STAFFING, STUDENTS, LIBRARY, ...

STAFFING
The University continually recruits and welcomes new staff, especially teaching staff. Most Departments now have eight or more teaching staff, at least one of whom is on professional rank (i.e. Professor or Reader/Associate Professor). In a nationwide survey carried out by the National Universities Commission in 2004, the University was ranked for the quality of its teaching staff as number one among the twenty-two state universities currently in the country.

Among the teaching staff of the University are winners of international awards like the Fulbright Fellowship tenable in the US as well as the Fellowship of the Alexander von Humbolt Foundation in Germany . There are also winners of national awards like the Fellowship of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and of literary prizes like the ones given by the Association of Nigerian Authors. There is a well-funded staff development programme under which financial assistance is given to junior academic staff pursuing higher degree programmes in Nigeria or abroad. On application, money is also made available in reasonable amounts for prosecuting viable research or for attending leanred conferences.

STUDENTS
Admission into the University, which is open to all suitably qualified persons regardless of sex, race, religion, or place of birth, is highly competitive and invariably oversubscribed except in the Sciences. However, as the institution is state-owned, 70% of the places for fresh regular degree candidates are by official directive reserved for indigenes while the rest go to out-of-state candidates.

The student population is national in character and currently stands at 7,486 made up of 4,593 (61.3%) male and 2,893 (38.65%) females. Most students live in rented rooms off-campus because the soon to be augmented University-owned hostel facilities are at present somewhat limited. Two such facilities exist on campus for females, while the third one, for males, is outside the campus. Many of the students enjoy Federal, State, or other institutional scholarships awarded strictly on the basis of academic performance. They also regularly shine in sports and invariably return from the Nigerian University Games each year with gold, silver, and bronze medals.

Several special-interest students associations and clubs exist on campus. Members of such associations or clubs annually stage shows, plays, carnivals, and pageants fro entertainment and publicity. There is also an umbrella Students' Union that serves the interests of the entire student body in the University. Annual elections into the various offices of the Union are always very keenly contested, with voter turnout often coming very close to a hundred percent

HEALTH CENTER
The University has a Medical Center off Campus, where basic health care is available to staff and students alike as the need arises. It is run by qualified and experienced medical doctors, nurses and laboratory technologist, and furnished with required diagnostic equipment.

UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
The University Library, though not centrally located, is within easy enough reach of all existing lecture rooms, office blocks, and hostels. It is currently undergoing extension designed to appreciably increase its seating and holding capacity. Its steadily increasing holdings at present stand at 15,000 volumes and 153 local and foreign journals covering different disciplines. In addition to that, it shares inter-library loan facilities with the other universities in the country and is currently very actively pursuing plans to house internet facilities for staff within its new wing. Funds for the proposed facilities are already fully assured, the Library being one of the ten university libraries in the country recently specially selected to benefit from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) grant for infrastructure and connectivity make by the George Soros Foundation, US. When the facilities become functional, the ones currently existing at the Computer Center will be left for students to use.

COMPUTER CENTRE
The University has a Computer Centre which serves as a central academic support unit that provides computing and ICT facilities to all sections of the University community. The brief of the centre includes student support services. Presently, the centre, through the development of software packages to aid Management in the effective performance of its administrative and management functions, has computerized matriculation number generations, examination result computation, transcript of academic records generation and central stores vendors system.