For over 50 years I have been in higher education as professor and researcher and all this time I ask myself: What do we want to see in a university or college graduate? What kind of person should she or he be?
As I ponder on these questions, several quotations of some prominent people come to mind and so in this reflection I would like to use their wisdom as our guidance in trying to answer the question: What kind of a university graduate do we want to see?
In 1989 there was this University of Central America in El Salvador, where six professors were gunned down by members of the military. Their sin was that they had been teaching their students to fight injustice wherever it showed its ugly face, and to work toward having a more just society where everyone gets their basic necessities of life.
These Jesuit professors were killed because they inspired their students to become citizens who are concerned with creating a more just society in which the gap between the halves and have nots gets narrowed down. But what we have today in most African countries are graduates who are not conscious about the poverty that continues to embrace our people. We have, for the most part, created graduates who want to become wealthy in a short time, graduates who could not care less about the poverty that is so abundant among us.
Then we have Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, our first president, who said: Our poor villagers give taxes to educate a university student so that when she or he graduates, goes to the village to fight the poverty that consumes the villagers. And that is why Nyerere said: we do not get education to run away from poverty, we get it so that we can fight it. If we are not producing graduates of this kind, we have failed miserably in our education system.
Instead, what we are witnessing is a growing number of so-called educated people who will do anything, foul and fair, to get rich. We witness the gap between the rich and the poor getting wider in our country and in most African countries. This is not acceptable.
This is therefore a call to revisit our education system, from preschool to university, so that we educate a future population that cares for each other.
