VC: Courses at Usiu-A are not as expensive as said 

A: I started on July 1, 2024, but there was a three-week interception with the interim vice-chancellor to make the transition smooth. In some places, you are kicked out and another person brought in very quickly. The transition was nice here, with Dr Lola Omole-Odubekun – who was interim – helping acclimatise me to the Usiu-A, which is a good practice that other institutions need to emulate. 

Has that been the tradition in Usiu-A or was it specifically for you?

It depends on the time or period. There are opportunities in other institutions as well. I saw that when I was the Commission for University Education CEO. In most private institutions, there is some warm handover. This reassures the constituents that the change is a continuum. 

It was really good for me because I had three weeks of induction. I met people, different sectors in the institution – including students, faculty, staff, senior administrators – and even sat in council meetings. Knowing there was someone else there, I didn’t have to make the major decisions. It was calming. Many of our public institutions don’t do that. Some even buy new padlocks.

How does it feel to be the person to make major decisions for Usiu-A?

It is a huge responsibility and an honour. It is an opportunity to bring all the experience I have had from many areas of leadership, mostly in higher education – from being a regulator to becoming the regulated. 

What’s your take on moving from public service to private?

There is something I appreciate from the public side. Before you make a decision, there is a circular or policy. If you have seen the letters public officers write, they say the institution was started under this, ask to do XYZ. They direct you to a specific area of operations. There is no ambiguity. That prepared me for the kind of work I will do here.

Before you were hired by the Commission for University Education, where were you and what were you involved in?

I was in the United States where I taught in three institutions. One actually has a presence in Kenya. It is an off-campus programme for St Lawrence University. I also did work for Augustana College in Illinois and Calvin College, now known as Calvin University. I worked with an organisation that takes books to different parts of the world. We call it the Theological Book Network. 

I returned to Kenya on September 3 and my tour of duty started two days later. 

That means you did not have the kind of induction you had at Usiu-A.

There was zero induction. I was just thrown in the deep end. I just came in, met the board and they said: “this is your mandate.” If you have been in leadership, the first thing you do is to look at the heads of department and the rest of the people. Those are the people that make things move.

Your experience is largely from America and you have come to a university that traces its origins in the US. You have also studied in America. How would you compare American education with ours, especially the transition to the compentency-based curriculum (CBC)?

It is intriguing. One of the things I noticed when I landed in the US was the relaxed relationship between faculty and students, especially at the post-graduate level. They consider one another colleagues. I think it’s the American culture of aspirational to be linear rather than hierarchical.

There is so much hierarchy here. I  don’t think anybody here calls me by name. They say “Prof”. In many African cultures, identity is tied to a social relationship. I came from a culture where we read short pieces but in-depth. When I was in postgraduate, we read 200 pages and spent 30 minutes talking about it, meaning you capture the key areas. You need to be able to summarise key ideas. There is a lot of analyses and synthesis. 

This is very much in our culture where if you get a book or a paper, the first thing someone does is underlining. They like what the person is saying rather than what the big idea is. 

There is a little bit of more ability to test things and push boundaries in the classroom. Students are encouraged to ask questions, especially as you go higher.

That is much more common like lectures and students doing examinations and quizzes. There are seminars as you go higher. Your peers ask each other questions; critiquing each other’s ideas and enabling them to become better because of your perspectives. 

That is encouraged. Here, the challenge has been taking teachers as the centre of knowledge. That is because of the distribution of resources. Some institutions have more resources than others. The teacher has become the centre also because of his or her authority.

We need to bring these two cultures together, allowing students to be more explorative and asking  more questions, doing more seminars rather than lectures and having teachers become coaches rather than sages on stage.

In your opinion, will CBC help in curing some of those problems? 

It should. Rather than be tested for just knowledge, the student is  tested on applying that knowledge. In its ideal state, we’re moving in the right direction. I may be good at talking but you are good at writing. We can’t be tested in the same way as that becomes a deterrent to some of our creativity. 

The challenge has been the rollout and equipping our people well to deal with it. The kind of teaching that you need to have that kind of competence testing is different from the lecture method.

The right parameters to test that competence will be developed over time. It is a wonderful opportunity to tag on some of the creativity of our students and expand the realm. CBC is a good project if implemented properly.

What is the niche area for Usiu-A? What is your opinion on specialisation by universities? Should a university have a niche even as it trains in other fields?

It is not in any subject area but in the way we prepare students. Our greatest asset is preparing our students to answer the most critical questions. Questions keep changing, based on social and economic changes. We want to prepare our students to anticipate certain things to be done in the way the world is moving. Critical thinking is very important.

That is why we have the general education, where every student does numeracy, philosophy and communication – things that allow one to expand the mind rather than just be taught in the field of your specialisation.

Communication entails being ready to engage with others, especially others who are unlike you.

We have a diverse group of students. We allow them to interact with people from different parts of the world. We give them courses that are challenging. 

The other challenge is how to work in teams. Sometimes our challenge is how to allow people to say: “Yes, I’m good at this.” Our niche is in our approach.

What about specialisation by universities?

Do we want to produce specialised graduates for certain fields? There are certain areas the government of Kenya wants us to get into. Is there a university that has the critical mass of qualified people and resources to support that specialisation?

University education is more than the skills to do something. It is also meant to build citizenship. Who am I in this country, in this world? How do I relate with others? How do I think about things? How do I act in ways that are productive for our own thriving as a people and as a continent? You can specialise to build the mass that is needed.

Academics ask these questions because we educate through knowledge, skills and values. Many of us stress skills so that students can go out and get jobs. That person needs to be trained also to be a good member of a community. The biggest challenge for us in this country is how we articulate values at the workplace, in the family and in any space.

Can we teach values in school? Where do people learn values?

Values start in the household and are demonstrated in every institution. If it is a school, mosque, church, university or elsewhere, they are demonstrated because we act in response to certain things we like and want to see in others. 

If the values are flouted, we change and do the same. One of our key emphasis is integrity as an institution. It has to be demonstrated and emphasised. If you do things that are important to integrity, they will be picked. We have knowledge, skills and values. If you don’t combine these three but you get your first job, how will you keep it? How do you get to the next one? It is more than just a skill. 

The skills we had before the Covid-19 pandemic were challenged. We were more trained to reproduce knowledge instead of asking questions and creating knowledge.

From your experience as a regulator of higher education, how are our universities training their students to fit into the global market? How do we rank, in terms of the courses we offer, how we train and the kind of graduates we produce?

I want to be clear that we have very good education. The question is, what we do with it? You can have a nice car but what do you do with it? I have seen students leave the our education and go abroad. They perform very well. It means they have been prepared properly. 

In terms of building graduates for the international market, there are two things. Number one, are we constantly looking at what is happening outside of our curriculum? That is where we need to have more interactions with industry so that we understand what the industry is looking for. But industry also needs to know that we are not going to give it ready-made workers. We will provide it with workers who can be enhanced. 

Number two is to constantly ask ourselves, what are the added advantages? How do we prepare our students first? If we still teach them the way we were taught, they will not be relevant. We need to have industry and universities working together and talking to one another

We also need to think of the training to add to our curriculum to respond to the ever-changing nature of the workplace. There is a lot of debate about the cost of university education in Kenya at the moment.

How would you rate the cost of studying at Usiu-A and other universities in Kenya?

People say studying at Usiu-A is very expensive and that this is a university for the rich. That is not true. We have posted our fee structure online. You can compare with other institutions. There are perceptions and there is reality.

If you want a specialised, student-centred kind of training, this is the place to be. It is not mass production. This is not fast food. Ours is gourmet food. 

This is not where you put potatoes in a big tank and fry them  all. Here, you cut a potato, you do things to it, and you cook it separately. 

We are at a place where we want to think of university education as something that can be easily done. There are facilities, resources, people and materials that need to be put into that to produce that calibre of a graduate.

One of the challenges has been where we move from university education as a public good to university education as a product. That is a debate Kenya needs to be engaged in. Let’s ask ourselves, can we fully support university education because it matters to us?

The kind of training at university comes with a cost – and this is not just in Kenya. These issues are the same all over the world.

The new higher education funding plan has been likened to the American model. With university education coming with a cost, how much should government invest in it?

If we start on the premise of the university education being a public good, then we should invest fully in it. The question, however, arises: Should I, as a vice chancellor of a private university, get the same support that someone in my community who has no formal income gets? There is diversification of resources.

We also do due diligence to identify actual needy students who are well set to go to university. If the government thinks university education is for the public good, it should invest heavily in it.  In cases where someone cannot afford university education, the government should step in. If university education is another product in the marketplace, the market will play its role.

In terms of research and generation of knowledge, where are Kenyan universities? 

If we look at the international l publishing scenario, we are not doing well.

Why is that so?

From the researcher’s side, this is a field you actually want to produce knowledge. A lot of us do not necessarily go to higher education for that. At the undergraduate level, for instance, you are getting knowledge as foundation to understand the field. 

At the master’s level, you are mastering that knowledge. At doctorate, you are producing the knowledge.
If you go to the PhD level with the mindset of becoming a managing director of this or that, you are not interested in producing knowledge.

That is one of the deterrents. As researchers, we are not really thirsty for producing knowledge that is relevant to our field.

The  second point is that we are not investing well in research. When the National Research Fund was established, there was this expectation that it would get funds equivalent to a certain percentage of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. 

It came close to half of that percentage at the beginning. Today, it is not even 0.0 something of that. Do we really want to invest heavily in research? Do we also use research to make important decisions? How do we make use of research to make decisions? 

Research is supposed to explore areas that do not know and give us pointers and fill gaps. That is why we keep finding ourselves very low in terms of international ranking and research productivity.

Do we have enough professors in the country?

Absolutely not. 

What and where would you put our shortage?

The shortage is dire. We expanded education at the university level very fast. To populate universities with people qualified in the fields of teaching, you need to factor in the time it takes to produce them. 

It takes four to six years to produce a PhD but when you bring in the issues of complications in Kenya someone can spend 10 years doing it. It means we cannot match the fast growth of universities. We do not have enough PhDs and professors. 

The situations sounds grim. What is the solution?

Specialisation is key. That is where we would have done well if we identified institutions with high capacity to produce.

That is one of the things I would like to do here because Usiu-A has a high number of people with doctorates – up t 70 cent while the national average is about 36. 

If we can find centres with enough resources to support a large number of producing PhDs and not just producing doctorates for the sake of it, that will be a step in the right direction. 

Number two is how we get post-doctorates. That is where research comes in. Every institution should be in this position, with at least 50 per cent of their faculty at the highest level of training in their field.

How do you compare the current university student, especially the undergraduates and even the young ones doing their masters, to what you are used to?

There is a very big difference between the time I went to university and what is happening now. Finding information at that time was only in specific places. Today, our students are accessing information that took me even a month in just a second.

Does that mean they are learning faster?

They are exposed to information more. What they need to learn is how to curate, synthesise and critique that information and remove all the noise in order to make use of it. The present-day student is not coming to class looking for information from the teacher. These are students being raised in a context where they can access information from other parts of the world and can compare themselves with others. 

Our students are at a point they have access, in real time, to information on issues, places or occurrences. That expands their minds. The Gen Z is keen on authenticity. It’s all about counter-reaction to this made-up life.

Comment on the Gen Z involvement in social activism

They are looking at social justice and transparency. Those are things that are so important to this generation that I don’t think I remember that in my own generation. Is that reflected in the lecture halls? I hope so. Students can have the power to challenge ideas if they have alternative ideas they have curated and verified. I hope my colleagues are open to saying, “I don’t know everything, let’s learn together”. Can you say that when we know everything? You are expected to know.

If you treat information as always changing, which it is, we have the added advantage of experience to help you navigate and find better education.

Is artificial intelligence an opportunity or a threat?

It’s an opportunity. It is  helping us ask the question; what is it that I, as a person, can do that will make a difference in my student and research without needing repetition? AI is based on gathering much data, aggregating it, finding where patterns are and then telling you, this is what to do. It is challenging us.

Why do we teach what we teach? How do we teach what we teach? Who do we want to apply that knowledge to?
The question is how well I can train my students to ask the right questions – questions that have not been asked before. 

AI is waiting on information that it is fed as well. That will change our approach to education.

What Prof Ntarangwi’s vision for Usiu-A?

My vision is to bring out the vision of Usiu-A, especially in training students to be equipped to answer the questions that are being asked in our world.

They need to do it with integrity and to serve humanity. Those bottled together, in whatever we do in the classroom, in the office, in our research and even in our interactions. 

My number one priority is to solve problems for us. Those other needs will come to you.

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