M.L. Luhanga — an interview
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SK: Who are the leaders in this university reform? Would you say it’s faculty-driven or is it the students who are demanding something new from higher education?

MLL: I would say initially, it started with the faculty, particularly within the circles of the engineering faculty. Mainly, it was a response to the loss of faculty who were leaving the university for greener pastures elsewhere. And, as well, it was a response to the tremendous loss of resources from the government. And so the reform movement really was started by people in the faculty—but the faculty together with the administration, because at the university, the administration is actually made up of members of the faculty. Here, we run a very collegial administration. The deans and directors of research institutes are in office for three years; they can continue for another three years if they are re-elected, but after six years, they have to stand down and another person must come into the office. So, we have a very collegial, committee-oriented system and reform was mainly a faculty-driven process initiated in response to the external environment, which was hostile to the survival of the university.

SK: I hear that the University of Dar es Salaam is a very entrepreneurial institution. Would you say that’s true?

MLL: We’re trying to be entrepreneurial, but we are not there yet. We have a Swahili proverb, which says that here, in east Africa, and around the Indian Ocean, we have coconut trees, and people make a wine from these trees. They say that if you praise somebody who makes this coconut wine, he’ll add water to increase the volume so that he gets more money by selling more wine. So we say, “Don’t praise him too much.” In this way, at the university, we say that we are not there yet. We are trying to do something different and something entrepreneurial but we haven’t reached our goals.

SK: But the “ivory tower,” which is sometimes the way Americans describe a university—where you closet yourself away from the real world—that is not how you would describe the university of Dar es Salaam, is it?

MLL: We are trying to move away from the ivory tower. The university was created thirty years ago. At that time it was more of an ivory tower than it is today. Now, the university is more closely linked to the society in which it exists.

SK: Are you feeling competition from the private colleges and universities that are now being established in Africa?

MLL: Most of them are fairly small, but I did encourage my colleagues to look at them. You see, in Tanzania, only three percent of the students who finish primary education go on to get a university education. In the United Nations human development reports, they note anything in the third decimal place as zero. So, because the number of students who actually graduate and have the opportunity to enter university is very small, I don’t think of these new universities as competition. We are nurturing them, actually, because we are admitting into the University of Dar es Salaam only twenty-nine percent of the students who qualify to attend. We are not meeting the demand by far.

SK: And so, as an educator, you really want to see many more higher education opportunities?

MLL: Certainly, certainly. I want to see much more. I’m chairman of the accreditation committee of the Higher Education Accreditation Council, which allows these institutions and these private universities to be set up in Tanzania, and certainly, we see our role as promoting them. Allowing them, really, and nurturing them to be established in Tanzania, rather than seeing them as competitive. Most of my staff, for example, are serving in various capacities at these institutions. Two or three of them are serving as chief executive officers of some of these private universities. This kind of interaction with private universities is a role that we think, as the oldest university in Tanzania, we need to play, because we see the development of higher education as crucial to the development of Tanzania. Certainly the government on its own does not have the resources to make an immediate impact on higher education, so the more we can help, the better.

SK: And does the business community and other sectors of the economy agree that higher education is critical?

MLL: I’m afraid the jury is still out on that question. We are still trying to convince the emerging business sector in Tanzania to support education in general. Not only university education, but education at all levels. When the major investor was the government, it was more supportive of education than I see the private sector being now. But I think we have a role there, too, a public relations role, to educate them about what their involvement in education could be. I think that businesses tend to have a short-term vision: if they don’t see returns over a year, two years, then they don’t think they should invest in something like education. But, we have made inroads into some of these private-sector companies, which have started partnerships with some of our faculty and continue to work with them. We hope to grow from there.

You know, for many years I studied at Columbia University in New York, which is a private university. It is my hope that I can bring that experience to bear here at my university, to bring in the American experience of working with private enterprise and see if we can use American education and American communication techniques to advance our concerns in Tanzania.

SK: Let me ask you about your students. You mentioned that there’s not enough room at the university for all of the students who could qualify to attend. How would you describe your students? What are they looking for? What are their goals?

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