'Pick It' — How COOU Is Building a Culture of Environmental Responsibility, One Campus at a Time

It started with a conviction that a world-class university must look and feel like one. Under the leadership of Vice-Chancellor Prof. Kate Azuka Omenugha, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University has made environmental sustainability not just a policy priority but a lived campus culture. And two words now capture that culture with striking simplicity: "Pick it."

Since assuming office, Prof. Omenugha has been unrelenting in her pursuit of a clean, safe, and eco-friendly learning environment across the university's campuses. Her approach has been comprehensive, combining awareness campaigns, tree planting initiatives, and firm disciplinary measures to ensure that environmental consciousness becomes embedded in the daily life of every member of the COOU community.

A defining moment in this drive came on January 30, 2026, during her birthday celebration and stage performance alongside the Department of English in the drama production titled Uzumma. Using the occasion as a platform for action, the Vice-Chancellor inaugurated a team of student marshals popularly referred to as the "students police" and charged them with the responsibility of ensuring that the university environment remains clean at all times. It was a symbolic but powerful statement: that cleanliness at COOU is not optional, and that students themselves would be its frontline enforcers.

The seriousness of the policy is underscored by its consequences. The university's students' handbook now stipulates clearly that any student found littering the environment risks a one-year suspension, a sanction that leaves no room for ambiguity about how seriously the institution takes this issue. Environmental responsibility, Prof. Omenugha has made clear, is not a peripheral concern. It is a core institutional value.

From this culture of accountability, a new campus slogan has organically taken root among students: "Pick it." Whenever a member of the COOU community is seen disposing of waste indiscriminately, the response from those around them is immediate and consistent, a polite but firm reminder to pick it up. The phrase has become shorthand for a broader institutional identity: a university that holds itself to a higher standard, inside the classroom and outside it. For COOU, excellence and environmental responsibility are not separate pursuits, they are the same conversation.

©️COOUNewS, 2026