Lecturers and the quest for academic relevance

Instead of conducting meaningful research that advances knowledge and supports economic growth, or providing substantive and useful lectures, they instead strive to advance their own misguided quest for relevance.

Rather than developing the skills needed for research and teaching, they become prestige predators, building reputations for being intimidating reviewers. They take the easier route by becoming destructive towards others and frustrating people.

In many cases, these scholarly saboteurs dismantle students' and their colleagues' work through PhD committees or internal review boards.

So accustomed are they to tearing down others' work instead of producing substantive research themselves that they even criticise work they originally directed their own research students to undertake, seemingly forgetting that the students were simply following their guidance.

When challenged to demonstrate their scholarship by publishing original research, authoring books or contributing new knowledge, they muddy the waters and erect smokescreens.

These destructive gatekeepers create the illusion that their students should pass, but those supervised by others should not without major revisions.

Meanwhile, when people ask to see their own academic work, there is often little to show beyond attaching their names to their students' papers. Instead, they create artificial crises. They look for opportunities to criticise, pretending to occupy the moral high ground and citing Commission for University Education rules as though they were auditors. In reality, they are simply searching for relevance.

Ironically, one reason student numbers are falling in research programmes is the way faculty and universities treat them.

The system often treats grown adults like children. Yet many of those who create these systems—and are the worst offenders—are often the first to speak up in meetings and divert attention elsewhere.

They offer advice on improving student retention, even though they are part of the problem. Ask any doctoral student, and they can probably identify the academic obstructors in their institution.

What is worse, these people do not allow students to push back against decisions affecting their own studies.

Why should one lecturer reviewing work that has taken two years to complete demand that it be redone entirely when two other lecturers have already supervised and approved it? What happened to academic freedom? Too often, someone tries to dismantle a study's conceptual framework simply to be difficult, without any academic or literature-based justification. Instead, reviewers should recommend improvements, not dismantle the work entirely.

Some particularly egregious examples include requiring students to change an entire variable during a PhD defence or forcing them to start all over again after two or three years of research.

Typically, these relevance-seeking gatekeepers are not proclaiming absolute truths but merely expressing personal opinions. Why should ideas unsupported by research or literature supersede everyone else's?

We need business schools that promote original research of global standing and earn relevance by being useful. We need business school research that supports Kenyan and East African businesses with practical insights, rather than repeating the same tired studies and concepts while relying heavily on research produced by students at the beginning of their academic careers.

When Kenya's leading businesses face complex challenges, our business schools should be the first places they turn for answers.

We should not be afraid to quantitatively assess business school faculty using objective performance metrics, nor should we allow fear of retaliation from academic wreckers to weaken performance appraisals.

Business schools in Kenya must earn relevance by producing knowledge that solves real problems, strengthens industry and advances the nation. Academic prestige should come from building people, ideas and institutions—never from tearing them down.

Have a management or leadership issue, question, or challenge? Reach out to Dr. Scott through @ScottProfessor on X or on email [email protected]