COLUMN ONE : In Africa, It’s Lower Education : Universities across the continent represent a silent disaster, marked by physical collapse, low salaries and decades of mismanagement. Students are becoming impatient.

It is a typical day at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, the national center of higher learning.

Ernest Maganya arrives a little breathless for the class he teaches in developmental economics, for he has been getting his usual practical experience in the subject. His professor’s pay of $75 a month is enough to feed his family for about a week, and he supplements this by ferrying produce and chickens to market every morning in an old pickup truck.

Down the hill from the classrooms, student president Matiko Matara arrives back at his office in the student center, from which he was escorted at gunpoint two days earlier by the Tanzanian security police.

The police have been questioning him about his role in fomenting an eight-day student strike over squalid conditions on campus and the absence of employment opportunities for the graduates the university turns out at the rate of 1,500 a year. They accused him of being on the CIA payroll.

A crowd of students is milling around in front of the cafeteria, wondering whether Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi will keep a commitment to show up on campus. He is expected to apologize to the faculty for an insulting speech earlier in the week accusing them of letting the students get out of hand.

Mwinyi would not arrive. A day later, he would order the university closed indefinitely.

This story could be written about any of more than 40 institutions of higher education on the continent. Overall, the condition of African universities might be described as a silent disaster. There are no dramatic photographs, no heart-rending personal histories.

But the cradles of African leadership are almost uniformly victimized by physical collapse, a “brain drain” fueled by ludicrously low salaries and political unrest. Government hostility, donor neglect and decades of mismanagement and inept planning are helping them crumble.

“This is where the future leaders of Africa must come from,” said Thomas R. Odhiambo, a Kenyan who is perhaps Africa’s leading scientist and the founder of a respected agricultural research institute in Nairobi. “In the end, the ideas that will make the people move forward will come from this level, and we should not take it lightly.”

Problems turn up in varying form on every campus. Sudan’s University of Khartoum was until last year a center of progressive thinking about how to bring peace to the divided country and reinvigorate its economy. But that ended with last’s year’s military coup. The new regime threw 12 top professors in jail, and they are still there, though none has been charged with a specific offense.

After a heated debate on human rights at the university last December, a student participant was killed, possibly by pro-government Islamic fundamentalists.

Elsewhere, the familiar maladies of Africa are vividly reflected in campus conditions.

“In some countries, the collapse of the society at large has destroyed some very fine institutions,” Brian van Arkadie, a Dutch economist who has taught in African universities for nearly 30 years, said in a recent interview.

An example is Uganda’s Makarere University, once known as “the Harvard of Africa.” Makarere is the alma mater of some of the continent’s premier African statesmen, including Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania.

“I had as distinguished a group of colleagues there as I’ve had anywhere in the world,” said Van Arkadie, who taught there in 1963.

But the institution’s fortunes closely tracked Uganda’s own. Both hit bottom when the illiterate President Idi Amin declared himself chancellor of the university. Years of political intimidation drove the best of the faculty out of the country, and the lovely Georgian campus on a wooded hill overlooking Kampala crumbled in disrepair.

Today, Makarere is slowly recovering, as is the country, but its eager students must study in conditions not generally associated with academe.

A tour of almost any African institution of higher learning provides a distressing picture of neglect, indifference and declining standards.

The University of Dar-es-Salaam is as good a place to start as any. Its library, like the libraries of many African universities, is useful more as a chronicle of the institution’s past than as a study tool.

In the periodicals room, scarcely any of the technical journals are up to date. The file of Psychological Abstracts stops at 1983, Current Biography at 1977. The most recent World Almanac is 10 years old. Bound volumes of the Times of London index stretch back 30 years, but if one picks up the loose-leaf binder holding the most recent issues, the date inside is 1977.

Go up one flight of stairs to the special reserve stacks, which contain the books most frequently requested by students. Here are rows and rows of textbooks and high-quality reference works, but whole chapters have been torn out of some volumes--in many cases more than half the book.

The reason is a combination of the scarcity of reference material and the penury of students. One of these books might have to serve an entire class of a hundred students, and “the students have no money for Xeroxing so they tear out the pages and keep them,” said Luta Malyamkono, a professor of education and head of a research project studying universities in eastern and southern Africa.

Elsewhere, the picture is the same. At Sierra Leone’s Forha Bay University, once a beacon of education in West Africa, the library has no electric power and receives no direct sunlight. Students recently went on strike because they had no toilet facilities.

At the University of Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, striking students labeled one of their dormitories “the People’s Republic of China” because 20 students were crammed into bedrooms designed for three.

Some institutions cannot safeguard their most cherished possessions. Not long ago, an alert European in Kampala found a first edition of a renowned turn-of-the-century tract on African slavery for sale in a flea market for 50 shillings, the equivalent of 25 cents.

The book had come from a collection of Africana bequeathed to Makarere by the late Margery Perham, a leading British historian of the colonial era. The priceless collection was being dismantled by a curator and sold off piece by piece to supplement his meager pay.

The problem goes beyond the condition of the physical plant. Since the 1970s, African universities have found it increasingly difficult to match national needs with institutional programs.

It has become a cliche that some colleges in countries that are still more than 80% agricultural turn out more philosophers and lawyers than agronomists and engineers. The reason is partially economic: educating a student in the sciences costs about five times as much as in the liberal arts.

There is also a mismatch of facilities and capabilities. One of the ironies of life at the University of Dar-es-Salaam is that its engineering school, still favored with money from Western donors, boasts an astonishingly well-equipped engineering lab. Complex wiring and gleaming electrical instruments fill the room. But most students are too poorly prepared to use them.

A foreign professor of engineering says that entering students are so behind in rudimentary instruction that he has to spend the first six weeks of his classes on high-school level review. Some students lack such elementary practical experience that he sometimes has to open the course with a demonstration of how a bolt fits into a nut.

No one is as impatient with the declining conditions and standards as the students themselves. And this contributes to the student strikes and demonstrations that have so irritated African leaders in recent months.

At Dar-es-Salaam, organizers of the eight-day strike presented a list of grievances that ranged from education’s declining share of the national budget through corruption in government to the meager pay that forces professors to take menial jobs in order to survive.

“We told the government either to close the university or raise the standards, so one can be proud of being a graduate,” said Ali Saleh, an activist in the student association. “They should give the faculty salaries that will make them stay, not force them to be taxi drivers. Their moonlighting comes at the expense of the students, because they don’t come to class prepared to teach.”

This sort of activism has resulted in the largely monolithic regimes putting increasing political pressure on the universities. Since December, universities have been ordered closed down--briefly, in some instances--in Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Uganda.

President Yoweri Museveni’s suspension of classes at Makarere in December was the first in the history of that institution, which had continued functioning, albeit as a cripple, even during the darkest days under Idi Amin.

Educators say the decline of African universities began in the mid-1970s, in tandem with and partially as a result of a sharp drop in Western donations. Among the key factors was a change in the philosophy of the private foundations that were providing millions of dollars to higher education. They began to feel that the elitist institutions they were helping to build were slighting the needs of the mass of Africans at the low end of the socioeconomic scale.

“There was a tremendous impatience with the trickle-down idea,” said Joyce Moock, a Rockefeller Foundation specialist in the subject. “The universities set up by the British and the French were aspiring to international standards of excellence, but the donors began to be more interested in reaching the poorest of the poor.”

The new goal was universal primary education. Some countries succeeded in getting close to 90% of school-age children into primary schools, but there were very few that were placing even 5% of the primary-school graduates in secondary schools.

Meanwhile, university costs to the central governments were rising because traditional subsidies to the institutions meant that students paid as little as 10% of the cost of their education.

The collapse in African economies in the 1970s and 1980s exacerbated the so-called brain drain, depriving universities of teachers and the countries of their graduates’ skills.

A recent report by the World Bank estimated that in 1985, the United States had more than 34,000 African students and that more than 70,000 highly trained Africans had chosen to stay on and work in Europe rather than return home, where an engineer’s salary might not be enough to feed a family of four.

“Africans who come to the United States for higher education in science and technology often have faculty appointments back home,” Rockefeller’s Moock said. “Now there are real questions being raised about how they are attracted to America and how they should be repatriated home.”

At the same time, she said, there are growing doubts about the training they receive in the United States. “We train them in very high-tech fields,” she said, giving them skills that may not be very useful in their countries’ developing economies.

What the foundations are discovering now is what other donors to Africa learned long ago: The deterioration of a neglected asset, be it a road network, railroad or university, can go out of control like a speeding car. The 10 years of neglect will take more than 20 years to repair.

Meanwhile, the institutions will fall further behind in their ability to absorb the explosion of information and technology transforming the rest of the world. And the continent’s ability to solve its own special problems will decline.

“Many of Africa’s problems are unique,” Kenya’s Odhiambo said, “and unless we can tackle them ourselves, we have no future.”