By Professor Olatunji Abanikanda
Prologue: Imposing an unqualified person as Vice Chancellor over demonstrably qualified candidates triggers a cascade of institutional damage that extends far beyond the symbolic insult to merit.
The Vice Chancellor is the academic and administrative nerve centre of a university; installing someone without the requisite blend of scholarly credibility, leadership experience, and deep understanding of higher education erodes the institution from the inside out. The consequences unfold across morale, governance, academic standards, reputation, and long-term viability.
The Vice Chancellorship of a university is not merely an administrative appointment, as it is the intellectual and moral headship of an institution whose very raison d’être is the pursuit, preservation, and transmission of knowledge.
To impose upon such a position a person bereft of the requisite qualifications, whether academic, managerial, or ethical, while simultaneously bypassing suitably qualified candidates, is to commit an act of institutional violence.
It defiles the foundational compact between a university and its society, and sets in motion a cascade of consequences that can take decades to repair, if even they are repaired at all.
A university derives its authority not from the buildings it occupies or the government that charters it, but from the credibility of the minds that govern it. A Vice Chancellor commands the respect of professors, researchers, and students only insofar as he or she is recognised as a peer of the highest intellectual and professional order!
When an unqualified appointee is thrust into this role, the institution’s legitimacy begins to crumble from within. Senior academics, that is men and women who have spent decades earning their professorial chairs, find themselves answerable to someone they cannot respect. This is not intellectual snobbery; it is the natural consequence of inverting the hierarchy of competence.
The result is a silent but corrosive de-legitimization of every decision emanating from the Vice Chancellor’s office, just as the current advertisement for the position of Vice Chancellor elicits. Policies are ignored, directives are quietly subverted, and the administration becomes a theatre of compliance masking a reality of institutional paralysis.
The facts and the figures: Lagos State University is endowed with enough human and material resources, sufficient to make it the cynosure and envy of its national contemporaries.
As at Q1 of 2026, the academics of the University is populated by 275 professors; consisting of eight (8) Sabbatical, two (2) Visiting and fifteen (15) Contract staff.
Out of the remaining 250 regular staff on full professorial status, only seventy (70) of them would have clocked sixty-five (65) years by 20th September 2026, the effective date of assumption of the newly appointed Vice Chancellor, and are thereby age bound and technically eliminated from the race for Vice Chancellorship of Lagos State University in this current exercise.
The remaining 180 Professors would be below 65 years on the day of assumption of duty as Vice Chancellor and are thus prima facie age-based qualified. These remaining professors had post professorial experiences spanning from 1 – 22 years, which are banded as follows: 1 – 3 years (46), 4 – 6 years (61), 7 – 9 years (45), 10 – 12 years (17), 13 – 15 years (7), 16 – 18 years (1), 19 – 21 years (2) and 22 – 24 years (1) as presented in the first image for visual appraisal.
When a broader banding in the light of my earlier post (https://www.facebook.com/share/1DCaHf2PPm/) on “Few, Several and Many” is used, the second image displays the proportion of professors based on their respective post professorial experience. Some of these Professors are well qualified after having served previously as Heads of Departments, Deans of Faculties as well as Directors of Academic Centres.
With these facts at our disposal, one then wonders why succession should be streamlined to the lowest band in first image when we have 28 suitably qualified candidates with even ten (10) years or more post professorial experience. That decision to supplant an unqualified successor could not have been borne out of dearth of qualified people but rather to some indefensible criteria, which informed the ambiguity in the advertisement.
My simple request is to advance a criterion with exactitude and not an ambiguous one as presented in the advertisement. After all, condition for promotion to the status of Professor refers to exact number of publications and exact scores in the grading system. Even If it is the wish of this very powerful cabal to limit their search and selection to “Several” as indicated in the advertisement, the 5 – 9 years post professorial band still stands a better argument than the 1 – 3 years band their eyes are focused on.
Now that I have presented the data (let the University challenge it if it feels it is not real data), and the superintending agencies (Governing Council, Ministry of Tertiary Education, the Visitor or the National Universities Commission) may request the University through their academic planning or Bursary units to provide the details of LASU workforce and the statuses of its academic staff. Let us now look at the ripple effects of such carelessly thought-out succession plan.
The readers be kindly reminded of the experience of the University when the incumbent Vice Chancellor was appointed. The situation was so bad that His Excellency Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu as visitor had to intervene and cause to cancel the entire exercise, with attendant actions by asking the Registrar at the time to proceed on Compulsory Leave for failure to adhere and enforce the University Laws, removal of the Pro-Chancellor and outright disbandment of the University Governing Council at that time (https://punchng.com/sanwo-olu-cancelled-lasu-vc-selection-process-over-guidelines-violation-govs-aide/).
Implications of appointing unqualified persons as Vice Chancellor: Excellence is self-aware, whereby talented academics know their worth, and they will not long endure governance by mediocrity.
The imposition of an unqualified VC sends a clear signal to the professoriate and the University in general, that merit is not the currency of this institution. Nothing demoralises a high-performing academic community faster than the signal that competence does not matter. The message is clear: political connections, ethnic arithmetic, patronage, or ideological loyalty trump decades of scholarship.
This breeds a toxic cynicism. Senior academics who might have stayed to mentor the next generation accelerate their exit to institutions that reward merit, and in response to this shenanigans, the institution’s best minds, precisely those most capable of attracting research grants, international collaborations, and distinguished students, begin to seek appointments elsewhere.
Those who remain often disengage, retreating into minimal compliance, withholding the discretionary effort that distinguishes a vibrant university from a diploma mill. This brain drain, once set in motion, is extraordinarily difficult to reverse. And the university is left with those who could not leave, or those who stayed because the lowered standards suited their own limited ambitions and capacity. Within a single tenure of an unqualified VC, a generation of intellectual capital can be lost!
A Vice Chancellor who does not understand the architecture of research, that is the culture of peer review, the imperatives of international publication, the management of postgraduate supervision, cannot champion it. Research clusters wither without strategic investment and advocacy. Grant applications go unsupported. Linkages with international universities remain unforged or collapse.
The consequences are measurable: declining rankings in global and continental university indices (such as we have witnessed in the recent past). Where university rankings already reflect decades of systemic underfunding and policy neglect, such further deterioration is not a mere embarrassment but rather it is an existential wound.
The Vice Chancellor is the chief executive of what is, in effect, a complex multi-stakeholder organization encompassing faculties, research institutes, student bodies, alumni associations, government regulators, and international partners. The governance demands of such an organization require not only academic distinction but managerial sophistication, financial literacy, and diplomatic intelligence.
An unqualified VC, lacking the competence to comprehend, let alone superintend these systems, will inevitably delegate authority to those who did not earn it through legitimate process, creating informal power centers and patronage networks (as we currently experience). Procurement becomes opaque and appointments become politicized. The statutes of the university are interpreted according to the convenience of those in power rather than the demands of fairness, and there may be complete disregard to the extant laws, statues and regulations of the university.
Academic boards (Senate, Faculty, Department or Appointment and Promotions Committees) become performative and are reduced to rubber stamps of “Approved? Approved!”, such as witnessed in the appointment of some individuals into “Senior Lecturer” position, who lacked the requisite qualifications; Six years post Ph.D. or three years of Lecturer I in a University or tertiary institution of comparable status and necessary publications as stated in LASU laws and conditions of service, whose only credential is that they are Personal/Special Assistant to the Vice Chancellor, and were never academic staff, either in Lagos State University or elsewhere!
The university, which ought to be a model of rational deliberation and transparent governance, becomes instead a mirror of the same dysfunctional institutional culture it should exist to critique and correct.
Beyond the institutional consequences, there is a profound moral injury inflicted upon those suitably qualified candidates who were bypassed. These are individuals who may have dedicated their careers to a single university, who have published, taught, mentored, and served in the belief that merit would ultimately be honoured.
To see themselves passed over in favour of a lesser candidate, one appointed on the basis of political patronage, ethnic calculation, religious appeasement, or financial arrangement, is to experience one of the most demoralizing forms of injustice, i.e. the systematic punishment of excellence.
Some will become permanently embittered, while others will carry their wounded sense of justice into their own administrative behaviour, reproducing the very dysfunction they suffered. A few will simply withdraw from institutional life altogether, their energies and gifts lost to the system.
Aristotle taught that justice is the giving to each what each is due. The appointment of an unqualified VC over qualified candidates is, by this classical standard, a failure of distributive justice of the most fundamental kind.
Students, who are the primary constituency of the university, are not oblivious to the quality of their leadership. When an unqualified Vice Chancellor is installed, student bodies frequently perceive the message beneath the appointment that this institution is not serious, and this perception corrodes their own investment in academic life.
Standards in examinations are suspected to be negotiable. Certificates begin to lose their social authority, and the transactional instinct, which is the belief that results are purchased rather than earned is further reinforced.
More broadly, the university’s relationship with society is damaged, whereby employers discount its graduates. Government agencies regard its research with skepticism. The institution ceases to function as an intellectual resource for national development, retreating instead into a self-referential world of ceremonial convocations and hollow proclamations of excellence.
The responsibility for such appointments seldom rests with the unqualified appointee alone. Behind every such appointment stands a Governing Council that failed in its oversight duty, a supervising ministry that privileged political calculation over institutional welfare, and a broader culture of impunity in which the abuse of appointment powers carries no meaningful consequence.
This is the reason why those primordial stakeholders are provided all these background details to avert a situation whereby the society would infer or conclude that Governing Council members or the Government are either lame-duck, bought over or lacked the necessary credentials to superintend the University.
It is a well-known fact that majority of the membership of the current LASU’s Governing Council are distinguished and accomplished professionals and men and women of means that will not run to LASU for their livelihoods, either as Contractors or Dependents on the University purse. Probably, the last time LASU was bestowed with this caliber of high flying, professional and high net worth individuals as Governing Council members was the Governing Council headed by Mr. Akon Kekere-Ekun alongside the likes of Tayo Aderinokun (of blessed memory), Jim Ovia, Mr. Wale Tinubu, Mr. Fola Ademola, Dr. Toyin Phillips, Dr. Gbolahan Elias (immediate past Chancellor of LASU), Mr. Tunde Folawiyo, Mr. Tunde Dabiri and others.
Those who impose unqualified Vice Chancellors are, in effect, making a declaration: that the university exists to serve the interests of its political patrons rather than the imperatives of knowledge. When such appointments go unchallenged, when academic unions are in dormancy or silenced, when courts are unengaged, when civil society looks the other way, the institution enters a cycle of institutional decline that may persist across multiple administrations.
The university is, in the most serious sense of the phrase, a sacred trust, held in stewardship for future generations, for the advancement of truth, and for the service of a society that has a right to expect from it both rigour and integrity.
To appoint as its head a person unequal to that trust is not merely an administrative error. It is a betrayal, of the faculty who serve, of the students who study, of the qualified candidates who were denied, and of every citizen whose taxes, fees, or hopes have been invested in the institution.
Research ecosystems are particularly vulnerable, since the VC sets the tone for valuing intellectual inquiry. An unqualified appointee often views research as a public relations accessory with prizes to be announced and centres to be named after patrons, rather than a painstaking culture to be nurtured. Discretionary research funds get diverted to vainglory projects with no scholarly merit. Doctoral programmes are diluted and over time, the university slides from knowledge creation to mere knowledge retailing, becoming a teaching-only outpost that loses the very identity of a university.
The consequences; academic, institutional, moral, and social, are neither abstract nor distant. They are immediate, cumulative, and, if permitted to persist, generational. History does not forget what poor leadership does to great institutions, neither should we. We are all witnesses to the indiscretions and maladministration of Nigeria’s immediate past leadership and the consequences on its citizenry, which unfortunately is blamed on the nation’s current leadership by those who are unaware that every action has a commensurate and opposite reaction.
The result is a governance crisis, with decisions on curriculum, research priorities, and academic promotions become decoupled from expert judgment. Strategic plans are rewritten as vanity projects. The Registrar, Bursar, Deans and Heads of Departments are either co-opted or sidelined. Whistleblowing and grievance mechanisms clog, and administrative fairness evaporates. Instead of stewardship, the institution gets a personal fiefdom, often with financial irregularities to match!
Recovery, when it finally comes, can take a generation and requires not only removing the unqualified leader but surgically excising the patronage networks, rebuilding the governance structures, and re-earning the trust of academics who were systematically demoralized and eliminated.
In conclusion, imposing an unqualified Vice Chancellor is not a simple personnel mistake; it is an act of institutional violence. It punishes the competent, rewards the parasitic, and rewrites a university’s purpose from the pursuit of truth to the consolidation of power.
The degrees it awards become hollow, the research it claims becomes suspect, and the society it serves is cheated of an essential pillar of enlightenment and progress. The ultimate cost is not just a failed institution but a coarsened public sphere that can no longer distinguish between genuine authority and counterfeit credentials.
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