LASU Must Move Beyond Size to Impact, Says New VC

Funmi Ogundare

The Vice-Chancellor of Lagos State University (LASU), Prof. Ayodeji Olawunmi Badejo, has urged the institution’s senate to move it beyond being a university admired for its size and build one that the state cannot do without.
Badejo, who said this at her inaugural senate meeting recently, urged members of the senate to own her vision of transforming LASU into Africa’s most consequential city university, stressing that the institution must focus on the impact and value of its achievements rather than merely its physical growth and expanding student population.
The 10th substantive VC said that LASU has fulfilled much of its founding promise in terms of scale and reach, disclosing that 84,326 candidates selected the university as their first-choice institution in the current admission cycle, making it Nigeria’s most preferred university for the second consecutive year.
She added that the university now serves more than 85,000 students across its campuses in Ojo, Ikeja, Epe and Badagry, with almost all its academic programmes accredited.
Badejo also highlighted the opening of West Africa’s largest digital library, LASU’s selection to host the south-west’s only National Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Cyber Sciences, and the achievements of the university’s women football team on the global stage.
However, she said the accomplishments came with greater responsibilities, urging the senate to confront the institution’s weaknesses and pursue measurable outcomes.
According to her, LASU’s research income remained in the millions of naira when it ought to run into billions, while student enrolment continued to outstrip available classrooms and laboratories.
Building on her vision, ‘Towards an Even Greater LASU’, Badejo outlined five principles to guide her administration, including making Lagos the university’s living laboratory, prioritising outputs over inputs, promoting students’ holistic development, ensuring peace as a driver of productivity and building institutions that would outlive her administration.
She said every faculty should identify specific challenges facing Lagos that its research and teaching could help address.
The VC also pledged to provide every student with an academic adviser, access to support services and supervised work experience before graduation, and to establish a university counselling and wellbeing centre and a student opportunity fund.
On staff welfare, she promised that every staff member would receive a confidential statement of verified entitlements within her first 100 days in office.
Badejo also appealed to senior professors who had withdrawn from senate meetings to return to the chamber and contribute their experience to the university’s decision-making process.
“A senate without its elders is a senate condemned to repeat its mistakes,” she noted, restating the need for younger scholars to benefit from the institutional memory of their senior colleagues.
Within her first year, Badejo said her administration would present a comprehensive academic quality audit, an admissions excellence and standards framework, a policy on the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence in teaching, assessment and research, and an annual faculty frontier review.