Head of Department, Mass Communication, Olabisi Onabajo University, Ago-Iwoye, Professor Dele Odunlami is an all-around media professional and academic based on his career history.
He started out as a print journalist at The defunct African Guardian Magazine where he was a freelance journalist on the art page and business desk and wrote advertorials and commentaries.
He later left for Champion Newspaper and worked on the sub-desk before moving to Sports News, a sports-based newspaper, with some top sports journalists. After editing Industrial News, a magazine Publishing Outfit, he returned to broadcasting in 1993 at Ogun State Television as a Principal Editor before joining the academics in 2003.
In July 2023 he was named a Professor of Mass Communication having started from the lowest cadre as an Assistant lecturer
In an exclusive interview with the Professor, he shares valuable lessons garnered through the years as an academician and professional.
Excerpts from the interview below:
ACADEMICS
“Academics is a challenging call. It is not for lazy people. I had my job cut for me when I joined the academics and as I tell my students, if you’re a successful reporter, you will be good in academics because when we do Investigations and write stories it is a kind of research. We try to balance and report accurately using the instrumentality of language, so that was why I wasn’t bothered when I started out at the lowest rank as an assistant lecturer. My promotion every three years, was okay until I was to move from senior lectureship to assistant and associate professor. That was the only time I had a little delay. Probably due to some rules that changed. But today I am where I am.
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MENTORSHIP AS INGREDIENT OF GREATNESS
Late Professor Lai Oso and a number of good people, like Professor Idowu Sobowale, played many roles in making me who I am, and not me alone. They are people who have touched lives generally. That is why in any profession you want to be in, you must have mentors, people who are up there, who will take you through the rudiments and make you aim at the best.
Without a good mentor, you end up being mediocre. And the quality of your mentor will determine the quality of your professionalism.
I have known Professor Lai Oso since I was in the industry. He was a regular face on the programmes I was presenting, including interview programmes on democracy and current affairs programmes on Television. So, when I crossed to academics, it was just like shifting gears for me. Seeing them as people who have been here before me, I patterned my own kind of scholarship after them in terms of prolificity and the quality of research output.
They could compete with any scholar from any part of the world, and I was determined from the start not to be a local champion, but a global scholar, and I patterned my scholarship after them. And indeed they have been there all the way monitoring, and working collaboratively. Some of them have access to bigger grants, to wider networks, so they exposed us to such a wide global landscape in academics and we have been able to find our feet. Losing such a person as Prof. Oso is not a joke because the gap he has left will be there for a long time.
When you have the benefit of mentorship you will not waste time around, you will be focused on your principal and not major in your minor. And as a result, you have your future cut out for you. And that Is where we are lacking today. A lot of upcoming scholars think they know it all.
Academics is like undergoing an apprenticeship. No matter how good you are, you still need some people to put you through the way so that at the end of the day you can be a master of your own otherwise you will be fumbling along the way.
People like Professor Oso were here, they guided us and we learnt a lot about their humility. And one of the critical things in academics is that the higher you go, the more humble you become, because the more you know the more you know that you don’t know.
If you go around thinking you know, you will be exhibiting ignorance. A good scholar, no matter how rounded and learned he is, still opens his mind to ideas even from people who are juniors to him, and that is the basis of scholarship.
AFTER THE PROFESSORSHIP, WHAT NEXT?
The attainment of Professorship is not the goal. What comes after is of what use is your skills, your research, and your contributions to knowledge? What values are you adding to society?
It’s like a student who has undergone some courses, gotten some skills and is now certified. The certification is not the end goal, it is just the instrument that certifies you now to perform. So, after being pronounced a professor, the next thing now is to profess. The quality of your research outputs and international engagements. The quality of intellectual introspection is all in a bid to move society forward and expand the frontiers of knowledge in my own chosen field.
So it is a call to service. It is the beginning of work itself, because at the end of the day what determines your proficiency and competence or the quality of your impartation are the lives you have touched. How many citations do you have? Globally, how many people are reading and citing you? Because before you are cited, it shows whatever you are saying is adding to existing knowledge. You can’t keep reinventing the wheel as we say, but you are coming out with new ideas that can be used elsewhere. That is the real beginning of the work.
And now, my hope is to begin to impact my society as a scholar pulling my weight with my contemporaries around the world.
