M.L. Luhanga an interview

Professor M.L. Luhanga is vice chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. He is interviewed here by Susan Robinson King, Carnegie Corporation Vice President, Public Affairs.

SK: In the past few years, the University of Dar es Salaam has gone through a very complex and important strategic planning process. The international community has recognized it and the Partnership to Strengthen African Universities* has made investments in your future. How do you see this support working with the university?

MLL: We are still continuing with our strategic planning process. Right now we think we have the governance issues pretty much on track—essentially, we have completed phase one. And so we are now focusing more and more on our mission-oriented areas: training and research, and traditional service. Currently, I have a team looking at that in a more focused way. Our initial decision was to deal with the governance issues first, while putting the mission-oriented features on the back burner.

SK: And of course, the mission is really critical to a university, isn’t it?

MLL: It is, it is. But of course, the governance issues were even more critical for us because our initial assessment was that on the mission side—the academic side—although there were things that were not that good, performance was not as poor as it was on the governance side. So, since one has to put priorities somewhere, we thought we’d start with the governance issues, believing that they also affected our academic problems. Our objectives for improving our governance systems and management have now, to a large degree, been met.

SK: What is the issue on the academic side that is most important right now?

MLL: We have sixteen overall strategic objectives in our reform program. On the academic side, for example, we are concerned with expanding student enrollment. That has been one of our major strategic goals, because if you look at Tanzania as a country south of the Sahara, under any metric, we are the last in terms of access to university education. It is even worse for girls, who have little access to higher education in the region, generally. So success for girls is a major, major strategic objective for us. I would say our top objectives are improving general access to higher education, improving research and making our research more relevant to the socioeconomic needs of Tanzania.

SK: Can you give me an example of one of the areas of research that you are re-focusing so that it will have greater impact on Tanzania and will respond to the country’s needs?

MLL: Well, for example, HIV/AIDS is a major problem in our country. It’s impacting the socioeconomic development of Tanzania tremendously, but the university has remained largely uninvolved. The research agenda of the university has not addressed that particular issue in a focused manner, except for work by several colleagues in the Muhimbili University College of Health Science. But since the other faculties had not really responded to this major, major calamity, starting about two years ago, each faculty and each institute began going through and rethinking their research agenda. The faculty is really repositioning themselves to address Tanzania’s critical needs in the 21st century.

SK: In a way, you’re saying that the work that goes on in the university today is now seen to be very tied to the life and the future of the country.

MLL: That’s what we want, to make our work very much more relevant to the future of Tanzania and what the country really needs from us.

SK: That’s not an easy job, is it? To turn around a university?

MLL: It is not an easy thing to do, but we have to do it; we have to try. You know academics—not only in Tanzania but in the United States as well—usually want to work as individuals, and often do. I believe that if you want to address societal problems, you need to form large, interdisciplinary teams, and that is a major undertaking, a difficult process. But we have started forming these teams. For instance, our colleagues in the natural sciences, like chemistry, are doing quite a lot of work on malaria. And we hope that these examples of success will at least show the others that it can be done.

SK: How do you encourage, inspire, convince faculty that they need to respond to these societal needs?

MLL: We do it in the following way: first of all, in terms of promotion. The publications that the members of the staff produce are very, very crucial in terms of their promotion. Since their promotions obviously impact their pocketbook issues—the salaries they get—as well as their status within the university and within the society, we’ve made one criteria for promotion the relevance of research to these societal needs. When we submit publications to our external reviewers, one of the issues we ask them to look at is the relevance of the research reported in the publication. How relevant is it to the societal needs of Tanzanians? This kind of criteria encourages faculty to focus on certain kinds of research, and then the publications that come out of the research are actually tied into the needs of Tanzania. This process also encourages the faculty to pass on a belief in relevant research, because they supervise graduate students and help them understand the importance of undertaking research that responds to society’s needs. It also means that they can produce collaborative journal papers and other types of publications that are relevant.

SK: So there is a real incentive for faculty to change?

MLL: Yes, because if the work is not relevant to the country’s development, we don’t consider it as part of the promotion process.

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