The essays in this volume were produced in the finest tradition of the university. Judging from their resumés, contributors were well-trained initially in the University of Ghana system and then exposed to the academic tradition in some of the best institutions in the world outside Ghana. The contributors are now located in Ghana but represent a microcosm of rigorous international research and debate. What are the prospects for maintaining this tradition as the present core of staff retire from the university and it faces seemingly insuperable difficulties? It is argued here that the academic staff must be actively involved in the search for solutions to the university’s problems.

Academic institutions in Ghana, as in many other parts of the world, are public institutions that depend largely on government subvention. Students, the chief beneficiaries of higher education, contribute little to teaching costs. Inadequate funding of African universities has seriously constrained their capacity to discharge fully their responsibilities to their host countries. Studies conducted for the Association of African Universities and the World Bank have documented the effect that inadequate funding has had upon the universities. Ghanaian universities also face these well-publicized problems which are associated with university education in most sub-Saharan African countries. Deterioration of the academic infrastructure, poverty-level wages and poor conditions of service for faculty and administrative staff, shortages of books and laboratory materials, discontinuation of journal subscriptions, inadequate supplies of computer and communication equipment, all are symptoms of the inadequate funding of universities in Ghana and throughout Africa. New staff, qualified at the doctorate level, are not being recruited in sufficient numbers in key areas like mathematics, statistics and computer science. This problem extends to the humanities. Retired faculty members are perpetually retained to fill vacancies. This can only be a temporary measure as they will leave the scene sooner rather than later. Without expansion of the academic facilities and with inadequate maintenance of existing facilities, the university is unable to admit the many new students who qualify for admission each year. Three out of five qualified candidates fail to gain admission. Many a time the academic calendar is interrupted by strike actions of both academic and supporting staff. The inadequate wage structure has been challenged steadfastly and unsuccessfully; indeed it cannot be corrected by government, because the enforcement of structural adjustment policies requires slashing tertiary education costs dramatically in the interest of foreign debt-servicing.

Currently, the local faculty embodies the late Nkrumah’s ideal of quality education forging the path of a new nation’s future. As the current faculty retires, however, this ideal is manifestly ebbing away. Current trends in policy making indicate it may disappear altogether. Without vigorous countermeasures, World Bank policy will turn once internationally famed universities, such as Legon, into glorified vocational schools. Private funding may take the driver’s seat of tertiary education in Ghana, servicing the interests of multinational corporations and other private entrepreneurs with the narrow capital-driven rationale of training their own future employees.

Starting with the University College of the Gold Coast founded in 1948, Ghanaian universities were conceived as state institutions to train the high level manpower needed by the newly independent country to run the apparatus of a modern state. Thus the university had a mandate to produce people to take over the administration of the central government and public services from the British expatriates who were then in charge. The government made available generous land and financial resources to provide the university with its imposing buildings and academic facilities, accommodation for staff and students. When completed, the enormous Legon campus was easily the finest collection of public buildings in the nation’s capital of Accra. The university was, without doubt, a source of pride to the government, to the students and to the people of Ghana. This writer remembers the steady stream of state visitors who were driven to see the university. Legon became a full-fledged university in 1961.

The Legon example of well-appointed buildings set within a pleasantly landscaped, expansive campus was replicated at the University of Science and Technology at Kumasi when it was upgraded into a full-fledged university in 1962. The University of Cape Coast (UCC) followed suit also in 1962, as the University College of Cape Coast, becoming a full-fledged degree-awarding institution in 1971. The government acquired a large tract of land and commissioned the design of beautiful buildings to house the university administration, academic departments, staff and students, as well as sport and recreation facilities. Most of the buildings and the landscaping could not be completed before the fall of the first republic in 1966. The mandate of the UCC was to produce teachers for second cycle schools, tutors for teacher training colleges, administrators and education planners.

. . . The university is expected to combine academic studies with practical field training, to engage in teaching and research with emphasis on extension work, and to train practitioners to live and work in rural communities. . . . Its principal objective is to . . . find solutions to the deprivations and environmental problems which characterize northern Ghana in particular and which are found in varying degrees in rural areas throughout the country.

 

The University College of Winneba (UCEW) was formed in 1994 out of an amalgamation of a number of advanced colleges of education in arts, science, business and management, vocational, technical and agricultural education. In its fourth year of operation, UCEW has a student population of just less than 3000. The mandate of the university, which has a special relationship with UCC, is to produce specialist teachers for basic education through on-campus teaching and distance education.

Arrangements were made at the onset of the universities to ensure that very high academic standards were attained in staff recruitment and in student admission. The University College of the Gold Coast was placed under the academic tutelage of the University of London from 1948 to 1961. The University of Science and Technology (UST) enjoyed a similar relationship with London while the University of Cape Coast (UCC) was linked in a special relationship with the University of Ghana (Legon) from 1962 to 1971. Thus until Legon and UST became full-fledged universities in 1962, teaching programs were approved by the University of London, students wrote examinations vetted by that same university and were awarded degrees of that university. Similarly graduates of the University of Cape Coast were awarded University of Ghana degrees from 1965 to 1971. Once the conditions for achieving high standards of academic excellence were established, the universities were allowed the freedom from government interference to determine what was to be taught and how it was to be taught.

In the early stages of their development, the universities depended substantially on expatriate teachers and researchers. They were provided with attractive conditions of service which included home leave every other year, as well as transfer of savings to their home countries. Ghanaian staff also enjoyed more attractive conditions of service than did persons of similar status in the civil service. Attractive staff development schemes enabled some of the better graduates of the universities to study abroad for research degrees to qualify them for teaching appointments. By the mid-1970s Legon had achieved a large number of staff who were Ghanaians. UST and UCC were following the same route by implementing generous staff development schemes. Most beneficiaries of these schemes promptly returned on completion of their courses abroad. But by the late 1970s the deteriorating economic conditions within Ghana significantly reversed the trend of earlier years to return home. Trained staff were absconding in large numbers to other African countries, especially to Nigeria. Many staff members went on sabbatical leave to these countries and did not return home to their jobs. Expatriate staff were also leaving the country in large numbers; a few British expatriates remained because the government had devised a scheme to supplement their plummeting local salaries in foreign exchange.

The universities sank to their lowest levels in the mid-1980s with respect to funding, staffing, teaching and research support. This situation improved substantially when the government began its economic reform program with the backing of the World Bank and related donor agencies. Recovery to the levels of teaching and research known in the early 1970s has not yet been achieved. About 30 percent of senior members with high postgraduate qualifications will retire from the university within the next few years. They are not being replaced in the normal way by new recruits.

There is no shortage of ideas about how to address some of these problems. Unfortunately the terminologies that are introduced by the IMF, donor agencies, and the social scientific literature confuse and thereby exacerbate the problems by absorbing local concern in empty verbal disputes. A striking example of this is the effect of using the misnomer ‘cost-sharing’ of education to refer to tuition and residence fees — when all that is really intended is to ask students to contribute to the costs of their education. Tuition fees are paid to the private preparatory schools in Ghana that are greatly patronized by the elite and by anyone else who can afford them. There is clear evidence from the public sector that overcrowded classes taught by poorly paid teachers cannot produce good results in high schools, hence the overwhelming preference for fee-paying private schools. Many Ghanaian parents are not happy to pay a lot for tuition in universities, since their pre-university expenditures are already very high. With the use of the term ‘cost-sharing’, even university students who obtain loans to maintain their personal welfare and their pocket money can argue that they are thereby ‘sharing the cost’ of their education, and so a verbal dispute pre-empts substantive debate over viable means to keep the universities operating, given the constraints placed on government spending by IMF policies.

Another revealing misuse of terminology by the World Bank is the application of ‘user fee’ to itemized charges for access to university facilities. The rationale for instituting this term to denote an educational tariff is as follows. In the private sector facilities are purchased at rates which ensure that the desired service will continue to be provided. In the public sector a facility supplied by the state is normally expected to be maintained by the state. If the state finds that it does not have sufficient funds for maintenance, a fee may be charged which is often heavily subsidized. In the new terminology such a fee becomes a ‘user fee’. (But then isn’t the rent for a house also a user fee?) The problem with this jargon is that it connotes the market exchange relation between a buyer and seller of a consumable resource. And exercising one’s merited right to participate in a university education with government subvention is not comparable to exercising one’s market power to buy or rent a consumable item of merchandise. With respect to the democratic rights of individual members of a republic, the relation between government and a citizen in the pursuit of education is importantly different from the relation that obtains between a user and a seller or realtor of a capital good or service. The government is not a profit-motivated player in a market producing education which it then rents or leases to the public So applying the term ‘user fee’ to denote the charges necessitated by government’s inability to provide basic educational instruments like books and lab facilities, is wholly out of place.

A deeper issue is at stake beneath this ill-chosen terminology. The government is in swift process of abandoning its role as custodian of the people’s needs and rights, including the right to higher education if the individual can afford it. Instead the government is adopting the posture of an ideal business partner to large multinational corporations. It serves in this capacity as an autocratic executive, definitively interpreting the needs of citizens strictly in terms of the capitalist investor’s market interests. As the World Bank published in its 1994 literature concerning the future education policy in Ghana, what big business needs is a "compliant and flexible work force." Towards this end education should be cost-effective. This means it should be streamlined to serve the needs of industry in order to attract foreign investors and to encourage speedy economic development. Since 1983 the government has obliged World Bank directives by drastically reducing its spending on higher education. In a very recent discussion paper, the World Bank urged the government to place a low ceiling on university enrollment. In response, the government has contracted a committee of experts to establish quantitatively what fraction of the population is optimally exposed to higher education at all. Granted such advice the government is then rationalized to decree, with the backing of expert cost/benefit analysts, how many Ghanaians shall be entitled to have the opportunity to apply to university. But in a democratic republic, higher education surely counts among those social benefits that each individual or family has a right to invest in voluntarily — provided the financial means and intellectual merit are in hand. Presumably a genuine and flourishing democracy reinforces each capable individual’s ideal of a successful life. So a democratic state’s role is to facilitate the individual’s own chosen means of serving his or her nation.

Suppose a state’s priorities lie elsewhere — in military defense or export production, for example. Then its government may be incapable of stretching limited resources to sustain opportunities for all its capable citizens desiring to pursue higher education. In this case, explicit limits should be set on the amount that the government is prepared to offer to its universities through subvention. In consequence of its expected shortfall, the government should encourage the institutions to find their own auxiliary sources of funding to meet the public’s appropriately growing demand for access to higher education. A government acknowledging the actual limits of its own financial investment in tertiary education is quite different from a government decreeing a stipulated limit to the number of citizens legally prescribed to invest privately in the benefits of a higher education if they ‘choose’. The latter policy is totalitarian, insofar as it sidelines the democratic ideal of each individual’s having a right to define and pursue their own vision of the good life, constrained only by their personal limitations. In a totalitarian society, this ideal is subordinated to the state’s immediate interests by defining the needs of the country and then mandating the roles that individuals must fill in order to meet the state’s objectives. The present government is defining ‘national development’ in terms of the World Bank’s directives, which currently entail the suggestion to limit university enrollment to 5,000 per year for the country overall.

The problems outlined briefly above can be overcome. The academic staff of the universities — whose careers are literally being mortgaged because of bad policies and inadequate funding — have a responsibility to join in the search for solutions. They have a responsibility, as men and women of letters, to insist upon terminology that will be productive and illuminating locally. An important lesson from the past half-century is that poor conditions of service will attract neither local nor international university staff. Advanced academic and professional qualifications make university training an international commodity, which can be, purchased abroad by countries and university systems that are prepared to pay attractive salaries. Hence the infamous brain-drain escalates. During the first quarter-century of university education in Ghana (1950-1975), graduates who were sent overseas to obtain postgraduate qualifications promptly returned home in large numbers. Foreign academics also flocked into Ghana’s universities to take up prestigious short-term and full-time appointments. Good salaries and other attractive conditions of academic service made this possible. Those former graduates of the universities who did not respond to the calls to return home were able to obtain positions at first rate universities outside Ghana. Their careers are evidence that Ghanaians with the appropriate qualifications can market their skills worldwide, despite the covert and overt racial prejudices that exist in the academic world and in professional arenas abroad. Many of these individuals have achieved exalted positions outside. They have not suffered the intellectual stagnation nor the isolation of their counterparts at home, who are obliged to function as intellectuals with little or no access to standard equipment nor to the latest contemporary ideas published even as near to home as Nigeria.

A recent study convinced this writer that in spite of much solo research contracts and consultancy contact between individual academics and Ghana’s public and private sector organizations, the university is perceived as largely a teaching institution whose research findings are of marginal interest and negligible value for the economy. Much needs to be done to change this distorted, minimizing image of the university so that its third but most important role — service or ‘extension’ — can be the key that opens the university as a resource for policy makers. Direct contracts with university departments would allow faculty to undertake income-generating government projects. One cannot fail to note that a private university in the USA like Stanford or John Hopkins is able to receive so much in the form of contracts from the government and private firms, that tuition makes up only 16 percent of its income. A public university like Legon could do just as well in Ghana.

1. It is extraordinary that in 1995 during the longest faculty strike in the history of Ghana’s universities (which ended in faculty unanimously voting to return to post without any of their labor negotiation terms fulfilled), Ghana’s president received two honorary doctorates praising his progressive administration in USA, one from Lincoln College in Pennsylvania and the other from Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York.

2. For a detailed account of the complex problems specific to the northern region, see J. Songsore, "Population growth and ecological degradation in Northern Ghana: The Complex Reality," in this volume.

3. In 1994, the annual salary of a university vice-chancellor was equivalent to the salary of a promoted cleaner or driver at other parastatal organizations run on government subvention (e.g. the Bank of Ghana). Currently, a newly graduated, BA-holding teller-trainee in a foreign-based bank with branches in Accra begins his job with a wage roughly twice what his professor with a doctorate is making, although the professor will have served with promotions in the university system for over a decade.

4. See "Introduction" to this volume, pp. 14-15.