University Don Sees Source of More Funding in Alumni Relations
International scholar Professor P-J Ezeh has advised that universities can make more money if their former students are involved more effectively in the affairs of their alma mater.
By: Emeka Mamah
International scholar Professor P-J Ezeh has advised that universities can make more money if their former students are involved more effectively in the affairs of their alma mater. He said that a situation where alumni of universities are invited to participate mainly in some one-off events of universities in Nigeria was not enough.
Professor Ezeh made the remarks in Nsukka over the weekend while delivering the lead paper at the opening of the Homecoming of former students of the Department of Sociology & Anthropology of University of Nigeria, Nsukka, UNN, where he taught for nearly 30 years until he retired in the middle of last year.
He further added that to be able to get alumni to help in the envisaged manner, adequate record of those who had passed through an institution of learning would be necessary. It was, he said, not a matter of pick and choose. You should involve everyone distributively.”
He gave examples from some foreign universities, especially University of Cambridge where he was a Press Fellow in the early 1990s, and said that donations from alumni formed an appreciable part of the funding of one of the worlds oldest and best-known universities.
He said, once one has had a certain length of academic relationship with any of the Cambridge colleges, the name of such a person enters its alumni register and such a person continues to be updated on the happenings in the University and ones college, adding that to some extend the colleges may be likened to departments and faculties in Nigerian universities, in terms of hosting of students during their programmes.
Ezeh advised that former students are likely to think favourably of their alma mater if they were treated fairly during their days in the school, and if the system was such that the school continuously showed interest in them after graduation.
He devoted a large part of his presentation showing from the origin of the words and from typical situations that alumnus-alma mater relationship was like mother-child kinship.
His words, "As in the case of most human mother-and-child relationship, I think that this determination to keep track of their former students through life helps to cement the cordiality and closeness of the alumni and the institution."
He commended the efforts of the Department in organizing the Homecoming and said that more improvement was needed to systematize continuous alumni-alma mater interaction.
Former student of the Department and a Professor there who is on secondment to the World Health Organization, Joseph Okeibunor, praised the organizers of the event and said it would enable current students to interact with their predecessors.
Head of the Department, Professor Bona Nwokeoma, and Chairman of the Organizing Committee, Dr Nnabuike Osadebe, each spoke on the long history of the Department, which is Nigerias first department of sociology and anthropology, which produced its first set of graduates six decades ago in 1963.
Professor Nwokeoma said the occasion was also being used to launch fundraising for a N70 million development fund for the department, and to present a book on the history of the Department.
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