UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION IN NIGERIA: HISTORY, ETHICS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Abstract

Purpose: This paper is an exploratory work focusing on university administration in practice. The study interrogates ethics and practice of university administration in Nigeria, vis-à-vis service-delivery. It captures and exemplifies the nature and elements of university administration as experienced in the contemporary Nigerian polity, making references to aspects of industrial and organizational psychology, human factor psychology, and others, in the context of diverse interrelationships between theory and practice. It reverts to antecedents of administrative practice, tracing the primal formation of organizational styles to the colonial era in British tropical dependencies, and deftly concludes that the contemporary administrative policies were direct derivatives from the political culture of the colonial masters who sought to enforce “law and order” and through a self-imposed dual mandate sophistry. It concludes by drawing attention to observed infractions in the contemporary practice, and emphasized on the need to upgrade ethics, practice and corporate governance. Contributions on the socio-politics of corporate practice in Nigerian universities is paltry, and more research could be initiated in this area to complement our effort.

Methodology: The research design is descriptive, focusing on answering the how, what, when and where, (i.e. in addition to why) thus, providing rooms for examination of historical evidences, theoretical relevance and practical algorithms. The study used qualitative research method to properly describe the research problem and analyzed the problem based on observed characteristics, behaviours and reactions. The researcher being an active participant in the system, used the instruments of interactive sessions, seminars, workshops and interviews.

The study was carried out among a cross-section of administrative class who are employees in renowned government-run public universities in Nigeria and are being governed by the same regulations under the jurisdiction of the National Universities Commission and the Federal Government of Nigeria.The target population of the work are the academic administrators, the professional administrators, as well as scholars of educational studies in HEIs. A survey is conducted to validate our stance on compromised standards, and to posit measures that re-assert good practice, using the qualitative research method to succinctly describe the research problem by observing the dialectical nuances of the work environment and drawing far-reaching conclusions on the contemporary state of management and administration in our universities. The research is hinged on social exchange theory (SET) which overtly describes the relationship between an organization and its employees in a social context (Blau, 1964; Molm and Cook, 1995; Azim, 2016), while at the same time, extending the social interface description to the individual level to describe relationships between supervisors and subordinates in a leader-member exchange (LMX theory) background (Manzoni and Barsoux, 2002).

Results: The study revealed that ethics and corporate culture have become compromised due to decades of abstruse practices, and that there was the need to urgently revamp work ethics, re-align values and re-orient practice in order to catch up with the meteoric speed of the global space. The nuances and intricacies involved in creating and maintaining standards, and the necessity of recreating a virile work culture is incontestable, not forgetting that our colonial antecedent also provided a skewed background for the practice.

Unique contribution to theory, policy and practice: It was recommended that negatives like excessive bureaucracy should be jettisoned, and open-door policies should displace shoehorned policies of government. Our universities should be nurtured and encouraged to self-regulate, while modern management technique should be entrenched in the system. In order to be able to effectively deliver on their triadic mandates of teaching, research and community services, the workforce in the universities should be adequately motivated and a strong reward system should be put in place to galvanize excellence. The National Policy of Education should be constantly reviewed in tandem with new-age realities, while aggressive digitization should be introduced to simplify operations, reduce stress, and maximize service-delivery.