'African universities should differentiate their missions clearly'

The notion that there is a single ideal university must be resisted in favour of one that values a plurality of institutional types and promotes intentional differentiation in national higher education systems, according to Tade Aina, head of research, Mastercard Foundation. In this regard, one of the biggest failures in the current discourse, he says, is the failure to see public universities "as existing on a kind of spectrum along which there are a wide range of different functions that may be performed".