The Vice- Chancellor of University of Abuja, Prof. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, says the university gives admission to students across different disciplines on merit.
Na’allah said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
He explained that the university’s admission process is thorough and transparent, noting that “the university maintains its core values when it comes to admission matters.
”Admission at the university of Abuja goes through a process that is transparent and has high level of integrity.
”You see, the university may have had some difficult history, it is not the reality today, our admission follows very thorough process.
”Again this university has values, and our values matter to us; besides, since I came here, we do our best to ensure that nobody who really merits admission is denied such admission.
”We have never left any state without admission, and our record is there, and we will continue to respect that pattern.
“This is because ours is a university for national unity in the Federal Capital Territory, and we need to offer representation to all as much as we can”.
The vice chancellor said that the university would apply a large measure of integrity, fairness and the interest of all Nigerians in its admission process for 2021/2022 academic session.
On quality of teaching and research, Na’Allah said that research “is at the core of its mandates while administration has supported both lecturers and students to conduct qualitative and problem-solving research.
He explained that the university had given grants to even undergraduates undertaking quality research, adding that it had also sponsored some of its academic staff abroad to conduct research.
”This university gives a lot of priority to research at different levels, for instance, through our Centre for Undergraduate Research, we encourage undergraduate students to embark on research under the mentorship of some academic staff; we actually fund that.
”When they turn in their proposals and it is good, some get about N300, 000, N500, 000, N800,000 and so on and so forth, depending on the nature of the research. We spend millions on these researches.
”We also have the Centre for Sponsored Projects doing great in terms of deepening and creating opportunitiesfor research in the university,” he said.
The vice-chancellor noted that university had signed series of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with various organisations in order to improve the quality and conduct problem solving research
He said that lecturers of the university, through their various researches had also won grants for the institution from various foreign organisations.
”Ket me tell you that we started the first year by celebrating research activity, when our lecturers were bringing in grants.
”When we first did the celebration, our academic staff had brought in N350 million, and we thought that was big. When we celebrated in December, 2021, we realised more than N1 billion and some of these grants came from Europe.
”Curtently, we have a lot of MoU with energy commission, environmental agencies, name them.
”We do not believe that when research is done it should be dumped on the shelf and forgotten, so we are working to ensure that research findings are put to practice and that they yield results,” he said.
The vice-chancellor explained that the institution was paternering with various organisations, government agencies and non-governmental organisations, among others, in utilising such research conducted by the school.(NAN)
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