The Vice-Chancellor (VC) of the University of Calabar (UNICAL), Prof Florence Obi (UNICAL), has said that the management of the school has carried out a “clean sweep” of the law faculty, ensuring that all the principal officers at the faculty are women.
This move followed the alleged sexual harassment against the University’s suspended Dean of the Faculty of Law, Prof Cyril Ndifon.
In a recent interview, the VC said the school management has put in place measures to curtail sexual harassment between lecturers and students of the institution.
Politics Nigeria recalls that some female law students at the faculty had staged a protest and accused Ndifon of sexual harassment.
Subsequently, the university management suspended Ndifon and constituted a panel to investigate the allegations against the embattled law professor.
Commenting on the matter on Saturday morning, the vice chancellor said the panel constituted to probe the case would do justice to it.
Obi explained that adequate measures had been implemented to ensure that such occurrences are curtailed and students are protected from sexual harassment.
Her words:
“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.”
