The process of selecting vice-chancellors in the Osun State University, Osogbo has triggered and exposed some administrative lacuna within the institution.
In the Osun State University, a camp has accused the university council of making rules that narrowed the contest to only professors in the Pure and Applied Sciences even when the university is a conventional one.
It could be recalled that the call for applications for UNIOSUN vice chancellorship opened on July 5; it closed on Monday, July 16, 2021.
One of the complaints on the process is that criteria established by the university council were deliberately set to exclude prospective candidates in disciplines such as Law, Humanities, Education (Arts) and Social Sciences.
An aggrieved source said the university council, while stating the acceptable qualifications for eligible candidates, ignored scholarly books and book chapters to consider only articles published in high impact journals recognised by Thomson Reuters ISI and Web of Science which are both pure and applied science-biased instead.
“The council even set a research benchmark of 800 citations and 15.00 ResearchGate score for candidates. The criteria used for even the incumbent vice-chancellor in 2016 are not the same as the ones set now.
“The current demand is deliberately made for only professors in the sciences and is above the bar of the criteria being used at Nigeria’s premier university, the University of Ibadan, and even at Harvard University. Anyone can check,” a source anonymously revealed.
Furthermore, the source asked Governor Gboyega Oyetola who is the Visitor to the university to intervene and get the council to “do the right thing as it is done in other conventional universities” before it is too late