ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a study, conducted from July, 1968 to June, 1969, is the first comprehensive sociological survey of an African university. A university should be a place accessible to all that have the necessary natural endowment to profit by it, not an additional instrument whereby a ruling class can maintain itself in power, nor a nurturing ground for a new privileged elite. Ideally, the researcher should be both an insider, and indeed a high-status one, and an outsider, to the University. The defensiveness of some of the senior administrators was also heightened by a steady stream of press attacks and “probes” into the University. In short, beyond endeavoring to understand the basic structure of the University, the study raises the problems of integration or lack of it between the University and the larger society. In as heterogeneous and complex a community as the University of Ilosho, it was necessary to rely on a great number of informants.
