Nigerian universities produce low-grade PhD holders because they are usually supervised by incompetent professors who are merely “meddlesome interlopers,” Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, has said.
Rasheed disclosed this in his keynote address during the inauguration of the Doctoral Academy of Nigeria and training workshop on PhD research supervision on Wednesday.
The workshop, with the theme “Enhancing the capacities of doctoral supervisors for research supervision,” was organised by the Committee of Provosts and Dean’s of Postgraduate Colleges and Schools in Nigerian Universities.
The NUC boss said some professors become “meddlesome interlopers” in disciplines in which they were not competent, thereby making PhD students “victims of interminable doctoral programmes” and frustration.
“You spend one year searching for a topic because the professor is not grounded in the field and is not humble enough to say he does not understand the methodology because he doesn’t have time to read it before,” he said.
Represented by the Deputy Executive Secretary (Academics), Dr. Suleiman Ramon-Yusuf, the NUC boss said being a professor does not mean that the person can supervise very well.
“A litany of problems have been identified, ranging from poor quality of doctoral thesis occasioned by the fact that a lot of the PhD theses were sponsored by staff who themselves are underpaid,” Rasheed said.
“We wonder how somebody who is not well paid will use part of his salary while his wife watches him go and do PhD research.
“So all of these problems at the end the product or quality of the school is not what it should be. And of course, if you put this against the backdrop of the critical role which doctoral research is expected to play in terms of innovation, creating new relevant knowledge by generating knowledge that is marketable for goods and services converted to goods and services, all of these have an effect in terms of establishing of nexus between doctoral training and national development as a whole.”
Rasheed said the NUC would set up a committee to look into the issues, and “we hope that this will be the beginning of disaggregating the issues and challenges of post-doctoral education in Nigeria, doctoral supervision in terms of the timeliness, quality, and relevance of research projects.”
