Graduates In Kenya To Blame.

Many Kenyan lecturers did not take kindly to my article titled “Why Kenyans take forever to acquire PhDs”

Some lecturers thought that the article was excessively one-sided and projected the lecturer as the villain.

I was inundated with e-mails and telephone calls, and have tried to condense the reasons provided by lecturers as possible causes for delays in graduate degree programmes.

Some professors felt that some Kenyan students were not putting enough effort in their studies. Some were simply too busy with other things to focus on their PhD work and this is to blame for delays.

One lecturer wrote: “Many of these students hold full teaching jobs as lecturers and have taken on part-time teaching at other universities and imagine that they can simply be given PhDs without sweat. PhD work requires time and sacrifice.”

This sentiment was echoed by a prominent education professor from a public university who wrote “…It is also important to mention the calibre of the students we have most of who would really prefer a short-cut to such a degree.”

Some professors blamed students for lack of seriousness, and commitment to academic rigour.

Instead of spending hours reading academic books and journal articles, many students have resorted to unreliable online sources like Wikipedia.

One wrote: “Some of the so-called PhD chapters cannot even be compared to essays submitted by undergraduate students in the 1970s and 1980s.

“They are simply cut and paste jobs, without proper attribution to scholarly sources. You want us to pass such claptrap without scrutiny?”

Lack of adequate research funding also took some blame. One lecturer wrote: “If professors are not funded for research in order to take PhD students as research assistants in their projects, where do you expect them to get data from?

“They will cook data and bring it to you as a thesis. My research lab has not received any funding for the last four years, but I am still expected to supervise PhD students.”

The mushrooming of universities was also blamed for delays in PhD work.

Some students registered for PhDs and disappeared into shuttle teaching, jumping from one campus to the next, and forgot all about their studies.

Some professors blamed some private universities of churning out weak PhDs and lowering standards and expectations. They blamed private universities for allowing weak individuals to graduate.

“Many of these students have come from weak Masters programmes and cannot meet the rigour demanded in strong programmes.

“They cannot blame professors when they come to us with weak writing, analytical and interpretation skills. They cannot hope to get a PhD if they cannot improve and incorporate recommendations given to them.”

Lack of course work in some programmes was also blamed. Lecturers said students who had been out of the classroom for many years, took long to get into the writing groove, and needed course-work.

In many universities abroad, course-work is used to expose students to current ideas and new literature. Such exposure is denied to students in programmes that do not have course work.

Prof Amutabi teaches at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa