Can the real professor please stand up?

One of the most prized possessions in Peter Kagwanja’s inbox must be a reader’s outburst that Makau Mutua, the SUNY Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York’s Buffalo Law School, is a “bogus off-the-shelf foreign student”.

The reader, who was responding to an article in The Buffalo News on the resignation of Mutua as Dean of the SUNY Buffalo Law School two years ago, protests Mutua’s “continued presentation of himself as an elite Harvard Law School graduate”, saying that in legal academia, a lawyer is considered a graduate of the law school where they earned their initial professional degree, the equivalent of an LLB.

The reader goes on to claim that Mutua, a graduate of the University of Dar es Salaam’s Law School, only attended Harvard in order to qualify for the New York bar exam, which is not the same thing as “attending three years of classroom study and taking law school exams in the legendary ‘paper chase’ environment at Harvard Law”.

“For Makau Mutua to represent himself as a Harvard Law graduate and flaunt the Harvard colours on every ceremonial occasion, bedecked with tacky medals of dubious provenance, is quite distasteful to his faculty colleagues.”

The reader’s tirade is part of the arsenal Kagwanja has assembled in response to Mutua’s public challenge to him to state the university that appointed him a professor.

The two commentators, who take strong, diametrically opposed standpoints on virtually every issue of national importance in their columns – Mutua in The Standard on Sunday, and Kagwanja in the Sunday Nation – are currently locked in a public spat, each accusing the other of posing to be what they are not.

Listening to Mutua, you will hear that Kagwanja is an intellectual fraud who abrogates himself a title that is appointive, while Kagwanja charges that Makau Mutua is a loudmouth who is too full of himself.

The loud arguments between the two perhaps point to the thin line between partisan politics and the role of public intellectuals. Whereas Mutua has never hidden his disdain for the Jubilee leadership, and is an ardent advocate of the recently ended ICC process, Kagwanja is a dyed-in-the wool government supporter who consorts with, and consults, for its departments.

The duo’s tiff has now sucked in political analyst Mutahi Ngunyi, who also consults for government, and University of Nairobi lecturer Godwin Murunga, who has often declared support for the opposition, but insists he is objective in his Saturday Nation column.

Ngunyi, a former popular columnist, is best known for his “tyranny of numbers” theory, by which he predicted that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto would trounce the triumvirate of Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka and Moses Wetang’ula in the 2013 elections because of the sheer numbers in their strongholds.

He was in the news recently for a controversial consultancy with the National Youth Service, and has also been charged in a court of law with tribal hate mongering.

FAILED TO FIND EVIDENCE

Mutua and Murunga accuse Ngunyi of using a PhD title that they say he did not earn. Ngunyi would not respond to our enquiries, but SoftKenya, an online publication, describes him as a political scientist who has taught in the University of Nairobi and universities in Europe.

Initially fought in the blogosphere, the war grew and spilled over to newspapers two weeks ago, with Mutua and Murunga both taking on Kagwanja and Ngunyi in their respective columns. Mutua wrote that he had searched and failed to find any evidence that the former and the latter had been conferred professorship and a PhD, respectively.

“Both Dr Kagwanja and the newspaper he writes for shouldn’t perpetuate the obviously wrong impression that Dr Kagwanja is a professor because he apparently isn’t … Mr Ngunyi and Dr Kagwanja must cease and desist from academic fraud.”

He insisted that the title professor is conferred by universities to lecturers in permanent employment, “not short visitorships”.

This position, however, is not shared by all professors. While agreeing that a professorship is an academic job description to which people are appointed on the basis of proven teaching, research, publication and administrative experience, Austin Bukenya, a leading East African intellectual, thinks it not wrong, for a person who has served as a professor, whether chair or visiting, to use or accept the title beyond their tenure.

“The point is that universities have their own criteria and systems of evaluating their staff and appointing them to posts, regardless of how the aspirants describe themselves. This is why you find that a person who might have served as a professor at one institution might be appointed as, say, a senior lecturer at another one. The reverse is also common.”

Kagwanja, who holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has previously responded in one short and measured tweet that he was at peace with his professional qualifications. But in a long e-mail reply to Sunday Nation’s request this week that he clear the air, he was bellicose, wondering why we were writing to him on “an extremely trivial matter”.

“At issue are articles by one Mr Makau Mutua and another acerbic writer called Godwin Murunga which asked whether I ‘qualify to use the title Professor’. I hope you have done your background check on their political affiliations to find out the motive for their well-co-ordinated attack on me – and others believed to be aligned to the Jubilee Government,” he wrote.

“If you are asking for a university degree called ‘Professor’ after PhD, that is funny/absurd – there is none!”

He wondered why Mutua and Murunga were asking for his qualifications yet he was not looking for a job from them. “I do not accept an invitation to a fight in a pigsty by those who have already damaged their careers and reputations (for your information, Makau lost his job as a dean last year and from last week Murunga has no job at the ALC!!).”

LONG ACADEMIC DEFINITION

Dr Murunga two weeks ago left the Africa Leadership Centre, a joint initiative of King’s College London and the University of Nairobi, but he insists his departure was a procedural end of tenure, and not a dismissal. 

But Kagwanja would not take up the challenge, instead offering a long academic definition of the title “professor”, which doesn’t mention conferment or appointment. He then referred us to his CV.

Indeed a search of Kagwanja’s name on Google returned an impressive array of publications in refereed journals, conference papers, books and monograms, as well as book chapters. 

Even Murunga, who maintains that Kagwanja is not a professor in any meaningful sense, concedes this. “Kagwanja is indeed very well published. I have never doubted that. I have read almost all the things he has written,” he says, but adds the rider that the publications are of varied quality and “have grown propagandist with time”.

Kagwanja has led a largely academic life. He was a visiting Professor of African Diplomacy at the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa, between 2008 and 2010. He says he has, since 2014, taught and supervised masters and doctoral theses at the University of Nairobi’s Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies.

So what does his appointment state? “My main work is to supervise MA and PhD students. But listen: I am a research professor. The other day I received a letter from the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nairobi, the most respected university in the region. He addressed me as Professor. He is not a fool to have done that.”

But Dr Murunga insists there is a distinction between the substantive usage of the term ‘professor’, from the generic usage “common in the US and in French educational jurisdictions referring to anyone who teaches at university or related tertiary levels”.

But even in these contexts, he argues, the generic definition is understood as different from, and inferior to, the substantive. “Indeed, such professors hardly use the title.”

Kagwanja, however, chose to take on Mutua, charging that the latter has no business talking about qualifications since he doesn’t have a PhD. “When he resigned as dean, he should have resigned as professor because his professorship is tied to a position,” Kagwanja said, referring to the long-drawn dispute at the Buffalo Law School in which faculty critics alleged perjury and mismanagement of the school. Mutua resigned in 2014.

But Mutua dismissed Kagwanja, saying he had no academic pedigree to argue with him about the academy. “I was the first African to become dean of an American law school, and the first black person ever to become dean of a law school in New York. My knowledge of the academy is grounded in reality, not fiction, like Kagwanja’s. His inability to tell us which university conferred him a professorship is proof that none ever did.”

He said he had checked the website of the diplomacy school at the University of Nairobi, and Kagwanja is not listed among the professors. “I wrote to Prof Maria Nzomo to check on Kagwanja’s status there several weeks ago, and she hadn’t responded. I can only conclude she doesn’t want to embarrass him. One can’t declare himself a professor – it’s an earned position.”

On the question of his own qualifications, Mutua said his credentials were in the public domain. “My CV is posted on the website of my law school, including all my degrees, where and when I received them, and when and where I was conferred the title of SUNY Distinguished Professor. The terminal degree in law in the United States in called SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science), which is the equivalent of a PhD. That he doesn’t know this shows his limited familiarity with the academy.”

The row between these high profile intellectuals has turned the spotlight on the state of Kenya’s higher academic system and the way it confers appointments. Whether the debate is necessary at all is neither here nor there, but for Prof Bukenya, “Just like Wole Soyinka’s tiger that doesn’t have to declare its tigritude but pounces, a professor doesn’t have to declare his or her ‘professoritude’: they profess.”

For him, the current obsession with titles and inclination to claim them, with the corresponding eagerness to challenge the claimants, is a symptom of a deep-seated anxiety as well as a confidence and identity crisis.