All great nations employ education and the culture industries generally, implicitly or explicitly to maintain the social order, train bureaucrats and maintain a myth of mission among other things.In the modern world, education in particular university education, has become a tool not just for elite reproduction but is increasingly deployed as a marker of a nation's international prestige and cultural importance. Hence, the great Universities of the Western World represent the cultural high points of American and British civilizations. That is why for example, countries like France and Germany raised quite some dust about international league tables which showed that their universities are not topical or are second rate in the international pecking order. From the point of view of transformative projects the emergent international league tables have been described as an attempt to increase the hegemony of elite universities based in the Anglo-Saxon countries.What the above statement says to us is that there are always hidden curricula in the process of schooling which implies that certain values, biases and word views are taken for granted. Nigerian universities which began their journeys as clones of British universities developed to a point in the 1970s and early 1980s at least in the Social Sciences where they could subject received paradigms to systematic and devastating critiques. Even at the level of policy it will be remembered that the debate over the adoption of Structural Adjustment Programme by the Nigerian State was led by intellectuals many of whom are based in the universities. I recall for example that at one of the meetings of the Nigerian Economic Society, radical Economist, Prof.Eskor Toyo thundered that:'I know more economics than the IMF Economists'. Toyo, along with scholars like Claude Ake, Bala Usman, among others represent a breed of academics who were grounded in both mainstream and radical social sciences. Ake for example spent a good deal of his academic career in several universities in Canada and cut his scholarly milk teeth by debating with established American Political Scientists such as Samuel Huntington and Lucian Pye.The 1970s and 1980s can be regarded as one of intellectual flowering for an emerging Nigerian social science which opposed itself to received social science grounded in theories of modernisation and neoclassical economics. That happy development was aborted with the abasement of our universities, the exodus abroad of top flight scholars, as well as the diminution of our universities as centres of alternative ideas and policies. Part of the tragedy of the recession of our universities is that there is virtually no response to the dominant globalised neoliberal social science which has produced such policies as the removal of fuel subsidy, the rollback of social services, as well as so-called open door policies which create unlimited access for the activities of multi-national corporations. It can be argued that there is no social movement challenging neo liberalism and for that matter political parties precisely because the intellectual class which should have theorised the counter hegemonic alternatives has been vanquished.In other words, there is no alternative development imaginary or policy road maps grounded in interrogation of the Washington Consensus and this partly explains our excessive reliance for development models on the neoliberal policies favoured by the IMF and the World Bank. In his interesting book entitled Geography of Power: The Making of Global Economic Policy, Prof.Richard Peet argues convincingly that there is a close synergy between elite universities, policy think tanks and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. Peet shows that elite American professors of economics some of whom are Nobel Prize winners circulate between universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale, establishment think tanks such as the Rand Corporation and international financial institutions which make global economic policies. This is to say that neoliberal economics constitutes a form of hegemonic discourse which is legitimated by the power and prestige of leading educational and policy institutions. This discourse is further protected by the power of international media which tend to ridicule nationalist and radical attempts to restructure the discourse map in favour of subalterns such as Nigeria and the rest of Africa. In this sense and as Gramsei has warned us, expertise is not a value neutral, technocratic activity but a form of discourse in the service of hegemonic interests. That being the case it is a shame that our intellectuals, including our Human Rights activists whose purview is increasingly limited to political rights and sometimes frighteningly assumes a shrill, partisan outlook do not get to grips with fundamental social forces that are driving our world.For example, in an increasingly Unitarian but paradoxically cacophonous political culture, we do not have social movements such as the anti-globalisation advocates and other socially based critics of the current neo imperial Americanised order. Such movements at the international level like the Coalition of Southern Countries, the Non-Aligned countries, among others, are effectively defunct even though we know that there is no greater time when their relevance should be proclaimed than now. It is precisely the lack of alternative development fora at the national level which gives neo-liberalism, multinational corporations and experts who are legitimated by them the leeway which they currently enjoy in the planning and management of the Nigerian economy. The argument here is not whether neoliberal policies would have worked if they are properly executed but more fundamentally whether neoliberal policies in their current globalised form are appropriate for countries such as Nigeria. The late Prof. Bade Onimode was until his death one of the few remaining voices opposing to neoliberal orthodoxy the developmental state model of the Asian Tigers which developed by carrying out a substantial reformulation of World Bank prescriptions. It is obvious that we cannot develop under the aegis of the same forces that are partly responsible for our underdevelopment as well as of people who continue to throw at us the same cure-all therapies that hold back our development .But we need to engage them not at the level of slogans or arresting buzz words but at the level of theory, fundamental analysis and policy prescriptions. As C.Wright Mills famously observed, freedom consists not in merely choosing between two or more alternatives but in the freedom to formulate the choices. Pedagogically, we need to go beyond the narrow choices presented to us by the former colonial masters and American social science in its current globalised form. Only credible self-respecting educational institutions which are conscious of their places in history can do so. These do not exist or exist in attenuated forms as of now. The double challenge therefore, is to recreate the fora for debate, as well as set the agenda for the debate.
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