Paper long abstract:

Globally, postgraduate programmes constitute avenues to deepen scholarship and progress the possibilities of providing solutions to the challenges in the immediate environment, and by extension, the human society. While Nigeria has a rich history of postgraduate education, it has progressively witnessed a downturn in fortunes, and this has been occasioned by a multiplicity of factors. In this article, we explore the history of postgraduate education in Nigeria; identify the contemporary realities of PG supervision in the Humanities; and, recommend possible ways through which solutions - home-grown especially - can be devised to resolve these challenges. The myriad of inhibiting factors include the bureaucratic administrative structures, heavy workload for academic staff, absence of domestic research grants, poor supervisor-supervisee relations, quality and professionalism of doctoral candidates, infrastructural and technological deficit, and deficient research culture. In our discussions, we rely on personal and institutional experiences in recounting the realities. It is hoped that through systemic reorganisation, sustained in-house trainings and collective call-to-action of stakeholders, the Humanities supervision system and the Nigerian postgraduate system as a whole can be reinvented to become more practical-oriented and more attuned to the constantly evolving global realities.

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