The University of Rwanda has been put on the spot over the recent re-allocation of its campuses, which saw 3,500 students transferred to its Huye Campus after they were brought to Kigali only last year.
Thus after all those changes the University of Rwanda again announced last week that the new relocation of students to different colleges.
Only three programs of School of Journalism and Communication (SJC), day programme of business studies and School of ICT will be transferred to Huye .
Dr Charles Muligande, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of University of Rwanda (UR) in charge of institutional advancement, says, the idea of merging University of Rwanda was to bring coherence, to eliminate possible duplications and also to benefit from bringing together all these resources.
However, that when UR was created, that mission was not achieved immediately due to a big number of students compacted in some campuses leaving others with few students and other uneven distribution.
Therefore, that by shifting those programmes student population will balance the facilitation of available resources and infrastructure in campuses of Huye and Nyagatare.
“Some cities were suffering from the decrease in student population, which mainly affected some secondary cities,” he adds.
He added that the recent campus allocations have an objective to balance the distribution of the students in the various campuses. “Especially in campuses of Nyagatare and Huye because the two campuses suffered more when we were doing programme allocations. The planning is aimed for achieving quality education, efficiency of the university,” he adds
Murigande, says, the adjustments take into consideration of national policies such as secondary cities in Nyagatare and Huye districts that need a bigger presence of University of Rwanda.
“For the School of Journalism and Communication, we do have Radio Salus and a community radio in Huye. Moreover, they can still come (to Kigali) for industrial attachment in print media and TV because these are not in Huye. And we will also soon put there a modern TV studio where they can practice from,” he says.
The changes are partly a result of a taskforce instituted by the Prime Minister to assess last year’s campus allocation as well as to impact further improvement, the stakeholder’s taskforce was composed of the people from the President’s Office, the Office of Prime Minister, the Ministry of Public Service, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, and the University of Rwanda.
Today, UR has a population of 28,600 students.
Unstable lecturers
Murigande added that the university is doing the best to minimize the movement of lecturers by trying to locate fully a school on one campus where possible but movement is in some cases not avoidable.
“For instance, if you are a biostatistician lecturer and biostatistics is needed in medicine, in veterinary education, in agriculture and in mathematics, because you are a biostatistician and you have the needed skills, you may be based in one of these schools and then you teach your course load,” he adds.
“Because you are needed in the School of Medicine you go there and teach, hiring a permanent staff would be a waste of resources because the School of Medicine does not need permanent lecturers to offer biostatistics. Our members of staff go to colleges as any other public servant who goes for a mission, they are given mission allowance and travel allowance,” he says.
The Express News
