The Academia are where academics work. Their work, concerns unreal things in an unreal world. In the African university context, the academia are increasingly places where theorising, teaching and writing are done, not so much to develop the intellectual capacities of those involved, as to preserve and entrench academicism of the actors – the academics – and their students and peers.

Just as was the case during the Renaissance, the Modern Era and the Age of Reason in Europe, focus is on knowledge production, addition and management in the cocoons of knowledge (disciplines), sometimes called academic tribes. Therefore, academic work is done intradisciplinarily.

Academic rewards in African universities are not so much to the academia themselves but to individuals who, in the majority of cases, work in a lonely manner, guided by select supervisors, to maximise academic output in a chosen topic of research in the discipline or intradiscipline. Increasingly, intellectual output has declined as emphasis has shifted to academic production of individuals, departments and faculties. Intellectual production is thus rated lower than academic production.

This has meant that knowledge, thinking and reasoning, which used to be tested outside the confines of the disciplines, as the scholars interacted with other scholars and non-scholars intellectually, can no longer be so-tested in the marketplace of ideas.

Fewer and fewer scholars venture out of their disciplines, or even their academia, to articulate and clarify issues for society. They feel safer interacting and communicating to and amongst themselves and their students. It is increasingly feared that within the walls of the academia and their disciplines, mediocrity is predominating and meritocracy diminishing.

It is impossible to ensure meritocracy in an academic environment where intellectual midwifery, nourishment and discourses are deliberately squeezed out in favour of academic dogmas, academic doctrines and academic jargon aimed at perpetuating and sustaining socio-academic styles of practice and behaviour, ostensibly geared towards ensuring standards of academic excellence and purity of knowledge in the academia.

At no time has the sense and nonsense of academic specialisation necessitated serious debate in the African academia as now when the predominantly disciplinary and intradisciplinary knowledge production and management strategies of the 20th Century are increasingly seen as no longer academically fashionable.

Unfortunately, the conspiracy of silence is covering every African university campus as if there is nothing wrong with transplanting such strategies from the 20th century into the 21st century. The 21st century is increasingly seen as a century of new knowledge production and management by way of interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity and non-disciplinarity or extradisciplinarity. This means the world is yearning for academics who can transcend academic boundaries to read, think, imagine, analyse, articulate and clarify issues that cannot fit in disciplinary cocoons of knowledge such as poverty, education, environment, climate change and environmental degradation.

Such issues can only be confronted sufficiently by academics trained to think and solve problems outside the box. Our campuses lack them due to excessive protection of disciplinary discourse. Yet if other knowledge discourses are allowed to tick interactively with the disciplinary discourse, teaching and learning become lively and enjoyable, genuine interaction occurs, quality of education improves, learners and teachers become freer academically and intellectually, begging to think critically and education generally becomes sustainable.

Hierarchical teaching and learning become a thing of the past and all become teachers and learners when they interact, not in classrooms or lecture theatres, but in teams. That way universities start to produce graduates who are more of independent thinkers who can see alternative views as sources of new ideas rather than opposition. Besides, universities are focused at producing future-ready professionals instead of continuing like before: producing graduates, professionals and experts for the20th Century as if our universities are moving backwards.

These strategies will become clear as the reader gets down to the business of getting to the gist of this little thesis.

While our universities are getting more and more buried in overspecialisation, which is depressing knowledge, thinking and reasoning, the need for more universal knowledge, thinkers and reasoning beings is becoming evident in this era of the Worldwide Web.

Perhaps the father of universal knowledge, or this kind thinking and reasoning, was Socrates, the Greek philosopher who never wrote anything down but helped generate knowledge, thinking and reasoning through the method he himself innovated: intellectual midwifery.

It is sad that in the succeeding centuries, through the Mediaeval Times, Renaissance, the Modern Times, the Age of Reason in Europe to the present, education strategies have been geared more to get rid of universal knowledge workers, thinkers and reasoning beings who seek and create knowledge beyond disciplinary cocoons.

We may say that it was Aristotle who started the process of academicising knowledge and limiting it to small knowledges we now call disciplines, thereby setting the pace for generating academic dogmas, doctrines and jargons, which do not add anything of value to knowledge, thinking and reasoning. Instead, we have been ending up with disconnecting knowledge into small knowledges and producing specialists that are deprived of the capacity to see interconnectivities in and the oneness of knowledge.

Our own ancient mediaeval university in West, Africa, the University of Timbuktu, was consummated by Aristotelian disciplinarianism. It glorified academicism and disciplinary discourse. While its collapse could have been precipitated by the penetration of West Africa by European and Arab influences, it is likely that the disciplinary education, while it enabled students to think more than the ordinary peasants, was not sustainable. This is as true as it is at our disciplinary campuses.

We see our universities continuing to structure themselves and to organise knowledge into broad categories called natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The broad fields increasingly do not communicate among and with each other. The academics only interact during senate meeting to make academic policies or approve examination results from the different disciplinary departments. Within each broad field of knowledge or territory of knowledge, the knowledge workers in the disciplines are like prisoners who must behave in ways only common to themselves and who must protect their small knowledges from pollution by others.

Accordingly, knowledge workers who seek and propagate universal education are resisted and belittled by being told that they don’t know where they belong. Everything is done to ensure that they leave the university.

Elsewhere on the globe – in Europe, USA, Japan, Russia, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Arab countries, Latin America and China – academics are breaking out of their disciplinary cocoons and are accommodating, and being accommodated, in new knowledge production and management, which the 21st Century demands. Africa is still the only Continent whose universities are stuck in the past.  

Our universities must change, otherwise they will be the irrelevant universities of the 21st Century – a century of information and communication. African universities must open up to the new knowledge production cultures or systems of education now. Later will be too late. If we have been talking of biological dinosaurs that became extinct because they did not physiologically prepare themselves for the warming up of the environment, cold-blooded as they were, in the 22 Century Africa will be totted with collapsed universities simply because they ignored accepting knowledge integration as the way forward.

The knowledge integration cultures or systems of Interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity,

transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity are changing education for the future. Universities that will lag behind will be the university dinosaurs of the future. Our generations have the duty, responsibility and obligation to transfer relevant universities to the 22nd century: crossdisciplinary universities, uinterdisciplinary universities, transdisciplinary universities and extradisciplinary universities. A word to the wise is enough.

We are producing graduates, professionals and experts whom we do not need for the 21st century. Such graduates, professionals and experts will definitely not be needed in the 22nd century.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda