Rising students’ expulsion from varsities is worrisome

The gale of students’ expulsion from Nigeria’s institutions of higher learning should worry everyone with good thoughts for our dear country. The blaring headlines in our newspapers are scary and portend more dangers for society if the trend is not checked. Families are failing to catch their young ones at home, and evil hands lurking around the campuses are making them easy prey.

The major reason for which these rustications are being meted out to the students is a general decline in moral standards, manifested in sexual abuse, cultism, examination malpractice, and forgery, among others. Ironically, institutions of higher learning, as agents of socialisation, are established to produce young minds that are free from these vices.

Recent reports showed Bayero University, Kano expelled 29, rusticated three, and warned 15 others for being involved in examination fraud; Bamidele Olumilua University of Education, Science and Technology, in Ekiti State, expelled two female students for bullying a fellow student.

In May this year, Ajayi Crowther University, in Oyo State, expelled a number of its students for their involvement in the death of a second-year engineering student, who was clubbed to death on the allegation of stealing a phone. An online video of the attack showed the horde of students viciously attacking the defenceless victim.

These days, there is a strong indication that our undergraduates are in school for different reasons except the core purpose of learning and acquisition of productive knowledge.  It has become clear that many of them do not understand the reason they have been admitted into institutions of higher learning. To some, it is simply an opportunity to escape the prying eyes of their parents and other family members who dare to correct them in attempts to force them to toe the right paths of life.

For these young people, being in school is simply an escape from what they consider to be unnecessary restraints from the wild ways. So, the university environment, characterised by an unfortunate sense of absolute freedom, offers unfettered liberty to them.

A worrisome aspect of this debasing of our academic institutions is the correlation between the students’ behaviour and the general moral and social decadence in the larger society. In a way, these misdemeanours are not entirely the making of the campuses, if truth be told.  If the students are getting involved in cultism, they learnt it from the men and women they saw or read about even before they entered the universities. They have heard and perhaps witnessed how adults seek powers so they can control others.

If they are cheating in examinations, they know that they are not the first to cheat. After all, cheating and stealing have become the order of the day in our country. The students know that many of those who wield power in Nigeria have cheated their way through, so why shouldn’t they?

Our society has by choice driven away the long-held values of hard work, honesty, civility, empathy and care for one another. In their place, we have enthroned the quest for wealth by all means, a crass appetite for raw, naked power that men and women acquire just to hold others in subjection.  The same goes for sexual abuse, which, invariably, has become an acceptable way of life. From the homes to the schools, our society now elevates indecent dressing and all the allure of nakedness in society. And it seems that the worse, the better appreciated.

These ills and more have become, one way or the other, standard ways of life, first in the home, neighbourhood, and the larger society. The role of the campuses in their spread is that they provide a fertile ground for them to blossom. This happens because the university is seen as a land of free men and women, boys and girls. And, given the young age at which children qualify to enter the universities, some rogue elements have converted the campuses into recruitment camps for their associations and gangs.

Daily Trust calls for a total revamp of our social values, starting from the home. Let all men and women of good will rise to the challenge and insist that the right attitudes must be inculcated into our young ones right from the primary, through secondary schools, up to the universities.  This should form the core component of a new National Orientation policy for Nigeria, to catch our children when they are still young.