The vice-chancellor of Technical University of Kenya has been vilified and demonised as the embodiment of inefficiency in management of universities and a textbook manifestation of how not to administrate a public university.
He has also been unfortunate enough to be used to perpetuate a theory that intellectual depth and know-how of academic matters is not a guarantee of efficient management and that professors should not just be appointed to manage universities on the basis of their academic meritocracy but qualification in the field of management.
Administration of public universities behoves one to possess a blend of strategic vision and tactical flexibility. An administrator needs to exercise level-headed thinking even when remonstrating with students who have demonstrated their aptitude and willingness to engage in students’ militancy so as to effectively communicate their grievances. Studentshave manifested regular, unremitting embrace of violence as an accompaniment to their discussion with the administration. Students use violence and threats to commit violence so as to jawbone the layers of university management to agree to their demands, even when those demands are petulant and borders neediness.
A case in point is when I was a second year student at the university, it was approaching the end of semester and the pressure of semester exams was weighing heavily on our consciousness and coupled with brokenness we were a ticking time bomb. We were walking around with crowns of pettiness and trying to summon self-restriction to enable us finish the sluggish semester.
It was around seven atnight, we had retired to our dingy hostels which during the end of the semester had perpetual rancid air hanging in the rooms and in the beginning of the semester the musty after sex smells was so thick we had to force our entrance into the rooms.
Hopelessly and with profound sense of distraught trying to eat our tasteless and poorly cookedUgali ( a lump of uninspiring boiled maize meal) and sukuma wiki( bitter vegetables that The inimitable King Pharaoh used to punish the Israelites with it before God intervened).The food was uninspiring, boring ,an insult to the word culinary and a conduit to depression. Most of us were suffering from acute withdrawals symptoms oflack alcohol and sex, since we were lacking funds to indemnify the above luxuries. We were just waiting for any slight that will afford us the chance to release our inner turmoil and postpone the exams.
Then we had a blackout ( the gods of destruction had indemnified our supplication) and we lost the little self-control we had in us and poured in streets demonstrating and stoning any fancy vehicle on the road that night. We were informed with the assumption that any person owning a fancy car was stealing money from the government and was therefore responsible for poor government services and providing amenities like endless supply of electricity to the university hostels. After only thirty before the police intervened, ten cars were reduced to a smouldering shell and one male hostel was stripped bare by hooligans using the demonstration to loot.
The next morning, the university administration chiefs were under impressed with our handiwork of destruction and what we students were referring to as recreational violence to break the monotony of classwork. The vice –chancellor chastened the students and accused us of deliberately shunning discussions to address our lamentations instead opting to embrace hawkish diplomacy and wanton destruction of property. He further pointed out angrily, that this was a clear manifestation of students affected with intellectual staleness and zero discipline in being committed to observing rules and laid down procedures of communicating our frustrations.
The students remonstrated bitterly and pointed out that the cream of university have sufficiently demonstrated their lack of enthusiasm in confronting unflattering facts about how the school is mismanaged, we claimed that university’s administrators are highly disinclined to engage students in dialogue thus the use of hawkish methods to give prominence to our frustrations, lamentations and grievances.
LAWYER UP 