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Disciplinary Gatekeeping In Nigerian Universities

Posted by: Benjamin Onuorah

Dr. Marzuq Ungogo has raised an important but controversial issue of unproductive gatekeeping in Nigerian universities.

People are being prevented by myopic disciplinary gatekeepers from crossing from one field to a related one as they move from first degree to a Master’s and PhD and ultimately to a teaching appointment.

We’re not talking about someone with a degree in English trying to enroll for a Master’s in Biochemistry or Mathematics. Or someone with an Economics degree trying to secure an appointment to teach in the English department.

We’re talking about people trying to explore their interests and goals within broadly compatible and complementary disciplines. I wrote an update about this a few years ago and I wish I had had enough space to include this in my recent ASE public lecture.

I know of a person with a Master’s and PhD in Public Administration who was denied a teaching job in the Public Administration Department of a Nigerian public university because their first degree is not in Public Administration. I have heard of several other such cases. One person had to go and register for a first degree as a PhD holder in order to overcome that senseless gatekeeping.

I understand that, in most Nigerian universities, even as a Master’s degree holder in a closely related discipline, you stand no chance of getting admitted to a PhD program in an adjacent field. Ditto if you hold a first degree and want to go for a Masters in a related field.

The thing with our people is that we like to make and enforce rules that stifle the freedom of academic inquiry and transdisciplinarity because for us territoriality and power matter more than the natural elasticity and momentum of knowledge production and the inevitable disciplinary boundary crossing that it entails.
There are research interests and career trajectories that would naturally take a person from one narrow field into another or that would require combining or crisscrossing related fields.

It’s a matter of simple logic. But in Nigeria, we prefer to vigorously police outmoded disciplinary traditions at a time when the traditional disciplinary divides are being challenged by innovative research and collaborative processes of inquiry and problem solving.

In other climes, discipline-crossing applicants and candidates are celebrated for their versatile repertoires, for their intellectual ambition and adventurous spirit, and as people who enrich and bring a uniquely capacious perspective into narrow disciplinary conversations.

But in Nigeria, we shun such people. We have elevated rigidity to a dogma at the expense of knowledge and intellectual freedom. If you have been a victim of this practice in Nigerian universities, please share your story with us.

By: Moses Ochonu
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