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The Faculty of Arts came into being during the 1974/75 academic session as the Faculty of Arts in the Jos campus of the University of Ibadan and moved to the Bauchi Road Campus during the 1975/76 session. The foundation departments in the faculty were English, History, Languages & Linguistics, Theatre Arts and Religious Studies. In 1975, the University of Jos was established and the Faculty of Arts was renamed the Faculty of Arts of the University of Jos.
Over the years, the foundation departments were consolidated. Experienced staff were recruited while new undergraduate and postgraduate programmes were developed. From the inception of the faculty, the various departments grew steadily in quality and quantity until the mid 1980's when the 60:40 Science-Arts mix of students was enforced in the admission exercises. The student and staff population continued to increase, but less steadily, until the mid 1990's when it registered a sharp decline because of the strict implementation of the 60:40 Science-Arts mix for the student population. In 1990, the National Universities Commission conducted the accreditation of undergraduate programmes in Nigerian Universities. The Departments of History, and Religious Studies secured full accreditation, while English, Languages and Linguistics, as well as Theatre Arts got interim accreditation.
The Faculty of Arts through its various departments aims at:
* training of high-level academic and professional manpower in the humanities;
* assisting the community with professional advice by proffering solutions to specific societal problems;
* training citizens to apply their acquired knowledge to solving societal problems
* training students in methods of scholarship, scientific research and other creative endeavours;
* training citizens to make them patriotic with high moral values, good human virtues and resulting in a responsible citizenry.
In an age of high technology and scientific advances, the liberal arts are often viewed as the sleepy backwaters of the academy, harmless enough perhaps, yet somehow on the sidelines of the action, detached from and irrelevant to the problems of the real world.
Faith in science and technology, on the other hand, has become almost a secular-religion as achievements in those fields have become ever more spectacular. From penicillin to plastics, from digital watches to dial telephones, from radial tyres to robotics, the advances of science and technology are unmistakable in our daily lives while the influence of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or the music of Mozart, or the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the plays of Wole Soyinka, the prose of Chinua Achebe, the sculptures of Ben Ewunwo etc. is much less obvious.
Regrettably, it is the material aspects of our culture rather than the philosophical, the moral or the aesthetic ones that seem to dominate our policy orientation and our developmental growth trends. This is glaringly reflected in our 60:40 Science: Arts mix Admission Policy and its consequent implications.
Tragically, this rat race in the pursuit of scientific and technological relevance emanates from the Nigerian society which is a society in desperate search for its soul, in search for the very raison d’etre for its being and existence which only the liberal arts can provide. The faculty therefore has a national role to play :
The moral and ethical crisis facing Nigeria has been well enunciated by successive governments in Nigeria. The ethical revolution drive, 1979 - 1983, the War Against Indiscipline Campaigns 1984 - 1985, the MAMSER crusade 1985 - 1993, and now the National Orientation Agency (NOA) thrust 1994 - 1998, all portend a trend towards the search for Nigeria’s soul. Nigeria’s soul can only be reached through the Liberal Arts, Religious Studies, Philosophy, Theatre/Creative Arts, History, Languages and Cultures.
The Nigerian inner spirit is embedded in these Liberal Arts disciplines and it is a cardinal vision of the mission of the Faculty of Arts to discover this Nigerian Spirit.
The ability to understand our times and cultures and times and cultures other than our own, to appreciate the sources not only of institutions, human existence but also of our beliefs and values, to apply them humanly in our daily lives, and to explore the human experience in all its richness and ambiguity are the main purposes and functions of the liberal arts.
a catalogue of the national maladies include: the undesirable manifestations such as greed, dishonesty, impatience, discourtesy, vandalism, indecency, brutality, armed robbery, drunkenness, cultism, tribalism, selfishness, ostentation, indiscipline, corruption, insensitiveness to filthy surroundings and many other identifiable ills.
In contrast to science and technology which are amoral, the Liberal Arts are value-laden disciplines and are targeted towards the nurturing and shaping of moral values and human virtues. Human life is empty without these moral values and human virtues which the liberal arts conduce. For through the liberal arts we discover how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope and reason. The liberal arts stretch our imagination and enrich our experience and increase our distinctively human potential.
Through the liberal arts we should learn to make choices, to discriminate between the meritorious and the meretricious between good and evil. Through them we determine which endeavours are worthy of our best efforts and which are specious, and ultimately we learn to know ourselves, our humanity socially, culturally as well as individually
the liberal arts have played an integrative role and continue to perform integrative functions in the evolution of national consciousness in Nigeria. The major outward trappings of national sovereignty expressed in the national flag, the national anthem, the national pledge and the national coat-of-arms all derive their form and force from the liberal arts. While literature and creative and performing arts give expression to national consciousness and patriotism, philosophy and history define its content and development. The Liberal Arts in whose territory lay philosophy, history, religious studies, languages and linguistics, creative and performing arts must create in the 21st century the right ideological and cultural climate conducive for the development of national consciousness. It must provide a philosophy and an ideology that cuts across our traditional primordial ethnic, regional, religious and racial barriers, to which all groups will identify with.
- the arts should empower us to properly analyse , correctly synthesise and accurately generalise, acting in the strictly more utilitarian sense. The arts should teach Nigerians to particularly be people whose life has meaning to the extent that it is applied to large and noble purposes that transcend material wealth and personal gain.
The dual purposes of the arts as a reflector or imitator of society as well as the inspirator or creator of values and symbolic forms that chart, compass and reveal new directions within society must be truly fathomed in the 21st century. Consequently, creative cultural activities must inspire the sense of mission towards individual self-consciousness and hence national consciousness.
To nurture a Faculty of the highest standards that nurtures and shapes moral values and human virtues in the citizenry. |
