Editorial
Nigeria has built one of the most demanding professorial ladders in the world, and one of its most quietly unjust. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels the other out.
Consider what it formally takes to become a professor in a Nigerian university. The National Universities Commission sets the bar high: a candidate is expected to have accumulated something in the region of sixty internationally published works, roughly 80 per cent of them articles in high-impact journals, alongside at least three years of service at each rung of a strict ladder; Lecturer II, Lecturer I, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor before a full chair is even considered. External assessors, often from universities abroad, review the work. A rigorous oral defence follows. On paper, this is not a system that hands out chairs lightly.
Now place beside that ladder a person who never set foot on it. A researcher, an industry economist, a policy analyst, a technical expert with a PhD, who has spent fifteen years producing work, perhaps twenty, thirty, even sixty peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, technical reports cited across their field. They match or exceed the NUC’s own publication benchmark. However, they never held a university appointment. They never logged three years as a Lecturer II. And so, however voluminous their scholarship, the professorial chair is structurally unavailable to them. Not because their work lacks merit, but because the ladder was only ever built for people standing inside a specific institution, climbing in a specific order, for a specific number of years.
That is the dichotomy worth examining, not university against university, but the academic insider against the non-academic equal. Moreover, Nigeria’s own scandals show what happens when the system tries to circumvent this problem rather than confront it. In 2007, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, controversially conferred a professorship in “capital market studies” on a former stock exchange executive who had no full-time university appointment and, as later exposed, a fraudulent doctorate to begin with.
More recently, a serving government minister was awarded a professorial chair in cybersecurity by a federal university of technology, reigniting a national argument over what a professorship is actually meant to certify. In both cases, the public reaction was not that non-academics should not be honoured; it was that the professorship is a specific, earned credential, and handing it out as a courtesy title cheapens it for everyone who climbed the ladder properly.
So the instinct to guard the chair fiercely is not wrong. Nigeria’s own National Universities Commission has admitted, in its franker moments, that the country’s professorial ranks are inconsistent even among genuine academics; one university’s forty publications is another’s sixty, one department’s “high-impact journal” is another’s obscure local outlet. A credential already strained by internal inconsistency cannot afford also to become a door that money or political favour can kick open for outsiders. That, ultimately, is why the ladder exists at all: not to punish achievement outside the university, but to protect a title that has already been diluted by insiders too many times.
Nevertheless, protecting the chair is not the same as ignoring the person standing outside it with a full basket of scholarship and nowhere to place it. Other academic systems have already built the honest answer to this exact tension: the “Professor of Practice.” It is a distinct rank, not a shortcut into the traditional professorship reserved for accomplished non-academic professionals, typically requiring a decade or more of senior-level expertise, sometimes without a PhD at all, appointed through the same rigorous, multi-tier scrutiny as any academic hire. Crucially, it does not devalue the traditional chair. It sits beside it, named for what it actually is.
Nigerian universities already possess this option, informally and rarely. What is missing is the institutional will to formalise it with clear criteria, transparent appointment committees, and a rank that says plainly: this is expertise earned outside the university, evaluated with the same seriousness as expertise earned inside it.
The honest reform, then, is not to loosen the professorship until anyone with enough publications and enough patience can claim it. It is to build the parallel door that already exists elsewhere in the world, and stop pretending that the only respectable place for deep, published expertise is behind a lectern that took someone twenty years and four ranks to reach.
Until Nigeria does that, it will keep producing both outcomes this dichotomy warns against: professors who hold the title without matching its rigour, and experts who match the rigour without ever being permitted to hold the title.
