Sexual Harassment: Law Faculty Principal Officers Now Women, Says UNICAL VC

Following the sexual harassment allegations levied against suspended Dean of Faculty of Law at the University of Calabar (UNICAL), Prof Cyril Ndifon; the Vice Chancellor (VC) of the university, Prof Florence Obi, has said that the management of the school carried out a “clean sweep” of the law faculty, ensuring that all the principal officers at the faculty are women.

The UNICAL VC spoke on Channels Television’s Sunrise breakfast programme on Saturday.

She said the school management has put in place measures to curtail cases of sexual harassment between lecturers and students of the institution.

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 matter would do justice on it.

Obi said, “We have put up measures to see that, going forward, such occurrences are curtailed.

“You can’t completely eradicate sexual harassment in schools because it happens everywhere, every country. It does happen but the impunity, the serial abuse, the way and manner in which this is done, is where it becomes a problem.

“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 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 an 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.”