African Universities and Western Tradition—Some East African Reflections

Extract

A University must grow from seed. It cannot be transplanted from England or Germany in full leaf and bearing … When the American University appears, it will not be a copy of foreign institutions but the slow and natural outgrowth of American social and political habits.

This quotation from C. W. Eliot, who was President of Harvard University nearly 100 years ago, provided Sir Eric Ashby with the starting text for his recent Godkin Lectures at Harvard, which have since been published under the title African Universities and Western Tradition. Ashby is concerned with the process through which the universities in Africa, still very much western transplantations, will develop into genuine national universities. He seeks to extend Eliot's prophecy to the universities of Africa, to test there its applicability and its implications.