ABSTRACT
Central to any discussion on university development is the quality of education provided. The supremacy of the issue in Africa is driven by the recent surge in the number of universities, both public and private, along with the burgeoning number of students. In a recent commentary, a Kenyan analyst captured the concerns about the educational quality at the country’s universities in the following terms:
Public and private universities are in a dire situation . . . no infrastructure, no resources, no agenda or vision . . . universities in Kenya are rotten from [the] inside, and it is a matter of time before they collapse. Corruption is now the defi ning feature of our public universities; degrees are literary up for sale, sex for grades is an accepted norm, skyscrapers are bought in shady deals, and branches are opened throughout the country without any regard to quality. Half-baked graduates are churned out in the process. (Abdullahi 2013, 20)
Sentiments like the one above capture the frustrations with the direction of the institutions that, from the time of independence, have been regarded as instruments of national development. At the advent of independence in the 1960s, African universities were regarded as the vanguards of national economic, political, and social development (Cloete et al. 2011; Mosha 1986). They were expected to be the engines that would drive development through the training of high-level manpower and the off ering of innovative strategies to solve the myriad developmental challenges. The 1960s heralded the “Year of Africa,” in which universities were to be the central movers. As seen in Chapter 1, the “developmental university” missed this goal by a wide margin. The current dispensation on national development, characterized by globalization and a “knowledge economy,” has given rise to new economic, political, social, and cultural challenges to which universities are being called upon to respond.
