When did the rain begin washing away the university?

Kenyatta University Main Campus entrance at Kahawa on 29 April, 2025.[Standard, Kanyiri Wahito]

The old men in the village have a peculiar habit. Whenever a river changes course, a sacred fig tree dries unexpectedly, or children begin calling their parents by first names, they do not ask what happened yesterday. They ask a far more dangerous question:

"Where did the rain start beating us?"

For every cracked wall has its first raindrop. Every collapsing granary has its first tiny termite. Every forest that becomes a desert first loses one unnoticed tree.

And as this old barefoot columnist wandered through the corridors of our universities, another village question refused to leave his mind.

Where did the rain begin washing away the university?

Not the buildings. Those have multiplied magnificently. Glass towers now stand where humble lecture rooms once stood. Administrative blocks rise like kingdoms, each floor carrying another office with another title and another stamp.

No.

The rain washed something far more precious.

It washed away the soul.

There was a time when mentioning a university evoked images of restless minds rather than restless administrators. The very names: Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Harvard, Yale, Makerere, Dar es Salaam, Ibadan, and even our own University of Nairobi in its intellectual heyday summoned a civilisation built not upon bureaucracy but upon scholarship. Their influence was measured not by the number of circulars issued but by the number of ideas they gave humanity.

When their senates met, the academic world listened.

When professors argued, governments sometimes trembled.

When deans spoke, society heard the voice of knowledge rather than the echo of management.

The university was not designed to manufacture obedience.

It was designed to cultivate courage.

One wonders, therefore, which university today's institutions are trying to imitate.

Certainly not Bologna.

Certainly not Oxford.

Certainly not the ancient academies of Athens, where Plato and Aristotle understood that authority grows from reason rather than appointment.

Perhaps there exists a new invisible institution somewhere; a mysterious "University of Administrative Excellence" whose curriculum teaches that scholarship is dangerous unless supervised by bureaucracy; that intellectual independence should be managed like a security threat; and that the finest qualification for leadership is not scholarly distinction but comfortable predictability.

If such a university exists, its graduates seem to have occupied many administrative offices.

That perhaps explains why today's university increasingly resembles a government department that accidentally inherited professors.

The greatest casualty has not merely been the professor.

It has been the dean.

People often imagine that every appointed dean celebrates promotion with dancing, roasted goat and congratulatory photographs.

Village Wisdom knows better.

Many deans quietly mourn.

For they discover that the office they long admired comes with invisible chains.

Yesterday's colleague suddenly becomes today's disciplinary case.

Yesterday's research companion becomes tomorrow's performance target.

Yesterday's intellectual debate becomes today's memo demanding "compliance."

The very people who inspired your scholarship become the people you are instructed to police.

How painful it must be for an accomplished scholar to spend precious hours explaining procurement forms instead of discussing philosophy.

How tragic for a respected researcher to measure academic excellence using attendance registers.

How heartbreaking when a professor known internationally for brilliant research must spend afternoons defending decisions he never believed in.

Many good deans do not lose sleep because academics are difficult.

They lose sleep because they are forced to extinguish fires they once helped ignite.

They entered office hoping to mentor scholars.

Instead, they are handed the thankless assignment of managing disappointed colleagues, implementing unpopular directives, defending shrinking budgets, pacifying angry staff, and occasionally becoming unwilling messengers of decisions conceived several floors above the academic universe.

Even the finest horse cannot gallop freely when someone mistakes it for a ploughing donkey.

The tragedy, therefore, is not that we have bad deans.

The tragedy is that we have imprisoned good scholars inside administrative armour until they forget they once rode magnificent intellectual stallions.

Perhaps that explains why so many professors now speak in whispers.

A strange silence has descended upon people whose profession is thinking aloud.

Some have become extraordinarily gifted in the art of nodding.

Their neck muscles deserve honorary doctorates.

Mention academic freedom, and they clear their throats.

Mention governance, and they suddenly remember another meeting.

Mention institutional autonomy, and their phones begin ringing mysteriously.

One almost suspects that courage has quietly been outsourced.

Yet universities continue teaching students about democracy.

Students write examinations explaining accountability.

Law faculties passionately lecture constitutionalism.

Political scientists brilliantly analyse separation of powers.

Communication scholars encourage speaking truth to power.

Then the lecture ends.

Everyone returns to an institution where speaking truth occasionally requires prior administrative clearance.

The irony is so delicious that even satire struggles to improve it.

Village Wisdom has therefore been wondering whether leadership in universities should not return to its rightful owners: the academic community itself.

Why should deans and heads of departments fear elections by fellow scholars?

Surely no jury understands a writer better than fellow writers.

No orchestra chooses its conductor through strangers.

No village selects its chief drummer by asking the neighbouring clan.

Who better understands scholarship than scholars themselves?

Election transforms leadership into recognition.

Appointment too often risks becoming gratitude.

Election tells a dean: "Your colleagues trust your intellect."

Appointment occasionally whispers: "Someone appreciates your reliability."

The difference is enormous.

One honours scholarship.

The other may unintentionally reward agreeable silence.

Of course, elections are imperfect.

Democracy has never promised perfection.

But appointments have perfected something far more dangerous: the slow domestication of independent minds.

The Universities Academic Staff Union must therefore breathe fresh urgency into the campaign for democratically elected deans and heads of departments.

This is not about politics.

It is about identity.

It is about restoring the university to the people who create its greatest wealth! Its scholars.

Administrative offices exist because academics exist.

Not the other way round.

Administration should oil the engine.

It should never become the driver.

The professor was never created to become an ornamental flower decorating management meetings.

Professorship is society's highest intellectual covenant.

Its loyalty must first belong to knowledge, evidence and truth.

Everything else comes afterwards.

The village elders would probably smile at all this excitement.

Then one of them would quietly conclude: "When the shepherd begins fearing the sheep, perhaps it is time to ask who now owns the pasture."

Likewise, when professors fear elections by fellow professors, when deans derive authority from appointment more than academic confidence, and when senates increasingly discuss management before scholarship, perhaps the rain has indeed washed away more than walls.

Perhaps it has washed away the very university itself.

But every village knows another truth.

A river that has wandered can still be redirected.

A neglected granary can still be rebuilt.

A community that remembers where the rain first beat it can still repair the roof.

The university, too, can rediscover itself.

Let deans be elected.

Let heads of departments earn the confidence of their peers.

Let senates once again become cathedrals of ideas rather than waiting rooms for administrative endorsements.

Only then shall the university recover its ancient dignity! not as an empire of offices, but as a republic of fearless minds.

And perhaps, somewhere, the old barefoot elders will finally stop asking where the rain began beating us.