Nigeria, Oct. 6 -- When this newspaper reported last Saturday that the Pro-chancellor of Michael and Cecilia Ibru University has called himself a professor for years without ever being awarded the rank, the reaction online was shock that the claim had survived for so long. It should not have surprised anyone. A false title survives for exactly as long as no one asks for the record, and in Nigeria we have stopped asking.

I write as someone who has spent two decades inside universities and the security profession. From both vantage points, the Anthony Kila story is not an academic embarrassment. It is a vetting failure with national consequences, and it deserves a plain answer to a plain question: What actually makes someone a professor? ...