Following the controversy that usually trail the disparity between programmes accreditation by the National Universities Commission and professional bodies in the country, a university administrator has called for synergy and interrelations in the interest of the nation’s educational system.
Towards this end, the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academics), Osun State University, Osogbo, Professor Clement Adebooye, has called on the NUC as well as the leaders of notable professional bodies charged with the responsibilities of accrediting courses across the Nigerian universities to, as a matter of urgency, look into the possibilities of working together in ways that would lift standards of academic programmes.
The DVC spoke while giving the chairman’s remarks at the 2017 Law Week Dinner of the Law Students Association of Nigeria of the National Open University of Nigeria, Ibadan Study Centre, held at the ICAN Study Centre, The Polytechnic Ibadan.
Adebooye, who, prior to his appointment at the Osun State-owned university four months ago, had taught in notable universities in Germany, Canada among others, stressed that the situation in which reports submitted by NUC accreditation team on a given university did not tally with that submitted by notable professional bodies such as Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, Council for Legal Education, among others, often portray the Nigerian education system in bad light in the comity of educational institutions across the world.
He said, “The situation whereby the NUC accreditation team submit a report that is different from what the notable professional bodies such as the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, Council for Legal Education, for instance, submit on the same department or faculty shows that something is wrong somewhere.
A former member of the House of Representative, Hon. Femi Kehinde, while delivering the lecture entitled, “Legal Education in the 21st Century: Need for Diversity- The role of Open and Distance Learning Concept”, expressed confidence in the National Assembly to address through legislative means, the grey areas limiting NOUN graduates from being admitted in the law school.
Kehinde, who was a member of the parliament that passed the bill for the establishment of the NOUN, noted that the issue of people studying law through distance and open university learning system shouldn’t arise at all, recalling that many luminaries of the legal profession acquired their education through correspondence and distance learning.
