Penda Mbow, an activist, teaching history in a packed and dilapidated lecture hall. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times) Africa's once-great colleges are overcrowded and crumbling *By Lydia Polgreen<http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=By+Lydia+Polgreen&sort=publicationdate&submit=Search> * *DAKAR, Senegal:* Thiany Dior usually rises before dawn, tiptoeing carefully among thin foam mats laid out on the floor as she leaves the cramped dormitory room she shares with half a dozen other women. It was built for two. In the vast auditorium at the law school at Cheikh Anta Diop University, she secures a seat two rows from the front, two hours before class. If she sat too far back, she would not hear the professor's lecture over the two tinny speakers and would be more likely to join the 70 percent who fail their first- or second-year exams at the university. By the time class starts, 2,000 young bodies crowd the room in a muffled din of shuffling paper, throat clearing and jostling. "I cannot say really we are all learning, but we are trying," Dior said. "We are too many students." The best African universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. They are victims of overcrowding, too little money, mismanagement and trends in international development that have favored primary education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions. Multimedia Photos: Africa's universities » View Today in Africa & Middle East The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of countries of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty. The Commission for Africa, a British government research organization, said in a 2005 report that African universities were in a "state of crisis" and were failing to produce the professionals desperately needed to develop the poorest continent. Far from being a tool of social mobility, the repository of a country's hopes for the future, African universities have instead become warehouses for a generation of young people for whom society has little use and who can expect to be just as poor as their uneducated parents. "Without universities there is no hope of progress, but they have been allowed to crumble," said Penda Mbow, a historian and labor activist at Cheikh Anta Diop who has struggled to improve conditions for students and professors. "We are throwing away a whole generation." As a result, universities across Africa have become hotbeds of discontent, occupying a dangerous place at the intersection of politics and crime. In Ivory Coast, student union leaders played a large role in stirring up xenophobic sentiment that led to civil war. In Nigeria, elite schools have been overrun by secret societies that have become violent criminal gangs. In Senegal, the university has been racked repeatedly by sometimes violent strikes by students seeking improvements in their living conditions. In the early days, post-colonial Africa had few institutions as venerable and fully developed as its universities. The University of Ibadan in southwest Nigeria, the intellectual home of the Nobel laureate writer Wole Soyinka, was regarded in 1960 as one of the best universities in the Commonwealth. Makerere University in Uganda was considered the Harvard of Africa, and it trained a whole generation of postcolonial leaders, including Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. And in Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop, then known as the University of Dakar, drew students from across French-speaking Africa and transformed them into doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were considered in every way equal to those of their French counterparts. The experience of students like Dior could not be further from that of men like Ousmane Camara, a former president of Senegal's highest court, who attended the same law school in the late 1950s, in the feverish days before independence. A cracked, yellowing photograph from 1957 shows the entire law school student body in a single frame, fewer than 100 students. "We lived in spacious rooms, with more than enough for each to have its own," Camara said. The young men in the photo went on to do great things: Camara's classmate Abdou Diouf became the second president of Senegal. Others became top government officials and businessmen, shaping the country's fortunes after it won its independence from France in 1960. Today, nearly 60,000 students are crammed on a campus with just 5,000 dormitory beds. The disarray of African universities did not happen by chance. In the 1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that would drive development in the young countries of newly liberated Africa, and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses, research facilities, scholarships and salaries for academics. But corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that swept much of Africa in the 1970s, and in the retrenchment universities were among the first institutions to suffer. As idealistic postcolonial governments gave way to more cynical and authoritarian regimes across Africa, universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and elitist airs, became a nuisance. 1 | 2 <http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/20/news/africa.php?page=2> Next Page <http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/20/news/africa.php?page=2> Read all 3 comments<http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/20/news/africa.php?d=1> Join the Discussion Name, City/Country (required) E-Mail (required, will not be published) All comments are subject to approval before appearing. ** [log in to unmask] ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to: [log in to unmask] ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤