Interrogating the postcolonial Nigerian university

Nigerian public universities stand at a crossroads.They are confronted by a multidimensional crisis that challenges their self-curated image as bastions of learning, thought and instrumental research.The universities are also increasingly imbricated in global epistemological politics and trends.These entwinements both weaken them and offer them new ways of imagining their missions, and new imperatives for reinventing themselves as distinctly African universities participating robustly in the global scholarly and pedagogical marketplace.One dimension of the crisis is the conundrum that Jeremiah Arowosegbe poses in his two articles in this journal: the quest for academic freedom and autonomy of inquiry in the midst of an increasingly fraught reliance on the resources of deeply politicized state machines with designs to co-opt and remake universities (Arowosegbe 2023; 2024).How Nigerian universities, individually and collectively, respond to this multipronged crisis will determine their continuous relevance in discussions around national development and nation building.This article maps the landscape of the current crisis, discussing its dimensions, the novel characteristics introduced into familiar problems of form and substance, and the ways in which the crisis is shaped in part by new anxieties and pressures exerted by global and continental epistemological debates.I sketch the contours of a fastevolving, constantly mutating structural and epistemic crisis, while identifying and analysing the enduring foundational issues that require radical rethinking.An early caveat is in order: my analysis here will focus on the humanities, which form my primary scholarly constituency.The humanities are also where the most acute manifestations of the Nigerian university crisis are felt and where they are most vigorously debated.Another disclaimer is necessary from the outset, which is that in sections where my analysis takes on a comparative slant the comparison is informed in part by my training and employment in two well-resourced and selective North American universities

Ethnic group · Indigenous · Narrative · Postcolonialism (international relations · African cultural and philosophical studies · African Education and Politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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  Open Access•Stephanie Kitchen, D Mills•Africa Spectrum•2026

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