attained the status of a tragedy. An obvious lack of awareness of how much the ranking hides more than it reveals as well as the never realised hope for a Nigerian university to break into the rank of the first 400 universities constitute the tragedy. In the end, the ranking industry and its many products are almost always misread in Nigeria. How is this the case?

One, The Higher Education (THE) ranking released a while ago has, for instance, been read as ‘the global university ranking’ by some columnist. It cannot be so because THE ranking is only one out of the six dominant annual ranking exercises.

Two, in most cases, the Nigerian media hails the appearance of Nigerian universities on the list at all, not minding the point of ranking order. It is difficult to know what is there to celebrate in a Nigerian university appearing within the 800 – 1000 bracket when a South African university can be seen in the first 200th, well ahead of many ancient European universities.

Isn’t this the height of how far the society has degenerated? Otherwise, what is difficult in coming to terms with the fact that Nigerian universities as they are today and in the current state of the nation cannot but put up a collectively dismal performance in the ranking exercises?

Three, the Nigerian media and other readers of rankings are fond of investing whichever Nigerian university makes the first appearance with the rating of the ‘best’. In the past few years, this has been either the University of Ibadan or Covenant University. First of all, the best university does not exist. There are no metrics by which any existing university anywhere in the world now can be invested with the qualifier ‘best’. Second, the very nature of universities makes the idea of calling one of them the best an anomaly.

A particular university can be the best in one or two particular metrics but certainly not the overall best. Ranking a university number one does not make it the best and no ranking authority has suggested that to anybody ever.

Let’s see how we might demonstrate this. Imagine a young man in the UK who wishes to encounter Discourse Theory at the graduate level. If he has been well advised, such a young man is sure to make the University of Essex in the UK his first port of call. Why would he do that when there are prestigious universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, amongst others, to choose from?

He would do so because when recruiters are head hunting a discourse analyst, they are certain to go to Essex first based on what they have in their records regarding what each university does better than any other. So, they will only go to Cambridge in relation to disciplines in which Cambridge leads the rest.

Similarly, if she has been well advised, that young lady in the U.S. seeking a graduate degree in critical geopolitics will head for Virginia Tech first rather than Harvard, Princeton or Yale because Virginia Tech is where Gérard O’Tuathail, the global signifier for that sub-discipline, is based and whose ex-students handling recruitment of critical geopolitics products in any firm, corporation or government department will first consider Virginia Tech before any other. Examples from Medicine, Environmental Sciences and Engineering may even show this better. Broadly, this is how it works, not according to grand rankings speaking more to marketing than academy.

This particular point about the ranking exercise is why it is in need of being scaled down to subject ranking rather than a global ranking that doesn’t speak much to what makes a university the ‘best’. It is hardly any other qualities than its stock of specialists which enables it to lead the rest in a particular domain. Every year, the subject ranking shows this more meaningful aspect of the ranking industry.

There is thus an element of an uncritical consumption of the ranking outcomes when our media and pundits put too much stress on a qualifier such as ‘best’ in describing a university just because of its location on the ranking list. This is problematic because, as true as it that the ranking industry has got the world stirring, truer is it that it has also come along with its own ironies as exemplified above.

The bigger issue manifested by such stress is the failure to reckon with ranking being about Europe, North America and rising powers, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. These are the regions where the knowledge – power nexus is unfolding in its fullest at the moment. Is it any wonder that Chinese versions of Oxford, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and so on are rising as China rises to great power stature?

It would, therefore, be surprising to find Nigerian universities among leading European, North American, Chinese, Japanese, Australian universities in the first 200 universities on the list, year in, year out. It is not the African moment there yet, notwithstanding the impressive showing by four South Africa universities, particularly the University of Cape Town which has remained within the first 200 global universities bracket ever since.

Universities in Nigeria are particularly afflicted by a ‘philosophy of science’ deficit that it can hardly make the kind of impact that universities of smaller countries Singaporean, South Korea or South African universities are making. Whatever ‘philosophy of science’ is obtainable in Nigerian universities today is too scattered to help.

The assumption that a Tinubu Presidency would seek out a Wale Adebanwi or someone of Adebanwi’s trajectory for the Minister of Education portfolio or the NUC job so that Nigeria can quickly put its ‘Fuji House of Commotion’ called higher education in order has not materialised.

In the absence of an agentian approach to solving the commotion, the crisis deepens as everyone talks endlessly about funding inadequacy.

Paucity of funding is an issue but even a billion Naira to each public and private university in Nigeria every day without a thorough philosophical and theoretical grounding of the curriculum will amount to nothing but a grand waste of time.

And that’s the point about this piece: that the reading of the world ranking of universities in Nigeria does not show a good enough grasp of where the trouble with the university system lies.

Yet, the country cannot go anywhere near greatness without functional universities because universities, as knowledge production centers, are crucial to the politics of national power projection in world politics.
Onoja, a former Political Science lecturer at Veritas University, Abuja is at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, Scotland.