Although many Kenyans should be saluted for the energies they expend on education, there is cause to be really worried about the craze for PhDs and other academic honorifics such as “professor”.

Some years ago, academic credentials would have separated the wheat from the chaff, but I am not so sure any more.

To begin with, virtually every other person you meet these days boasts of a PhD or at the very least, an MA or MBA degree (earned, stolen, honorary, in pursuit of ….call it what you will, but who really cares?)

Second, the noise I hear lately that there are not enough PhDs to go around, including merely finding chairpersons for a paltry 33 public university councils, is to my mind, a naked lie.

It is a cruel affront to our “native intelligence”, as one journal title has it lately.

Quite honestly, could some self-interest be trying to perpetuate what playwright Francis Imbuga once satirised as the preserve of “the progressive layers of humanity?”

Meaning that you can pretend that there are not enough PhDs and once the policy wonks are persuaded, you can justify the ignominy of serving in two, three, or even four public sector boards.

However, there is a macabre and inescapable fact: The rain began to “beat” us when not so long ago, someone somewhere decreed that academic merit be pegged, not so much on what you had painstakingly accomplished, but rather strangely, on the number of PhDs supervised and probably who you know.

A host of other strange criteria were included. In one place I know of, a report that, like Moses’ Ten Commandments, became the basis of upward academic mobility.

PRESTIGE DEAD

As you may have guessed, the ever peace-loving dons just watched as some well-known norms governing academic integrity went to the dogs.

Some well-established international labour norms were openly violated.

You hear, for instance, that some have recruited PhD candidates from across the road, others have penned dissertations for others (for a fee of course), completed supervisions in record-breaking time, and, wonder of all wonders, sat in the very panels that awarded those honours and/or promotions.

A vice-chancellor of a university was once reported as commending the “genius” of a lecturer who single-handedly supervised a whopping 50 PhDs, an international record of some kind.

As I now appreciate, PhDs and all those other academic titles of the past must surely mean nothing in a creative and highly inventive society like ours.

As for the pieces of paper that seem to have become an obsession, perhaps there ought not to be any problem dishing them out to whoever so desires.

Do not get me wrong, but I do not think it will change anything because in the fullness of time, we may have to look elsewhere for other criteria by which academic merit can be recognised.

What is certain for now is that the ritual earlier associated with being called professor or doctor so and so is dead.

Retired president Daniel arap Moi, in his chequered quarter century rule, often wined and dined with both the quacks and the crème de la crème of Kenya’s academy.

I once overheard Mzee Moi voice his lingering doubts about the people he was listening to, whether they were real academics.

Little wonder, then that (Dr) Moi too became a “professor of politics”.

If it is really true that there is a shortage of PhDs to chair university councils, I can suggest some magic-wand solution.

DECEIT

Why can’t we just promulgate it, so long as one has shown some modicum of interest? In any event, has the promulgation not been going on?

As lawyer Donald Kipkorir recently tweeted, there is one university that has awarded PhDs (both honorary and real), including “professorships” to “every conceivable con man, politician, and all other ne’er-do-wells.

Lest you forget too, the industrial and labour court was recently treated to the spectacle of an enterprising Form Four dropout who had been quite successfully “supervising” lecturers, for the man not only managed a campus on behalf of a university, but, if the reports are accurate, was also solely responsible for the recruitment, teaching, supervision, and awarding of masters-level degrees as well as determining, collecting, and disbursing fees.

So, what is the noise all about? Are we all not enterprising, born clever, and quite smart, given a chance?

Dr Outa is a lecturer at a local university. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..