This article first appeared on University World News
There is a ritual familiarity to curriculum reform in many African universities. A committee meets. It requests a review. It calls for benchmarking. A subcommittee drafts a template. A second subcommittee edits the template. The proposal advances – slowly – through layers of approval designed to prevent disasters by preventing change.
After two or three academic years a revised syllabus appears, triumphant, like a rare animal in a museum: lovingly preserved, difficult to animate, and increasingly irrelevant to the ecosystem outside the glass.
We talk about ‘outdated curricula’ as if the problem were chronological, easily solved by a sprinkling of new topics onto old frames. But what we are witnessing is not a scheduling failure, it is a structural one.
The university has, for understandable reasons, perfected the art of stability. It was built to certify knowledge, to slow the world long enough to teach it.
The economy, meanwhile, has discovered speed. It rewards learning that can reconfigure itself while moving.
Our institutions continue to produce the theoretical half of a bridge while refusing to engage the engineers building the other half. Graduates cross the academic span only to find a gap, and below it, a churning river named ‘work’.
A machine for credentialling or educating?
The temptation is to blame committees. Yet committees are only the visible interface of a deeper logic. Universities reproduce themselves through procedures that confirm their own past decisions. Quality assurance demands evidence, and evidence favours the measurable past.
Accreditation freezes ‘learning outcomes’ that were once sensible, then curates them as if they were heritage sites.
Procurement cycles outlast cohort cycles. The result is a time mismatch: courseware that takes two years to change is tasked with preparing students for industries that change every quarter.
By the time a new module on, for example, data ethics, finally passes the last hurdle, the relevant controversy has moved on to model auditing, and the students have moved on to jobs where they will learn both from scratch.
The consequences are not merely aesthetic. An obsolete curriculum produces graduate obsolescence. Students internalise the signal that memorising definitions is safer than grappling with ambiguity.
Faculty, pressed by massification and the seminar’s slow demise into a lecture, default to transmissive teaching, the pedagogical equivalent of handing out photocopies of yesterday.
Employers – those finicky judges of performance – adjust by screening for institutional brand rather than demonstrable skill, thus punishing the many for the weaknesses of the few. The system becomes a machine for credentialling, not educating. It runs smoothly, and it runs down.
‘A new syllabus does not show up in Scopus’
There are reasons for this, and they are not small. Underfunding turns every reform into a zero-sum fight for scarce time.
The incentive structure rewards research counted in publications more than courses counted in relevance; a new syllabus does not show up in Scopus.
Political interference destabilises leadership and teaches prudent people to avoid initiatives that require multiple years of consistent support.
Quality assurance frameworks, often imported and then domesticated into rigid rubrics, demand conformity to documented processes. The safest response to such a regime is to align with yesterday’s paperwork. Thus, a curriculum hardens, not despite bureaucracy, but because of it.
Credibility vs usefulness
The paradox is obvious once you say it aloud. A university must be stable enough to be credible; it must change fast enough to be useful. Most institutions try to escape the paradox by choosing one side and pretending the other will wait.
Those that choose stability graduate polite irrelevance; those that choose speed without structure become training centres with a revolving door. The intelligent move is to design for both: a slow layer that anchors identity and a fast layer that learns in public.
A slow layer is what we already know how to do: canonical knowledge that does not expire with the next software update, methods that travel across domains, literacies in writing, data, and ethics that resist obsolescence.
Students need a spine – something to keep them upright when technologies tilt. But spines do not walk. The fast layer is where curricula develop a gait: studio courses built around real problems with open-ended outcomes; rotating topics that track live issues in industry and public policy; assessment that privileges process, iteration, and the ability to explain trade-offs to non-experts.
In such a design, students encounter the mess of reality under supervision instead of alone on their first day of work. They also encounter their own ignorance in a safe space, which is the only reliable way to learn how to learn.
The discomfort of provisional decisions
The bridge metaphor, beloved by policy documents, misleads because it implies a river that stays put. The world does not; it meanders. What universities can build are not fixed spans but the habits of extension – ways of continuing construction as one walks.
That calls for institutions to accept the discomfort of provisional decisions. A course may be excellent this year and inadequate next year; excellence is not a permanent state but a relationship to context. To behave as if it were permanent is to outsource the future to someone else.
If this sounds like agile software development, that is not accidental. Courses, like products, benefit from cadences. Imagine a university with a published rhythm: minor curriculum updates every year, moderate revisions every two, and deep rewrites every five, each with its own evidentiary standard and approval path.
Annual updates might add cases, adjust readings, and revise assignments; a two-year cycle could reconfigure modules and embed new tools; the five-year cycle would question premises and prune what no longer serves. None of this requires heroism if budgets and calendars are built around it. Heroism, much celebrated on conference panels, is often an index of institutional failure.
Partnerships and practice
Two further moves change the gradient of relevance. The first is to mount the curriculum on partnerships that actually change the content of teaching rather than simply embellish brochures.
Universities should make practice porous. Faculty need the right to spend part of their time in the field – as engineers in a plant, lawyers in a clinic, data scientists in a city agency – without being treated as deserters.
Sabbaticals should include the option of time ‘in residence’ at an enterprise that is not academic.
This does not demean scholarship; it reconditions it. Students, meanwhile, should not be forced to choose between study and work as if these were mutually exclusive phases of life. Work-integrated learning, if properly assessed, is not an internship handout; it is curriculum in another building.
Africa as a site of knowledge
The second move is to re-centre Africa as a site of knowledge creation rather than an importer of problem sets. Curricula that teach AI, climate adaptation, public health, or urban design through cases from Boston will reliably prepare students to solve problems in Boston.
A continent where agriculture, languages, ecologies, and governance arrangements are distinct deserves case materials that do not require passports to make sense. Universities should build libraries of local datasets, annotated with the contextual knowledge that makes data meaningful.
They should cultivate problem studios with municipalities, hospitals, and cooperatives as co-owners. They should, in other words, teach the world by studying themselves.
Artificial intelligence is often introduced into this conversation as a shortcut, an offer to automate all the difficulties we have been too slow to resolve. It can be a lever; it can also be a crutch.
If models compute and critical data remain offshore, AI will merely accelerate the awkwardness of teaching yesterday: our best educators will become expert prompt-writers for other people’s tools.
AI as infrastructure and method
The alternative is to treat AI as infrastructure and method. Build regional compute cooperatives that lower the cost of experimentation.
Assemble curated, ethically governed datasets in health, agriculture, and public services that make African universities indispensable to anyone serious about those domains. Teach students to, not only use models, but to interrogate them, fine-tune them, and audit their failures. In doing so, a curriculum acquires a pulse; it responds.
Much of the inertia we face is powered by incentives we have forgotten to notice. Updating a syllabus is invisible work, and invisible work is rationally avoided. Promotion criteria that treat course redesign as a hobby will select for indifference.
Administrative cultures that elevate compliance over curiosity will reliably award the safest course the highest marks. Consequently, during challenging times, courses designed to foster curiosity, such as pure-basic science courses, are more likely to be defunded by administrators who fail to recognise their compliance with qualification rules. In short, there is no incentive for curricular greatness or stewardship; only for compliance. None of this is destiny. Universities can choose to treat curricular stewardship as scholarship.
They can ask for evidence of impact in the lives of students and in the practices of partner organisations. They can put teaching teams on the cover of the annual report with the same pride they reserve for the research headline. Prestige is not a natural resource; it is a policy.
Allies
Quality assurance and accreditation, so often the butt of jokes in faculty lounges, could be allies if they learned to measure what matters. Fixation on input checklists – number of contact hours, list of topics – encourages course taxidermy: every requisite word appears in the file, and nothing moves.
An outcomes orientation, done properly, asks whether students can perform competently in contexts that do not respect module boundaries. It requires external judges who do not care how tidy the file looks.
It requires the courage to let go of courses that no longer justify their rent in the timetable. Sunset clauses are not insults to tradition; they are how traditions avoid becoming mausoleums.
Massification
All of this is more difficult under conditions of overcrowding. When one instructor faces 300 students, interactivity becomes an aspiration disguised as a slide. But, even here, design choices matter.
Massification is an argument for the creative use of scale, not a death sentence. Large lectures can be paired with peer-led studios; content can be modularised so that students demonstrate mastery in different ways; technology can be used to free humans for what only humans do well: feedback, critique, coaching.
One might even say the university must finally do the one thing it has long promised: focus on learning rather than teaching.
We often comfort ourselves by saying curricula take time to change. This is true. It is also not a defence. Time, in universities, is a currency.
We can squander it on procedural theatre or we can invest it where it compounds: in people who know how to keep learning when the course ends, in faculty who have the right to change their minds in public, in institutions that can tell the difference between tradition and habit.
The future will not wait until the next subcommittee meeting. It will, however, reward those who can move with it without forgetting why they are moving.
If we succeed, our graduates will no longer stand at the edge of a bridge to nowhere. They will step onto structures that extend as they walk – sometimes shaky, often demanding, but always connected to real ground on the other side.
And our universities will have recovered their vocation: not to teach the latest fashion or defend the oldest dogma, but to cultivate the capacity to update – a humble, rigorous practice of staying in conversation with the world as it changes, and of changing with it without losing ourselves.