Prof Calestous Juma’s piece published on al Jazeera was provocative. The piece fetishizes science and technology while wrongly reducing the function of the humanities to sharpening debating skills.

In contrast, Dr Alex Awiti’s piece in The EastAfrican indirectly responds to Prof Juma’s argument by arguing that our universities are on their knees with respect to physical infrastructure, intellectual capacities and willingness to research, innovate, train and spur growth based on an understanding of both local circumstances and the dynamic global economy.

Dr Awiti delves into context and suggests the need for critical thinking, norm setting and effective but deliberately controlled integration in the global dynamics. His constant reference to the East African context implicitly emphasises the need for us to ride, rather than flow in, the wave of globalisation.

READ: Why EA graduates are ill-equipped for the global job market

East Africa is the site of potentially major innovations that can spur growth and development. It is also the site of major challenges that we must surmount before innovations become meaningful and sustainable.

We all must agree that this picture is complex and that technology is no magic bullet for complexity.

One such potential, but ironically also a challenge, is the youth bulge. Worse, East Africa is the home of recent major security threats associated with porous borders, marginalisation of critical borderland communities and a potentially poisonous modernisation ethic driven by excessive elite greed and an uncritical admiration of the Chinese model.

The context Dr Awiti discusses is therefore important as it depicts not just the current state of the university in (East) Africa, but also the critical ingredients one must pay attention to in order to get the re-invention gospel right.

He shows that universities are no longer the site of “curiosity, critical thinking and imagination” and indicts those of us who teach there for laziness, carelessness and greed all done at the expense of mentoring undergraduate students. His critique of our bad teaching habits is apt even though it is too generalised.

But the question of what university and for which Africa, remains unaddressed.

Unsurprisingly, Prof Juma opens with an approving citation of President Yoweri Museveni’s dismissal of the humanities.

He restricts their relevance to the nationalist era of the 1960s and suggests that it is academics schooled in this thinking who have formed a bulwark against the so-called “developmental universities.” It doesn’t matter to him that the scholars he cites as examples made pioneering arguments in favour of developmental states.

We know that the funding fortunes of Makerere University as a leading University dwindled drastically under the presidency of Museveni. Museveni has presided over this underfunding and death of the culture of inquiry in the university but castigates it for the failures he oversaw.

In its days, Makerere University stood for a certain identity and created the graduate that East Africa, and later Uganda, needed. There was a clear correlation between the socio-developmental needs of the region and the graduate it produced.

he curriculum was designed to achieve particular objectives, the training, research and seminar culture followed those objectives, and the graduate reflected the output that universities wanted to produce. And it did more than simply train “functionaries for the public service.”

Excellence and values

I am aware it was not all glorious. Perhaps, one of the areas of failure, which goes towards the question what university for which Africa, was in the assumption that excellence and values don’t go together. That is why African universities reserve the issue of values to departments of religion or management thereby confusing values for morality.

Yet, the notions of entrepreneurship and management that dominate our thinking are neo-liberal and have not distinguished themselves on ethical grounds.

They frown upon issues of social justice, important as these are if development is to be achieved and sustained. The issue is not simply to discover and innovate, it is to upscale and sustain those innovations.

Sustainability is often easily undermined by the greed of leaders and CEOs; the insidious effects of greed on Wall Street are largely responsible for multiple incidences of sabotage and economic collapse in the past few decades.

If technology alone could fix the human greed underlying all known forms of political and economic sabotage and collapse, we should have avoided the downturn we are struggling to recover from.

And yet, we continue to celebrate the sciences as the site of growth through innovation without adding that their value depends entirely on the human contexts of their application. If those technology disciplines hold the magic of development, they certainly were prepared for the hubris of George Bush Jr.

In other words, Dr Awiti’s call to our universities to “produce captains of business, leaders of government and stewards of civil society” is equally an apt reminder that the enterprise of development will simply not emerge from well-trained, technology savvy graduates who operate at the mercy of ill-mannered leaders.

It will emerge from an all-round graduate whose academic rating is exemplary, relevance to the context is clear and whose values are proper. For far too long, we have decoupled values and excellence and assumed that a brilliant engineer will, on the basis simply of brilliance, reject the corrupting tendencies of this globalised world.

At the African Leadership Centre and with the support of Carnegie Corporation of New York, we are preoccupied with linking values with academic excellence in the area of peace, security and development.

We want young Africans to compete at the same level of competence with anyone in the world but imbibe values that distinguish their character.

Godwin Murunga is Director of the African Leadership Centre and Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies.