Abstract
This chapter employs Systemic Functional Linguistics to account for style and distinctive language usage in the vision and mission statements of Nigeria's first-generation private universities. The objective of the chapter is to examine how certain linguistic resources in the statements reflect the intersection of language, context, and meaning, thereby creating the style or register of these institutions' vision and mission statements. The findings reveal that the configuration of linguistic resources revolves around five themes: high self-ranking, qualitative research, teaching and learning, rectitude, qualitative graduates, and positive societal impact. Additionally, at the lexicogrammatical level, there is a predominant use of the Relational Process, as well as verbal sequences involving "to be" and "be to + stem verb." The study concludes that the prominent linguistic elements and distinctive syntactic patterns in the statements not only contribute to the style or register of the private universities' vision and mission statements but also effectively convey the institutions' purpose and idealized future, thus strategically appealing to prospective clients and serving marketization objectives.
TopBackground
Nigeria has an unusual history of private higher education. Babcock, Igbinedion and Madonna Universities are the first three private universities established in Nigeria in 1999, some 51 years after University of Ibadan, the first public university, established in 1948. Although there were about 40 public universities in the country when these three universities arrived on the Nigerian higher education scene, the urgent need to meet the yearly unmet admission demands of millions of Nigerian youths is often identified by government agents as government’s rationale for approving the establishment of private universities. When some seven private universities were approved by the National Executive Council in 2009, for example, the Minister of Information at the time was reported to have indicated that government’s consideration of the rising youth population in the country was fundamental to the approval of the new universities (Nairaland Forum, 2009). In a similar circumstance, the Minister of State for Education emphasized that more universities were needed to take care of the millions who needed admission (Nairaland Forum, 2009). In a paper delivered at Obafemi Awolowo University on behalf of the Nigerian President, according to Babalola (2020), the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education explained that the emergence of private universities was a logical response to fill the demand gap created by the inability of governments to meet the number of universities required. Iruonagbe et al. (2015, p. 51) corroborated this by submitting that the establishment of private universities is one of the most reasonable policy options that expanded access into the university from around 2001/2002 when admission crisis had become more critical and access rate into public universities had fallen below 13 per cent.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Mission/mission statement (MS): An organizational statement which expresses how the organization’s idealized future state/being will be accomplished.
Functional stylistics: A stylistics enterprise which particularly employs functional grammars such as systemic functional linguistics to describe, explain, and interpret the relationship between context and formal features of the text.
Context: The variable linguistic and extra-linguistics factors which reside at the background of a text and imparts of the production of the text.
Higher Education Institution (HEI): Institutions such as colleges, polytechnics, and universities, either publicly or privately owned, which provide post-secondary education.
Vision/vision statement (VS): An organizational statement which expresses the idealized future state/being of the organization.
Register: Functional variety of language for creating particular text types in particular situations.
Nigeria’s first-generation private universities: The first 22 of the privately-owned HEIs in Nigeria which were established between 1999 and 2005.
Marketization: The overt or covert strategies which organizations deploy to positively present their self-images to their prospective clients in order secure patronage.