Universities Act 2012: Toward Quality Varsity Education in Kenya

An online article posted in Daily Nation on January 21, 2013, and titled  "New Law Wants Varsities to Walk the Quality Talk" (To read, click here), observed that several universities in Kenya have recently been bragging about their quality-based ISO certification. However, a new law to govern the operations and steer the standards of Kenya's public universities -- Universities Act 2012 -- was recently enacted, and was to be implemented under the auspices of the Commission for University Education (CUE), successor to the Commission for Higher Education (CHE). Quality is the key word at CUE, and the newly appointed Head, himself a university don of long standing, could not during an interview say enough about quality as the over-riding criterion of excellence in Kenya's higher education. And yet, I am thinking, quality is a vexed concept, being easier to talk about from a distance than to implement in any comprehensive way, and to assure in the trenches. I am sensing that comments already made in response to the article -- comments such as by TumuTumu, Mheshimiwa and Kenya Yetu -- have hit the nail on the head in substantial measure. 

Quality and standards are the driving concerns in the online article as well. So is walking the talk. However, there is room to make a few other observations, fill a few gaps, as follows:

CUE must go beyond platitudes if it is to make a difference in quality assurance. In the first place, it has to define quality in measurable and, importantly, consequential ways. I don't think KEBS has the standards to make our universities great. It can of course create them in proper consultation with those who operate exactly where the rubber meets the road -- the lecturers and researchers (though, indeed, a disappointing number of lecturers have deeply ingrained habits which exacerbate the rot). 

The main point, however, is that you cannot demand quality on a higher plane if you don't have (or squander in administrative excess and impunity) the financial, material and technical resources required to realize the desired quality. Exceptional or just good lecturers, as human resources, are, up to a point, a component of these resources that must be sourced. They cannot procure, retain, remunerate and motivate themselves -- someone else must do so, and not grudgingly -- in an environment which no one seems to tend with any healthy passion. There's too much inbreeding at our universities. Too much, and in some instances growing, ethnicity -- and even clanism and cronyism.

You cannot have fruit if you don't grow fruit trees, or have procurement power. When all else is said and done, the Achilles' Heel of our higher education is that we have not closed the loop in PhD training, in two ways: (a) We are not training enough based on our own priorities and resources (no sovereignty here) to meet present needs and replace those we lose to attrition of one kind or another; (b) Too many of the few we train we train locally -- and so under-expose intellectually/scholastically and experientially, and so condemn to what may turn out to be, in quality terms, a downward spiral toward a mediocrity we may be too afraid to acknowledge. 

It is a joke for our universities, which are supposed to be universal institutions, to call themselves world class when you have to search and search and not find find any world-class academics from other places willing to join us full-time.