No fewer than 100 fake professors have been uncovered in Nigerian universities by the National Universities Commission, NUC.
Prof Abubakar Rasheed, the commission’s Executive Secretary, disclosed this in the NUC’s November bulletin.
Rasheed said the NUC published the details of the fake professors on its website and also sent the names to the various universities for verification.
He said this at the 2019 retreat for Vice-Chancellors by the NUC Strategy Advisory Committee.
“The updated version of those documents will be published by December 2019 and professors in their respective universities uploaded their CV on the website which was used in the compilation of the directory. About 100 fake professors also uploaded their details but we detected them.
“This measure helped in identifying fake professors in the system. The fight against fake professors is a collective responsibility,” he said.
Rasheed informed the vice-chancellors of a recent meeting held with the Director-General, National Youth Service Corps, Brig. Gen. Shuaibu Ibrahim, where the latter complained that some corps members’ degree certificates purportedly obtained from some prestigious universities were questionable.
He directed that VCs should check the excesses of their affiliated institutions, noting that universities must spearhead the fight against academic corruption which must be tackled by all stakeholders.
The bulletin, said that the committee published a directory of full professors in the Nigerian university system, statistical digest of the NUS 2017-2018; refinement and modernisation of instruments for accreditation of undergraduate, postgraduate, part-time, affiliate, open and distance learning programmes as well as the state of university education in Nigeria 2017- 2018.
Prof Rasheed also clarified that lecturers were not permitted to teach in more than two universities, while minimum teaching for eight hours should be enforced and the practice where lecturers move from three to four universities must stop.
