Academy

The secretary-general of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors in Nigeria recently disclosed that only 38 women have been vice-chancellors of universities in Nigeria since 1960, out of more than 720 in total. The Conversation Africa asked Ekanem Braide, the Nigerian Academy of Science president and a former vice-chancellor, why this is so and how the country can have more women as university heads.

Why are there so few female vice-chancellors in Nigeria?

• As in other professions, the early career years of young academics in universities coincide with marriage and having children.
• Most young female academics have to take care of young families, teach, conduct research, publish and generally struggle to climb the academic ladder.
• Discrimination against women and under-representation of women in leadership positions are deeply rooted in cultural beliefs, values, traditions and attitudes.
• In my experience, the belief in male supremacy and female subordination remains dominant.
• Higher value is therefore attached to the boy over the girl even by highly educated men and women.

You have been a VC twice. How did that come about?

• I did not apply for the position of vice-chancellor in both instances.
• In 2004, I was invited by Donald Duke, governor of Cross River State, to head the new Cross River University of Technology.
• I was again invited to serve as pioneer vice-chancellor of Federal University, Lafia and I served from 2011 to 2016.

What advice do you have for women wanting to be a VC in Nigeria?

Female academics who aspire to become vice-chancellors should:
set a personal goal and plan to achieve it
prepare a convincing plan for the university, making it clear what they want to achieve as vice-chancellor
serve well in any position so their name comes to mind
be confident
undergo leadership training
study and be conversant with all mandatory documents guiding operations in the university
be familiar with the roles of the National Universities Commission, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, Federal Ministry of Education and other departments and agencies in the university system
apply and prepare adequately for the interview.

How can Nigeria have more female vice-chancellors?

• Men and women should just change their mindset about women.
• There are many women who are qualified to serve as vice-chancellors in Nigeria.
• Second, the government at national and state levels, as well as private proprietors, should consider and appoint women to lead universities.

Ekanem Braide does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.
• But like any major thinker, there are risks in summaries – some of which give us clues about Rousseau himself.
• Although he is known as a social and political philosopher, Rousseau’s creative output does not resemble that of a contemporary “theorist”.
• These are now conventional tropes, but they were only emerging at the time Rousseau was writing.

Natural or artificial

• Rousseau had shot to fame a decade earlier, after winning an essay competition advertised in the literary magazine Mercure de France.
• Where much philosophical discussion had been centred around the distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”, Rousseau opposed the natural to the artificial.
• He argued that what we ordinarily think of as civilisational progress creates – and then aims to satisfy – new and artificial vices, serving our vanity and not our natural needs.
• In fact, he proposed there were many good reasons to think they were greater in both.
• Read more:
  Guide to the Classics: Voltaire’s Candide — a darkly satirical tale of human folly in times of crisis

Society and inequality

• Developing these ideas, in 1754, Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.
• In it, he attempted a thought experiment which imagined what humans may have been like in a “pre-civilisational” state.
• Rousseau was aware that this act of imagination was speculative and he could not be sure of its results.
• He held that inequality was artificial.

Education and politics

• The first was the institution of a new kind of education; the second was reorienting politics towards a new moral foundation.
• In Émile, or On Education (1862), Rousseau wrote a treatise on education in the form of a bildungsroman – the first and likely the last of its kind.
• He sought to outline the conditions of a good education, which he thought should be based on lived experience and the development of individual character, not rote learning, mechanical memorisation, or even the reading of books.
• As for moral education, young people should learn about the consequences of their actions.
• Rousseau’s terminology has oriented discussions of morality, self-development and politics from the 18th century to the counterculture of the 1960s, the New Age movement of the 1980s, and beyond.

Deism and human nature

• According to Rousseau, we know what we know of God from Nature and Reason alone.
• In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (1776), Rousseau addresses this question directly, and in typically Rousseauian fashion:
  whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
• He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.
• whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
• He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.

• Most recently the microblogging platform backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, saw a surge of sign-ups in the days following Twitter’s rate limit, and Meta launched its microblogging platform Threads on July 5.
• Even very different forms of social media such as TikTok are benefiting from what many see as Twitter’s imminent demise.
• The turmoil at Twitter is causing many of the company’s users to consider leaving the platform.
• Research on previous social media platform migrations shows what might lie ahead for Twitter users who fly the coop.

‘You go first’

• These migrations are in large part driven by network effects, meaning that the value of a new platform depends on who else is there.
• For this reason, the “death” of a platform – whether from a controversy, disliked change or competition – tends to be a slow, gradual process.

It’ll never be the same

• What makes Twitter Twitter isn’t the technology, it’s the particular configuration of interactions that takes place there.
• And there is essentially zero chance that Twitter, as it exists now, could be reconstituted on another platform.
• But as our study implies, migrations always have a cost, and even for smaller communities, some people will get lost along the way.

The ties that bind

• They might be unwilling to completely cut ties all at once, but they might dip their toes into a new platform by sharing the same content on both.
• Ways to import networks from another platform also help to maintain communities.
• In this sense, Threads has an advantage over other Twitter alternatives because users sign up via their Instagram accounts.
• But even if there is a price to pay for leaving a platform, communities can be incredibly resilient.

• And the image of Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket that appeared in March 2023?
• How will voters know whether a video of a political candidate saying something offensive was real or generated by AI?
• Will people be willing to pay artists for their work when AI can create something visually stunning?

The many faces of authenticity

• Authenticity also matters because it is a social glue that reinforces trust.
• In short, authenticity matters, for both individuals and society as a whole.
• One of those is historical authenticity, or whether an object is truly from the time, place and person someone claims it to be.
• A second dimension of authenticity is the kind that plays out when, say, a restaurant in Japan offers exceptional and authentic Neapolitan pizza.
• In my own research, I’ve also seen that authenticity can relate to our expectations about what tools and activities are involved in creating things.

How to deal with the looming authenticity crisis

• Generative AI thrives on exploiting people’s reliance on categorical authenticity by producing material that looks like “the real thing.” So it’ll be important to disentangle historical and categorical authenticity in your own thinking.
• Also, it’ll be important for everyone to get up to speed on what these new generative AI tools really can and can’t do.
• Finally, in a world where AI operates as a tool, society is going to have to consider how to establish guardrails.
• What if Pixar films were deemed ineligible for the Academy Awards because people thought computer animation tools undermined their authenticity?