Citadels of Crisis: The Predicament of Nigerian Universities

Once highly regarded as centers of excellence, Nigerian universities now uniformly occupy the basement of most global university rankings. At the same time, the nation’s academia is all but shorn of the social prestige that previously attached to it. This essay argues that neither the specific degradation of the professoriate, nor the broader crisis of higher education, can be understood without attention to the crisis of the postcolonial Nigerian state. Accordingly, restorative strategies must take into account the historicity of the crisis, and its insertion into a whirlpool of national, regional, and global forces.