The flagship and the university idea
By Ebenezer Obadare
W HEN I wrote an article a few weeks back criticising the intention of the authorities of the University of Lagos and the French Village to prescribe a dress code for their (female) students, I half-expected to kick-start a debate about the future of tertiary education in Nigeria. I was therefore hugely pleased with the volume of responses to my submission, even though the general tenor has been rather disappointing. Over the last two weeks, the initial trickle of responses has swollen into a dam, mostly of condemnation. Majority of these have appeared in other publications and various discussion sites on the Web. However, I did not quite see the need to mount a counter-attack until I read The Guardians editorial of Wednesday July 14. The prime reasons why I have decided to respond may be advanced as follows.
One, unlike the gaggle of respondents who have anchored their condemnation of my purported tolerance of 'indecency' and 'obscenity' on one or another religious precept, The Guardian is an institution with an ontological responsibility to a defined meta-religious public. While it may hold and defend moral values, it is not a religious institution and must constantly forswear those prejudices which individuals are permitted to hold in their private domain. Two, The Guardian is not just another newspaper. It claims to be, and has largely been, the flagship of the Nigerian press.
This could be a crushing burden, but no one will doubt that The Guardian has mostly borne it with grace and elegance. The prose of some of its reporters may have lost its erstwhile cadence (a problem which admittedly many Nigerian newspapers should urgently find a solution to), but it remains the most competently edited newspaper in the land. Third and lastly, The Guardian prides itself as a liberal institution. This is the most onerous of its self-imposed social responsibilities, and quite easily the one in regard to which similar institutions elsewhere have been known to fall on their faces.
For the liberal spirit, that which, to borrow the words of Peter Berkowitz, "conduces to the maintaining of free institutions", is a highly elusive one. Liberalism " and it is a bastard mimickry of its essence if it is not one " is essentially a moving philosophical target. On any given subject, it is always difficult to feel which side of the argumentative divide a liberal spirit might bat for, although in the case of The Guardians editorial on the proposal for a dress code in our higher () institutions, it seems to me that the newspaper did not even seek for the liberal mean. To put it simply, I have not read a more a typical The Guardian editorial in recent times, and one is at a loss to imagine that the editorial board of Nigeria's most progressive newspaper actually reached the conclusion expressed in the said comment after a rigorous exploration of the issues at stake in this matter. The entire editorial is littered with errors of logic and fact, a few of which I will point out in a moment.
With that single editorial, The Guardian has squandered a golden opportunity to make a telling statement on an issue that seems to encapsulate the unfolding crisis of tertiary education in Nigeria. By so doing, it has done a disservice, not only to its identity as a liberal establishment, but also to the idea of the university as a space whose primal characteristic is diversity " moral, intellectual, political, and of course, sartorial. By throwing its influence behind a pack of fundamentalists who are masquerading themselves as beacons of a project of moral regeneration, it has dealt a blow to the very spirit of tolerance which it has always sworn to protect.
Let me illustrate my previous thesis that the newspaper's case rests on a series of false (and flawed) associations. First, the editorial makes the unsustainable claim that "the problem of indecent dressing, immorality and social decadence stifles the efflorescence of academic excellence" in our universities. Pray, if "indecent dressing" in the universities is a recent phenomenon, and the decay in the system dates back to the beginning of the lost years of military rule, how can the stifling that The Guardian speaks of be plausibly caused by the former Isn't the newspaper mistaking cause for effect here What exactly do "indecent dressing", "immorality" and "social decadence" mean in this particular context Whose notion of decency are we talking about, and whose immorality
The editorial briefly considers the more plausible possibility of events on the campuses being a mirror of developments in the larger society, yet casually and mysteriously dismisses it as "spurious and escapist". Why Hasn't the newspaper on countless occasions in the past advanced the same interface Why has The Guardian suddenly decided to become ignorant of a piece of sociological fact that is key to unlocking the riddle of instability in higher education in Nigeria By its manifestation of wilful ignorance, the editorial throws the newspaper into the needless muddle of arguing that "universities are expected to be oases of sanity in a desert of moral and social decadence". Surely, Nigeria must be the only place in the world where universities are expected to perform this arbitrarily defined role.
Second, The Guardian argues that because of the nature of their apparels, female students "deliberately or inadvertently either set themselves up as potential rape victims, objects of male lasciviousness, or worse." This argument barely stops short of validating rape. At the very least, it makes a dangerous justification for it based on the acceptability or otherwise of what the female (student) has decided to wear. One has heard this argument (a subtle endorsement of rape and sexual violence if ever there was one) repeated so often it begins to grate. Yet, it only has the solidity of pure wind. If rape is bad, nothing, not even utter nudity, can justify it. As I argued in my first piece, we know from research the causes of rape, and they have nothing to do with "inappropriate dressing".
Does the newspaper realise for instance that rape incidents are more rampant exactly in those countries across the world where "decent" or "appropriate" dressing is enforced as part of the religious or cultural system What The Guardian has inadvertently done is to strengthen the arm of those who need the barest encouragement to visit violence on innocent girls, both within and outside the campuses. Quite sadly, its position will come as welcome news to members of self-appointed fashion Talibans who have been harassing females across the country for the crime of putting on a pair of trousers.
There is of course an aspect of this whole debate which the editorial itself does not mention, at least not directly, but which is implied by the recurrence of the word 'immorality'. This is the issue of sex and the role it is supposed to play (or not play) in the social life of our universities. Rather than bring this all-important subject to the forefront, The Guardian has chosen to play the ostrich, taking shelter behind vaguely defined "acceptable standards of decorum expected in the hallowed corridors of the academia", and even making an ill-judged connection between "indecent dressing" and cultism. Next, we may be blaming "indecent dressing" for the inability of JAMB to organise successful entrance examinations into the universities!
What kind of universities do we want in this country What does the university idea represent in Nigeria What roles are universities supposed to play in social and cultural development These are few of the dilemmas which the controversy over the propriety or otherwise of a dress code for (female) undergraduates has brought up for critical deliberation. Is it that The Guardian does not appreciate the ramifications of these issues, which is unlikely, or has it played into the hands of moral crusaders without the foggiest conception of them, which one suspects might be the case Either way, it has flunked a glorious opportunity to nip the festering extremism and spirit of intolerance on our campuses in the bud.
Obadare is with the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
