Overcrowded halls, absent lecturers and a culture of mediocrity are hollowing out institutions built to shape a nation
By Benedict Sese
Kenya’s public universities are in crisis β and the evidence is no longer possible to ignore. Lecture halls built for hundreds now hold thousands. Departments operate with a fraction of the staff they need. Lecturers miss classes without consequence, and when they do appear, too many recycle old notes and past papers rather than teach. Meanwhile, students arrive on campus and promptly stop studying, convinced that admission alone was the hardest part. Somewhere between underfunding, overcrowding and a culture that has quietly normalised failure, the university has stopped being a place of learning and become a system in managed decline.
The rot runs deeper than infrastructure. Academic culture has collapsed in ways that money alone cannot fix. Students who rarely attend lectures and lecturers who rarely challenge them have reached an unspoken accommodation β one in which mediocrity is the agreed standard and questioning it is treated as provocation. Those who demand accountability are dismissed. Those who exploit the vulnerable face little consequence. Reports of staff demanding sexual favours from students with missing marks, or extorting those in desperate circumstances, point to institutions that have lost their moral bearings entirely.
The question is no longer whether there is a crisis. It is whether anyone with the power to act is sufficiently disturbed to do something about it. Kenya cannot afford institutions that exist in name only. The universities built to shape this nation’s future must first be honest about how badly they have lost their way.
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