By
Ganiu Bamgbose, PhD
Let me begin by operationalising “good” as used in this piece. I describe the academic mentors who feel that supervision has to be soothing to students, especially at postgraduate levels, as “good lecturers” in this article. Good lecturers would use expressions such as “These students are not to fill all the gaps in scholarship”, “We don’t have to make things difficult for them”, “Doctorate is not all that there is to life” and so on. These platitudinous expressions have become ways of negotiating standards and compromising rigour.
It is needful to state the two kinds of “bad lecturers” that also feature in this discourse. On the one hand, there are the bad lecturers who clearly make life difficult for students: the ones who keep files on their tables for a whole session, who attend to your files only when they are accompanied by an envelope, who will not let you go because you talk to the colleagues they do not like, and who generally torture rather than nurture. It is, however, important to mention that some of the actions of the lecturers in this category are consequent upon demotivating factors such as poor remuneration, heavy workload and absence of facilities, all of which require governmental and managerial interventions. On the other hand, there are the “bad” lecturers who will not accept mediocrity, who will not allow themselves to be guilt-tripped, who will insist on rigour, and who will not agree to a shortcut. Sadly, the line between these two classes of bad lecturers is blurred by narratives of interest.
At the centre of this piece is a plea to the good lecturers who negotiate away dedication and call it compassion, and substitute rigour with favour. Growth does not exactly come with ease, and it is okay to be misunderstood by supervisees during the research process. Like the central proposition of Douglas McGregor’s Theory X, which operates on the assumption that “employees are inherently lazy, inherently dislike work, and will avoid it if they can”, it is most likely that a supervisee would also want the easy way out unless the supervisor insists otherwise. Supervision is not a massage and need not feel like a soothing balm on the flesh. Of course, while one must not be like the bad lecturer who tortures rather than nurtures, it is also not ideal to be the good lecturer who negotiates standards rather than inculcates values.
Attributed to the founder of modern-day Dubai, Sheikh Rashid, is the thought that, “Hard times create strong men; strong men create easy times. Easy times create weak men; weak men create hard times.” If we churn out misfits as scholars, we would be destroying our collective future. Simplifying a process and journey that requires hard work, dedication, rigour and effort does not translate into being good. And, of course, being called “bad” for insisting on what is right is the genuine definition of being good. No researcher is ever excited about a rejection or the need to overhaul a study. However, everyone is pleased about their own work when it becomes better and richer.
In conclusion, while academic mentors must nurture and not torture, it should also be born in mind that academic mentoring and supervision are serious intellectual endeavours that should foreground competence and spice it with compassion. This is the only way “scholar-ship” will not be replaced by “scholar-sheep” in the Nigerian academic milieu.
(c) 2026 Ganiu Bamgbose writes from Lagos.
Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose, PhD
Department of English,
Lagos State University, Ojo
[email protected]
08093695359, 07084956118
