The development ideal in higher education: The experience of Kenya and Tanzania

Abstract

During the 1970s African universities were subject to powerful external expectations about what their role in national development ought to be. These stressed the need for universities to serve national policy and public welfare in direct, immediate and practical ways. The varied response of the Fast African universities provides sonic instructive experience about the potential and limits of a meaningful role for African universities in the 1980s. Although several of the chosen university innovations, especially at Dar es Salaam, were significant in their own right, they have not yet demonstrated a comprehensive or convincing model for emulation on the continent. An explanation for this mixed record suggests that the developmental expectations were partly premature and inflated and partly misconceived.

In the first place, for most of the 1970s the universities were preoccupied with the internal task of institution-building and were in no position to expand their social responsibilities into an effective extension role. Secondly, the East African experience suggests that universities are not the most appropriate institutions for providing practical leadership in development projects or in policy-making which goes beyond pedagogic purposes. Thirdly, the varied experience of the three universities of Makerere, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi has shown the extent to which the character of the political regime circumscribes the assertion of an autonomous role. Finally, the public emphasis upon an external contribution to development has distracted attention from the real internal achievement of the universities during the 1970s which was to build up an indigenous teaching and research capacity.

The challenge of the 1980s is to convince their governments and national populations that their contribution to national development lies not in the extent to which they can conform to certain material and intellectual prescriptions, but in their ability to demonstrate that above all the process of development requires the kind of trained minds and thinking society that universities are uniquely equipped to promote.