Dr Charles Olweny, a globe-trotting oncologist who trained and worked on
four continents – including as a professor of medicine in Winnipeg –
decided seven years ago to leave Canada and return home to lead Uganda
Martyrs University, a private Catholic institution. His leadership
strategy is guided by five core principles, he told
University World News.
Uganda is undergoing a higher education boom. The result of introducing
universal primary education in 1997 and universal secondary education a
decade later is a surplus of students looking for a university
placement.
Uganda's 30 public and private universities offer 50,000 spots for
qualified secondary school graduates. More than 102,000 secondary school
students sat for qualifying exams this year. But the demand for higher
education is tempered by harsh economic reality, and even as students
graduate many are unable to find jobs.
No less a presence than Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has laid the
blame for the country’s high youth unemployment squarely at the feet of
the higher education system.
The World Bank estimates that young people between 15 and 24 make up as
much as 83% of the unemployed population. On a tour of the country last
year, Museveni accused universities of not focusing on marketable
skills, such as information technology and the sciences.
Since 2006 Dr Charles Olweny (72) has been trying to navigate this landscape.
As vice-chancellor of Uganda Martyrs University (
UMU),
he is responsible for strategically expanding his institution while
maintaining a range of courses – some that meet the president’s
definition of marketable, such as agriculture and science, and some, for
instance development studies, that do not. Olweny said they are no less
important, though.
Even as UMU is looking to develop two new campuses, he is also eager to
experiment with new education models to ensure all of the university’s
graduates are immediately employable.
It is a challenge Olweny relishes.
A trained oncologist, he built a career across four continents – Africa,
Australasia, Europe and North America – as an administrator, researcher
and academic. He took an 80% pay cut to return to his native Uganda
from Canada and help establish UMU as “the benchmark of all institutions
of higher learning, not just in Uganda, but in the entire Great Lakes
region”. Click
here for the video link.
The main campus of the 19-year-old Catholic university is Nkozi, west of
the capital Kampala, just south of the equator. It also has a newer
campus in the eastern town of Mbale.
There are more than 2,000 students, nearly 500 of them resident on the
main campus, and the others on distance learning and part-time
postgraduate courses around the country. Among a growing number of
private higher education institutions, UMUis well established,
respected, outward looking and focused on quality.
Olweny’s transition has come with some challenges. There were the
expected ones – he is quick to highlight the constant search for funds –
and those that he did not anticipate, including a battle to overcome
institutional aversion to change.
In a wide-ranging and frequently funny discussion, Olweny spoke to
University World News about the challenges for higher education in Uganda and how he is helping his institution to overcome them.
You trained as an oncologist and have spent your life all over the
world in various positions. How did you end up in academia in Uganda?
As he describes it, Olweny’s first love was medicine, not academia.
Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s when Uganda was still a British
protectorate, he was responsible for keeping his family’s medical box –
dispensing aspirin when people had headaches, or quinine when they
developed fevers.
He went on to join the country’s first postgraduate programme in
medicine at Kampala’s premier Makerere University. That was after he had
already published four papers – two in peer-reviewed journals – during
his undergraduate years at the institution. (He later got his MD from
Makerere.)
Those articles “were in the area of oncology. And I didn’t quite know
that was an area that would attract me. But it was soon after I had done
my masters degree that the dean of the faculty of medicine called me to
his office and said: ‘We all believe you have a lot of talent.’”
Olweny was offered a scholarship to study under Georg Klein – a cancer
researcher and a member of the Nobel Committee – in Stockholm, Sweden.
That was the beginning of Olweny’s globe-trotting career. He worked and
trained in the US, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Australia. He also served as
director of Uganda’s Cancer Institute for more than a decade.
Before joining UMU, he had worked in Winnipeg, Canada, for 16 years,
where he was a professor of medicine and head of the oncology department
at St Boniface General Hospital.
It is a career that has consistently included work in academia, though
Olweny is jokingly hard-pressed to explain why. “It’s almost like people
are asking me, ‘Why did you ever leave Australia to go to Canada in
that cold weather?’ My reaction, very often was, ‘I think I need my head
examined.’”
But he said teaching had always attracted him, even as an undergraduate.
So when an unexpected letter from UMU arrived in 2005, offering the
deeply religious Olweny the vice-chancellorship of Uganda’s flagship
Catholic university, he decided – after months of soul-searching and a
heated family discussion – to move into academia fulltime.
What is your leadership strategy?
What Olweny calls his “guiding principles” are the stuff of legend at
UMU. Carefully rationalised and easily presented, they have been widely
adopted by the staff, alongside the university motto – ‘In virtue and
wisdom lead the world’. Print-outs of his five-point list are hung on
walls around the university.
- Transparency
- Accountability
- Reliability
- Action based on institutional ethos
- Quality
“I think that essentially guides my way of doing things. I brought those
five [principles to UMU] and they have remained.” Click
here
for the video link. Quality, Olweny, is a major preoccupation of the
university, not the least because it relies heavily on student fees for
its financial survival.
The other quality he espouses is hard work. It is evident in how he
structures his day – starting at 08h00 every morning and not ending
until at least 19h30 every night. And those days are filled with
meetings. Meetings with students, faculty or one of the five national
and international boards he sits on.
“One of my kids, when they were growing up, he used to say they thought
their dad was always eating meat, because I said, ‘I’m going for this
meeting. I’m going for that meeting.' They thought dad is always eating
meat.”
He adopted his work habits while at university. A mentor at medical
school once told Olweny that his day should only really begin when
everyone else was going home.
“Usually, that’s the most productive two to three hours. Nobody knows
you are in the office. No telephones ring. What I’m able to achieve
between 16h30 and 19h30 is enormous. Very often it is much more than
what I’ve achieved through the rest of the day.” Click
here for the video link.
What major change have you brought to the university?
Immediately on arrival, Olweny upended UMU’s educational philosophy.
From his years at universities around the world, he said he had learned
that most universities have a standard set of priorities: teaching,
research and, then, community service.
“We have rearranged that. We have put research and scholarship first.
And our No. 2 is community engagement. Not service, engagement. And we
put teaching at the bottom.
“The reason is, we believe anybody can teach. You don’t need to be a
professor to be able to teach. But you need to be a researcher to be at a
university and we need to engage the community.” Click
here for the video link.
Less than a month into his tenure, Olweny established a community
relations committee, which meets regularly to decide how the community
and UMU can work together. The key product of that relationship has been
an effort to lift a nearby village, Nindye, out of poverty.
“What we have done is every faculty has been told they must mainstream
outreach into their curriculum.” Departments like health sciences and
education consult with the community and brainstorm ideas to help
improve the lives of people living in Nindye.
The faculty of agriculture, for instance, is helping farmers improve
yields and market their goods. The endeavour is modelled on the
Millennium Villages Project, but draws on research conducted by UMU.
If the effort, which is being run in partnership with the University of
Notre Dame in Indiana, is successful, Olweny plans to export it to other
communities. Click
here for the video link.
How have you positioned the university both for international recognition and to prepare students for Uganda’s job market?
Nearly 25% of UMU’s students are international. Most are drawn from East
Africa, but a handful comes from the United States, Canada and Belgium.
The international strategy capitalises on Olweny’s own experiences
working abroad. At UMU, he has forged partnerships with universities
like Notre Dame, and also recruits staff from around the world.
“That’s part of our strategy, just to be as international as we possibly
can. We also take pride in forging strategic alliances…That gives us a
fairly broad perspective.”
As UMU seeks to expand its international presence, though, it also has
to tailor its educational experience to preparing Ugandan students to
find positions in a difficult job market. That can require two very
different kinds of courses.
Olweny is using planned university expansion – introducing new campuses
in northern and western Uganda – to deploy an unusual strategy
addressing just that problem. “Every campus must be unique in character
and not merely a replica of what takes place at our main campus,” he
said.
The plan is for the new eastern campus in Mbale to spearhead education.
Gulu in the north will be a “hard work campus. In addition to regular
academics, they will be doing hard work.” The western campus will be a
polytechnic. “We’re thinking of motor vehicle mechanical engineering,
medical equipment repair engineering, petroleum engineering and
agricultural engineering.” Click
here for the video link.
With campuses tailored to specific skills, UMU can continue to attract
local and international students to its varied programmes at the main
Nkozi campus, while also offering the kind of vocational training that
will allow entrepreneurial students to take advantage of gaps in
regional markets.
In that vein, UMU also launched the Student Training Entrepreneurial
Promotion (STEP) programme to teach students how to start their own
businesses.
The increase in vocational offerings is critical in Uganda’s current
economic environment but, despite recent urgings from the president and
others, it is not the only solution to graduating students who will be
able to find jobs in Uganda.
Olweny keeps returning to another advantage that UMU graduates have over
other university-educated job applicants. It starts with what he
describes as a mythical radio station that everyone in Uganda listens
to, calling it WIII FM – the What Is In It For Me station.
“That’s what is killing Uganda today. Everybody will [ask], what do I
get out of this? That’s the first question…Until that radio station is
closed, this country is doomed."
He continued: “I’ve been singing to everybody, to the students, to the
staff, and hopefully if the change can start there, it will spread in
concentric circles and eventually it will catch up with everyone.
“At least I now know that most of my students, when they graduate, they
will be grabbed. Especially by banks and other financial institutions.
They’ll say, 'Yes, those are guys with integrity.'” Click
here for the video link.
What other challenges have you encountered as leader of UMU?
Like most private universities in Uganda, UMU has a constant struggle to
raise enough money to cover its costs, while still offering an
affordable education. The mantra Olweny shares with his staff is that
“it’s not business as usual”.
That means more dialogue between different departments to guide
financial decisions. He just finished hosting a conference that pulled
together UMU’s deans, associate deans and department heads to instil
this message.
The other major hurdle, he said, is an attitude of complacency. “People don’t want to change. They are happy with the
status quo. You bring in a new idea, they think you are crazy.”
Each innovation he introduces – from outsourcing campus security to
creating an advancement office that would build greater alumni support –
has been greeted with resistance, he said.
“They are beginning to accept [change], but we just have to keep reminding them.” Click
here for the video link.
What advice do you have for future academic leaders?
As with most of his answers, Olweny has a readymade list of advice for
his successors. In essence, it boils down to three critical points:
“Do what you like to do. Do not do it because other people want you to
do it. You would not succeed. You have to do what you want, what you
like doing.”
He also emphasised the importance of working within a group of people who support the same vision and adhere to the same value.
And finally, “not to lose sight that, in fact, we’re training leaders of
tomorrow”. He added, somewhat implausibly given his groundbreaking work
at UMU: “Our time is gone. My time is gone.”
