From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Few years ago, Bingham University, Karu, Nasarawa State, was faced with serious management crisis that almost consumed the fortunes of the institution. The crisis lingered till the coming of Prof. William Qurix, as the Vice- Chancellor. In this interview, he explained how the crisis was managed and other decisions that returned the school to the path of growth, academically and otherwise.
There seems to be growing acceptance of private universities in Nigeria
I may not be bold to speak about other private universities. We at Bingham University have witnessed tremendous increase in public confidence and trust. It’s evident in enrolment and other support we enjoy from parents and partners within and outside Nigeria. We just had our 18th matriculation ceremony few days ago and there was massive participation of parents and partners.
For the records, 2,318 new students, inclusive of postgraduate students, were admitted for the 2022/2023 academic season. The figure was 340 students above last year’s admission. There’s this generally acceptance of private university system. Faculty of Health Sciences has the highest number of new students with 424 new admissions. It is followed by the Faculty of Science and Technology with 328 new admissions, while Faculty of Social Sciences has 286.
Faculty of Clinical Services with 265, Faculty of Administration, 141; Faculty of Basic Medical Sciences, 117; Faculty of Environmental Sciences, 89 and Faculty of Law, 75. Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 61; Faculty of Arts, 37; Faculty of Education, 15 and School of Postgraduate Studies, 480.
What could be responsible for this sudden interest in private universities?
It is partly because of the unstable academic calendar in the public universities and we all know the reason. It’s simply due to periodic industrial actions by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). You are aware of the prolonged strike by ASUU last year. That didn’t go down well with students and their parents. Close to eight months were wasted to the strike and effect can simply be imagined.
Another point is because private universities are doing very well. In the last assessment and ranking by the National Universities Commission (NUC), private universities were far ahead of public universities. Also, the TIMES Higher Education ranking showed that private universities in Nigeria were in the first 500 best in the world. Obviously, private universities in Nigeria have come a long way and they are doing amazingly well.
How affordable are these your programmes?
Our programmes are really affordable to an average person to access. The most costly programme in Bingham University is Medicine, at N3.2 million. But if you benchmark it against other universities, you will find out that it’s very much lower than what other institutions charge. In Law, other universities charge in excess of N2.5 million, but we charge N1.8 million.
We have programmes that are as low as N900,000. For instance, Microbiology, Biochemistry and other related courses are about N600,000. English, Mathematics and few others are at about N400, 000. In Education, some courses are N250, 000. Religious Studies are as low as N150,000. Some people are even on scholarships up to 40 per cent tuition fees discount.
What kind of system did you adopt to distinguish your students?
In Bingham University, we adopted the system of balanced education. Our vision is our guiding principle in all we do, academically and otherwise. Our vision is to become a world-class university in knowledge and skills, while inculcating morals and spiritual values. Everything we do in this university, there’s always a touch of that. We have turned our programmes to be skill-based irrespective of the course of study. We have specially designed Bible courses to boost the morals and spiritual values of our students and we seeing the results through our feedback channels both from the parents, the students and our partners.
Outside classroom activities, what else for your students?
There is a committee set up to promote and reward positive behaviours among students. The committee engages the students in some productive ventures. It’s an all round target for us here in Bingham University.
Also, we apply the stick where and when necessary. Where there are problems, we sanction the person(s) involved to serve as deterrent to others. All these put together, help us to graduate students who are armed with relevant skills and competence to champion the desired transformations within and outside Nigeria. Here, we have the chance and opportunity to design programmes that would focus on life-long skills.
Programmes like what?
Okay, we have discipline specific entrepreneurship programmes. What it means is that each discipline/programme will have entrepreneurship programmes directed to it, tailor-made to its own areas. Gone are those days that students think that by nature of the course they are studying, they won’t be entrepreneurs. We have corrected that in our newly designed entrepreneurship programmes. Any student graduating from this university knows that he or she must have an entrepreneurship skills. For instance, in Business Administration, we have agreed that students must know how to write a proper business plan. We also have an incubation centre that was set up by our entrepreneurship centre. Outstanding students would be allocated spaces to begin their trade from here. We have also introduced leadership and mentorship engagements, and it’s compulsory for every student to acquire that skill before leaving here. Sincerely speaking, every university has a chance to be peculiar.
Can students survive in today’s world with classroom activities alone?
Let me correct one thing. If the classroom learning was not sufficient, it’s because the curriculum was not well engineered. If in your class curriculum, we insist you must do practical work, then we are enriching the curriculum. For us in architecture, apart from the SIWES that are compulsory for students, we have now introduced skills, notably, painting and some other related works, and students must find one to do. Learning has changed and the emphasis is on outcome. We now assess students based on what they have done with evidence backing the claims. Again, for us in the field of Architecture, we have introduced several changes in the academic work. We now insist that students must develop a prototype design that would reflect what Nigerian architecture should look like. Unarguably, teaching and learning methods have changed whether in or outside the classroom.
How are you harvesting the benefits of technology in teaching and learning?
Obviously, technology has redefined education and we are making maximum use of it. Students are allowed to come to school with their technological devices, with emphasis on laptops. We have, undoubtedly, leverage on technology. In fact, we were among the first institutions to start online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic which led to lockdown and restriction of movement. This university is technology sensitive.
But there was a recent announcement on phone use restrictions. What could have prompted that decision?
Yes. In as much as technology is good and has redefined education and human living, it has its own negative sides which are fast becoming dangerous to humanity, particularly the current generation. The decision was simply to limit the negative side of phone use, particularly in class. The feedback we are getting from lecturers was that students are highly distracted by their phones. Imagine a situation where a lecture is going on in the classroom, students are busy punching the button of their phones with the noise that accompanies it. We can’t go on that way. Great men don’t do that. We have also seen negative use of the phones particularly on areas pornography. If parents of these children are aware of what their children use these phones for, they won’t be happy.
We can’t claim to be teaching people about the fear of Christ and close our eyes to this. The students are allowed to bring normal phones and their laptops and other devices, but not android phones. Besides, we are not the only institution enforcing the restricted use of android phones and some categories of internet-enabled devices.
Bingham university was faced with a serious management crisis before you came. How were you able to stabilize and record progress?
The first thing is to identify your priority and focus on that. If there’s focus and you are moving with that focus, then you will make the necessary progress. In addition to that, you need the support of your principals. In this case, the Board of Trustees and the Governing Council. These set of people have given maximum support in all our plans for the university.
What happened afterwards?
Massive advocacy. We had to embark on advocacy. Lots of parents had negative views about the institution in the past years during the crisis, and that affected our performance. We had to go to them and make necessary corrections to the wrong perception they had about us with strong proofs. We were able to convince them and solicit their support and trust. That was when they began to show interest in the school again, and over the years, the negative picture they had fizzled out and we can see the impact. Parents also saw evidence of what we said to them. Our students are competing favourably in different fields across the world including medicine. Locally, we have gained massive support and recognition. NUC has declared us top on entrepreneurship. When I resumed as Vice Chancellor, we had about 2,500 students. But today, we have over 6, 000 students in our database and growing. This astronomical growth is an indication that people appreciate what we are doing.
What challenges do you have?
We have our challenges and it’s expected because we are doing good things. Each time we talk about the challenges and acknowledge them, then we put up efforts to work on them, and we have achieved a lot over the past five years. We have had accommodation challenges for our students but we are working on that. We currently building a new hostel that will accommodate about 720 students. Also, we have also worked on the road network and other things that has given the school a facelift.