The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calabar, Prof. Florence Obi, has said that the administration of the school has undertaken a “clean sweep” of the law faculty in response to the sexual harassment claims made against the faculty’s suspended dean, Prof. Cyril Ndifon.
According to the Vice Chancellor, all principal officers at the faculty are now women.
Obi made this known on Saturday’s Sunrise breakfast show on Channels Television.
She said the school management has put in place measures to curtail cases of sexual harassment between lecturers and students of the institution.
In a protest, some female law students at the faculty had accused Ndifon of sexual harassment.
The university administration then suspended Ndifon and set up a team to look into the accusations made against the accused law professor.
Commenting on the matter on Saturday morning, the vice chancellor said the panel constituted to probe the matter would do justice on it.
Obi said, “We have put up measures to see that, going forward, such occurrences are curtailed.
“You can’t completely eradicate sexual harassment in schools because it happens everywhere, every country. It does happen but the impunity, the serial abuse, the way and manner in which this is done, is where it becomes a problem.
“In my university, we have put up so many measures that we know, going forward, nobody in the Faculty of Law will hold students to ransom and make any female student so vulnerable to having an amoral relationship
“We have put about seven committees in place. There is a committee to assign students to supervisors because there are accusations that the suspended dean took all female students to supervise and that made them vulnerable to his advances. Now, there is a committee to handle that.
“There is a committee to look at mobilisation to law school which students alleged in their protest letter to us that they (staff) use that as intimidation, as a way to getting some of them to succumb, and that if they don’t accept, they may not be mobilised to law school. We have set up a committee to look into that.
“There is a result vetting committee. We have also made a clean sweep in the faculty where we have the acting dean, for now, a woman; the sub-dean, a woman; the faculty officer, a woman; we want to see that the students are protected.”
