Prof. Florence Obi, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calabar (UniCal), has instructed students to report incidences of sex for grades to university authorities.
Obi made the call during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Calabar on Monday.
The Vice-Chancellor stated that her administration would not tolerate harassment in the name of improving students’ exam performance.
She urged the institution’s students to be courageous enough to report such cases in order to ensure that those found guilty are punished.
“As a management team, we are sensitizing students about sex for academic purposes.” Let them be brave enough to speak up about it; they own their bodies, and no one has authority over them.
“No one has the right to tell them that if I don’t have your body, you won’t be able to attend class or you’ll fail my course.”
“We have a gender development center, and I can tell you that the students have been doing the awareness on campus because of the sensitization we’ve given them.”
“During the freshmen orientation program, I told the newly admitted students to speak up whenever they encounter such demands from lecturers,” she explained.
She challenged the students to be astute, to gather evidence of such threats and demands from lecturers, which would be used to investigate such reports appropriately.
“Parents can’t afford to send their children to school for some lecturers to start harassing them and ruining their future because we have students in school who are 14 and 15 years old,” she said.
“Because some of these lecturers are old enough to be the grandparents of the children they harass, the fight against sex for grades must be waged holistically.”
“Some of these men who are doing these things are so protective of their own children back home, yet they want to destroy someone else’s daughter’s future.”