MY IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY
By
Professor Joseph Abiodun Bello
HOD, Business Studies
Covenant University, Ota.

A CONCEPT OF A UNIVERSITY

As a pioneer in Business Administration, my concept of a University has three dimensions: Hardware, Software, Orgware.

Hardware
It is a production thorough-put with basic material, technical, social infrastructural, informational, components.

A physical entity dominating a space dedicated to knowledge production, knowledge distribution, knowledge sharing, and knowledge acquisition by vested stakeholders. A citadel of learning, teaching, research, and communicating of relatively original findings in recognized Journals and Books.

Software
Everything done in our business organization must start with an idea of some needs of potential consumers in our relevant environment. The pockets of schemes, study areas, desired programmes, course offerings, floated from time to time denote software.

Orgware
There exists a conventional structure for managing the affairs of a University. The academic, professional, technical, administrative and other supporting staff are linked up in Colleges, Faculties, Departments, and programmes by some order. The top level is held by the Council or Board of Regents, the Vice-Chancellor, the Registrar, Bursar, Librarian. The Senate, Provost and Deans Committee, and other relevant Committees.

What differentiates a University from others is the quality of administrative finesse brought to bear in piloting the human resources (staff, students, publics) and potential consumers/employers of our products.

Practical Operations
A University is a coalition of interests, loosely coupled, for defining, negotiating, and crystallizing communities of functional business orientations and objectives pertinent to societal needs and expectations.

• There exists narrow conceptions of interests or specialization.

• There exists natural competitive tendencies for healthy (cooperative) and unhealthy (conflictual) interactions of disciplines.

• There are shared ideals of what caliber of outputs should emanate from defined areas of business study.

• Basic preparation denoting a training of the mind to search, define, process and effect solutions to pressing organization and management problems.

• Creating sustainable avenues of developing first level graduates along relevant management career lines.

• Provision of market-driven postgraduate professional education generally tested and believed to be creditable foundations of managerial and administrative careers.

• Engaging in action research aimed at generating policy relevant solutions to pressing management and national development problems.

• Locating and placing competent experienced academics in positions of administrative responsibility in Colleges and departments.

• Ensuring that merit and operational capability is enthroned in all critical decisions affecting reward, benefits, and promotion.

• Carefully monitoring and managing communication processes in ways to ensure that social distance between top and lower levels is not too wide.

• Creating ample room for genuine feedback from all critical stakeholders as means of fine-tuning adaptive leadership styles for optimal administrative effectiveness.

• Ensuring that the age-old tradition of University autonomy and academic freedom of staff is delicately respected.

Dilemmas of Business Education
For what are we preparing our undergraduate and graduate outputs? (For what time frame? Next 15 or 10 years, next 25 years?)
(a). Largely to facilitate efficient management of modern complex technostructure in our national and trans-national context.
(b). To equip and motivate such output for self-employment creation.
(c). To breed genuine entrepreneurs who can appreciate the practical serious business generation and handling beyond crafts, petty trading, and contract services.
(d). Is business education a reliable predictor of serious business entrepreneurial venture pursuit?
(e). The ICT, Internet age has come, to what extent are we preparing our outputs to embrace e-commerce, e-marketing, e-technology sourcing, adaptation, and transfer?

Covenant University

• We thank God for Covenant University and also for the Visioner, the Chancellor, Dr. David Oyedepo.

• This University, with our core values and modus operandi, is definitely on a good track towards becoming a world class University.

• The investment visible in the College of Science and Technology (CST) would seem very laudable, going by the huge inflow of laboratory materials, computers etc to that College.

• My own Department of Business Studies can appreciate the allocation of state-of-the-art computers and printers.

• The necessity of our networking with our international peers warrants that our access to the Internet should be very free, and regular. Maximizing the benefits of the Internet exposure we have at present should not be hampered by the spate of system malfunctioning being experienced at present.

• There are young, there are middle-aged, and there are matured academics of ripe age, currently making contributions to Covenant University. There is need to keep funding ways and means of removing any impediments they may perceive as militating against their engaging in path-breaking research ventures, and in promoting mental productivity.

• Our classrooms and lecture delivery systems should continue to reflect creative investments in electronic gadgets that will soon let me interact with my students on-line real time and get them do the same with their counterparts in our field.

• I wish to appreciate the leadership qualities of our Vice Chancellor, Professor Aize Obayan, the Registrar, Deacon Yemi Nathaniel, and the management team

Thank you for listening.
God Bless You All.