ABSTRACT
The major historical significance of the Parkinson era, however, was that it constituted the transition from a British-dominated to a Nigerian-dominated institution. University College, Ilosho (U.C.I.) was being deliberately “Nigerianized” in preparation for Independence in October 1960. In anticipation of the end of British political rule over Africa, the British were consciously creating a successor elite to themselves, an indigenous mandarinate in their own image. Besides the academic emulation of the “best” British universities, U.C.I. authorities attempted from the first to reproduce the social conditions of Oxford and Cambridge as well. Short of sedition, academics have been almost wholly free to criticize the government, even during the Civil War and the military regimes. The tradition of academic dominance over university administrators was in good measure the product of Macaulay’s anti-bureaucratic conception of the university. Nigerianization in the University took almost entirely the form of filling vacancies left voluntarily by their prior, foreign incumbents.
