Makerere University yesterday kicked off its 71st graduation ceremony with its largest number of doctorate degrees ever. The university Vice Chancellor, Prof Barnabas Nawangwe, said there were 108 graduates with PhD out of the 12,000 expected to get their Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees until Friday.
The country’s oldest institution of higher learning had previously graduated between 70 and 75 PhD holders.
“The capacity to supervise PhDs has grown. We have very many people who can supervise them. Also, the number of students has grown. At the moment, we have 600 people who have registered for PhDs. If we were even more efficient, we could be having over 200 people graduating with PhDs but we shall get there,” he said.
Mr Nawangwe said there are 280 professors and associate professors slated to supervise PhD students.
However, the ceremony was without fanfare due to the few graduands invited because of the Covid-19 pandemic disruptions that necessitated standard operating procedures.
The graduands were also told that they would not walk home with their academic transcripts.
“Due to Covid-19 effects, we were unable to process transcripts for our graduates before the ceremony. However, I am happy to inform all our graduates that we have now received all materials required for production and they should be able to collect their transcripts within a couple of weeks,” Prof Nawangwe announced, confirming our early story on the transcripts’ crisis.
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