About a month ago, the University of Nairobi announced it would de-register students who have overstayed the required maximum enrolment duration. This was deliberately directed at undergraduate students who have been discontinued, expelled or those who deferred indefinitely.
What UoN did not reveal is that there are students, especially in the graduate category, whose overstay at the university is directly linked to its conservative policies and poor administration.
One of the most appalling policies regards the choosing of thesis or dissertation supervisors. Graduate students are no longer allowed to engage a thesis adviser of their choice. Instead, departments select and impose advisers on students with little consideration of the needs. An adviser is supposed to be a guide and a mentor with the sole purpose of helping the student achieve scholarly endeavours in their area.
The most important consideration in selecting a thesis adviser should be his or her area of specialisation. Students want to work with individuals who are knowledgeable in their area of research and who share similar research interests. This way, there is a guarantee there will be useful input from the adviser.
It is, therefore, common practice for students to look at profiles of potential supervisors and find indicators of their research interests. These indicators include availability of publications related to student interests, modules the lecturers have taught, and previous successful supervisions in related research areas.
With such conservative policies, you will find that 98 per cent of students complete coursework successfully in the first year of enrolment but get stuck at the thesis or dissertation stage. It is common to find a student paired with an adviser who never taught them. Building rapport with such a supervisor becomes utterly impossible for most students. Supervision therefore proceeds from a very superficial point.
The second policy challenge is on administration of graduate supervision. Once a student is assigned to a particular supervisor, the departments do not follow up on the student’s progress. I agree students should not be spoon-fed. It is up to the student to put effort to complete the thesis and graduate.
But it is also paramount that the departments follow up and ask for progress reports from the students and the supervisors. There often lacks a structured schedule of milestones to be achieved in the journey of supervision. Because of this laxity in administration, supervisors engage students in hide and seek games.
It is common to find a student who has been trying to meet his or her supervisor for more than six months and when he or she succeeds, the adviser is only available for less than half an hour. This is very disorienting and frustrating, especially to hard-working students.
Advisers waste a lot of time and get away with it. Student attempts to confront such advisers usually lead to strained relationships and supervision slows or comes to a dead end. Changing a supervisor is an uphill task. Most students fear being victimised by former advisers during defence of proposal or thesis. They opt to stick with bad supervisors and hope for the best.
The university has also linked graduate supervision to career promotions. This occurs in all universities. It is the main reason why departments decided to assign supervisors instead of letting students choose. The number of students one supervises becomes very useful during promotions.
Supervision is largely viewed as a benefit to the advisers. Previously, student preferences would revolve around great lecturers and professors with a record of superb and efficient supervision. Those lecturers would go on to co-author journal articles with their students—often extracts of their thesis. But with so many students preferring very few advisers, other lecturers would find themselves with no students to supervise. They got little or no credit for graduate supervision.
Additionally, UoN lacks capacity to handle graduate work and this has led to overstay of students waiting to graduate. Most departments are understaffed and survive on part-time staff. Most part-timers are contracted for short durations.
A common complaint by part-time staff is that universities take more than a year to pay salaries. Sometimes, part-timers who complain about salary delays are discontinued without pay and another new part-timer is engaged. The universities prey on the endless supply of cheap labour from new unemployed PhD holders.
Part-timers have been known to withhold student results as leverage so that the University can pay them. This delays timely completion of courses and increases cases of missing marks. Sometimes you find that permanent staff at the University of Nairobi are doing part time work in other institutions and have very little time for graduate supervision.
Also, the academic staff sometimes lacks supervision capacity. It is very common to find departments recruiting lecturers with no education background in the field of specialisation they are employed to teach and supervise graduate students. This is common in the Faculty of Arts, which comprises majorly of social sciences and humanities. You will find a lecturer with an undergraduate degree in chemistry, education or biological sciences teaching political science.
These lecturers have no grasp of the subject matter of the discipline they are engaged to teach and research on. They will mostly have publications in areas that are not related to the discipline they teach. The result is poor quality of education, low research output and bad supervision.
Independent policy consultant
