Taiwo Oluwadare, Ibadan
AN advice has gone to institutions of higher learning in Nigeria to popularise cross-disciplinary scholarships for national development in order to overcome the limitations of over-specialisation and maximise the advantages of it for national development.
Visiting Professor of English Language from the University of Ibadan and Dean, Faculty of Humanities, Management and Social Sciences, Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, stated this in his lecture at the fourth matriculation ceremony of the university:
“A university is expected to be a centre of varying disciplines fused into a unilateral hub of knowledge, harnessing the resources of each field in the interest of humanity. The essence is to be able to integrate more, and make the university more resourceful and instrumental in solving the problems of the common man.
“What does it mean to be literate in the age of (the new media) of multiple scholarships and multiple literacies? Without doubt, the new understanding of literacy in the new age is such that it invites multiple definitions, for literacy itself is a plural activity.
“How do we popularise the potential of cross-disciplinary scholarships for national development? How can we overcome the limitations of over-specialisation and maximise the advantages of it for national development? How do we maximise the dialogue of the disciplines as a necessary means of attaining intellectual fullness?
“Specialisations are necessary; specialisations are industrial inventions of the Malthusian imagination. But at its worst example, specialisations breed the indiscipline of mutually exclusive disciplines.
“But in this century, it is those who are capable of crossing the boundaries of the disciplines who will make the difference; it is those who possess the ability of disciplinary transgressions who can interact beyond the borders of their own specialisations; those who has privilege horizontal collaborations (across the planks or branches of the disciplines); those who embrace the advancement and deployment of technology in SSH, education and those who are not afraid to embrace the qualitative power of the imagination even when they are engaged in the empirical world of scientific.
“The promotion of scientific inventions without artistic/humanistic interventions is a movement towards mechanistic chaos, what can be imagined as progressive backwardness. Scientific/technological advancement without (the) ethical consideration of things runs the risk of foisting a generation of Frankensteins on the society.
“The character of cross-disciplinary practice is that one discipline illuminates the other in a concentric, mutually functional way that intellectual literacy is achieved across and within the disciplines.”
The Vice Chancellor, Prof. Steve Afolami, acknowledged the proprietors for giving the school authority freedom to operate.
“We thank the proprietor, the Chancellor, the chairman and members of the Board of Trustees, the Pro-Chancellor and members of the Governing Council for the immense support they have given since inception and the freedom given to the vice chancellor and his management team to govern the university according to best practices as recognised internationally and as desired by the National Universities Commission.”
He also disclosed that the senate of the institution at the inception instituted academic awards for excellence to foster high academic standards and encourage healthy competition by students in all its programmes.