Prof. Florence Obi, Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of Calabar (UNICAL), has discussed some of the steps taken to resolve the sexual harassment issue plaguing the school’s law faculty.
Recall that the Dean of the Faculty of Law, Prof. Cyril Ndifon, was suspended following a protest by some UNICAL law students who claimed he had harassed them sexually.
On Saturday, August 26, Prof. Obi said in an interview with Channels Television that the school’s administration had conducted a “clean sweep” of the law department to ensure that all of the top officers at the faculty were female.
The V.C. also stated that steps had been taken to reduce instances of sexual harassment involving lecturers and university students.
She said; “We have put up measures to see that, going forward, such occurrences are curtailed. You can’t completely eradicate sexual harassment in schools because it happens everywhere, every country. It does happen but the impunity, the serial abuse, the way and manner in which this is done, is where it becomes a problem.
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“In my university, we have put up so many measures that we know, going forward, nobody in the Faculty of Law will hold students to ransom and make any female student so vulnerable to having an amoral relationship.
“We have put about seven committees in place. There is a committee to assign students to supervisors because there are accusations that the suspended dean took all female students to supervise and that made them vulnerable to his advances. Now, there is a committee to handle that.
“There is a committee to look at mobilisation to law school which students alleged in their protest letter to us that they (staff) use that as intimidation, as a way to getting some of them to succumb, that if they don’t accept, that they may not be mobilised to law school. We have set up a committee to do that.
“There is a result vetting committee. We have also made a clean sweep in the faculty where we have the acting dean, for now, a woman; the sub-dean, a woman; the faculty officer, a woman; we want to see that the students are protected.”
