An Ugly Battle Of Wits

There is no better place for a child’s character training than the school since this is where he has contacts with others. In fact, education in itself is naturally designed to develop citizens intellectually, spiritually, morally and, of course, physically. While at school, a child inherently seeks these types of growth even though he might not be immediately aware of this.

Every education curriculum in in Malawi seeks to develop positive personalities in individuals so that they do not only attain intellectual development. This is because we are all social beings that are supposed to interact with our fellow human beings in different scenarios.

In primary and secondary schools, pupils oftentimes take everything that their teachers say as the gospel truth and are compelled to believe it without much as hard work. This is why these teachers are supposed to be exemplary in their behaviours.

But in colleges, students are mostly left to develop their own personalities in practical terms, using theories, some of which may not work very well when put in practice. However, the mutual understanding is that college students are mature people who can take care of themselves, hence their teachers seldom concentrate on building positive personalities out of them.

Nevertheless, college teachers are not excluded when it comes to showing positive traits of humanity. They are social beings too who must comply with the dictates of society and must not act like animals that do not care about morality.

However, of late, there have been some peculiar cases within the main constituent college of the University of Malawi, Chancellor College, where some lecturers have taken it so personal that they have shelved their morals and engaged in very ugly battle of wits that at the end have just exposed very ugly sides of their lives.

Eccentricity in university colleges among students is not a strange phenomenon. And university colleges are supposed to be first places where eccentricity must be accommodated; after all, students in these places come from different backgrounds and therefore, eccentricity in this case, makes sense.

But eccentricity among university lectures may almost seem an impossibility. These are “more” mature individuals who are given the responsibility of finishing up the molding of future leaders, and we expect them to guard their morals as much as they can.

Yet, there have been cases of calling each other names like sorcerers, drunkards and many other undesirable names. Essentially, the whole ugly battle of wits has been going on at Chanco where some lecturers thought their colleagues who were fighting for academic freedom were not fighting for a right cause, or had taken things too far.

Whatever the case, the approaches in “countering” their colleagues haven’t been the best ever. There is one former Chanco lecturer named Linje Manyozo who in rebuking his Chanco colleagues who were boycotting classes used very undiplomatic language.

In his wisdom, the learned man (who calculated his way into one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, the London School of Economics, where he is studying for his PhD, or just chanced upon it), described the “striking” lecturers as drunkards and sorcerers.

One would never be wrong to doubt the educational benefit of this learned man. Isn’t education supposed to shape us into covetable human beings whose morals should be different from those of savages?

Then there is also one other lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the same Chanco who castigated his colleagues using very odd language. Instead of controlling his emotions, his emotions controlled him such that he lost touch with reality and began to think like he was dealing with animals, not human beings.

These ugly battle of wits paint a very bad picture of the university’s reputation. In fact, they lead to questioning the criteria that are followed when employing university lecturers. After all, there have been speculations that some of these “undiplomatic” lecturers have very undesirable records.

Above everything, university lecturers must refrain from using undiplomatic language when dealing with anything. They are considered as people who understand that morality supersedes any kind of intelligence, and when they engage in ugly battle of wits, we tend to question whether they have benefitted enough from their education.