The Vice Chancellor of University of Calabar ( UNICAL) Prof. Florence Obi, has stated that it’s no longer business as usual at the institution as the administration has put measures in place to check some excesses of both staff and students.
Prof. Obi, who disclosed this on Friday in Calabar during an interview with journalists while commemorating her third year in office as a VC, said more academic reforms are on underway to take the institution to greater heights.
Recall that the VC, who became the first female to man that position in UniCal since its inception in 1975 was installed on Dec. 1, 2020.
Speaking about some of her challenges and achievements in the last three years, Obi said: “I had to work extra hard as a woman to prove to the world that women could also lead such prestigious institution.
“Although some people still find it difficult to accept the fact that a woman is the VC of the institution, that has not stopped her from moving forward with innovations that has created a better learning environment.'”
According to her, “when I came on board as the VC, I noticed that some lecturers taught and organised examinations but took up to two years to mark their scripts and produce results.
“Today, they all send their results to the portal in one month, because she had to enforce it despite the initial resistance.
“Besides, in the past, many students believed paying lecturers to rewrite their examination, “sorting” was the way to go, in fact the school was nicknamed “unisort” but we have gone past that today, you now have to work for your grades.
“I noticed that our past answer booklets were in the hands of so many people who were doing business with them, setting up examinations after normal examinations and we swung into action.
“We customised the answer booklets every semester and non has been repeated in the last six examinations in my administration, we also digitised the result system, making it easy for all students to access their results from anywhere in real time.
“We improved the quality of our facilities by reviving the Equipment Maintenance Centre that had been dormant for years and made it a directorate to move from department to department and ensure that our facilities are properly maintained. All these have helped to improve standard of teaching and learning,” qshe stated.
On facilities within the academic community, she said all the roads within the institution are worked on, streetlights installed to illuminate the school at night and a decentralisation of the central library to faculties with the introduction of a state of the art e-library.
On student development, she said the administration had upgraded the entrepreneurial centre to ensure that students acquired skills before leaving school while they bided and won the right to host the Nigeria Universities Games Association, (NUGA) 2026.
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