Re: Failing the Test: University of Ghana

First of all, as a graduate of the University of Ghana, I will attest that all the issues raised here are genuine and problems we need to fix. But I will also add that this is a bit too generalizing to say the least. Here's why:

A. On the Culture of Deference

As an undergraduate student at UG, I was never quiet in any of my classes and actually challenged most of my professors pretty hard in many classrooms. Almost everyone in my Political Science Graduating Class of 2013 knew me even though I didn't graduate with them because I was always sharp and assertive in my first two and half years with the class. The problem with this culture of deference the author observed at UG is a spillover from the general Ghanaian Culture. Many of our professors are foreign educated and can easily accommodate assertive students. But students bring in their deference to authority from home and it doesn't help in changing professors' attitudes. We need a complete cultural overhaul in this regard. I'll give you two examples to illustrate how the broad-brush of deference painted isn't fully accurate. In my third year at UG, I challenged a professor so much to the point of arrogance as I called him a hypocrite in class. This professor got his PhD in Canada mind you. My challenge was so cringeworthy that the whole class held its breath for a moment until the professor told everyone to ease up and that he as a professor at the premier university expected such serious critical approach to discourse and not deference for its sake. We became friends afterward to this day. Also, in my third year, I took a course with a young professor in African Literature and we butt heads on the first day because I was unwilling to just take his words of 'I'm going to be expecting a lot from you' without any reciprocation from him. I wanted him to promise us that he was going to do his part. He got angry after my challenge and I wouldn't back down. But the most amazing thing is that it was my favorite class ever at UG and he has become a truly great friend and mentor afterward. He's the reason why I'm in grad school. So my point is this: there are a lot of professors at UG who aren't looking for deference from students but they get it anyway. They are intellectual beings and they hunger for the stimulation. Only that students bring in their deference from home and it spills over into the learning culture. So, not all professors at UG want or expect deference. I know they're there but so are the opposite.

B. On Using Old Teaching Materials
I again agree that this is an issue and we've talked about this quite often among my group of UG graduate friends. But again, no painting of broad brushes here as I had professors from Political Science and English continually updated on course material. I took a course on International Relations with Bossman Asare and I can attest that his course materials weren't outdated. He even used one of his recently published book on the subject as part of the course. Same with a course on Global Conflict resolution. But the one I'm more intimately aware of and close to is my English professor and mentor. His arsenal of course materials are as updated as any professor in the world. Books published in 2016 are already on his teaching list. Even though I'm here, I still get requests from him to help purchase books newly released for his classes. I agree that some professors become lazy and use outdated materials but there are professors there also keeping the standards high. I don't know the author personally so I'm not going to impugn his personality. But I will say this, many international students at UG come to have fun and so do not take courses that are tough and where the professors hold your feet to the fire. Case in point, in one of my classes in third year, after my professor introduced the course in week one, all six or so international students dropped the course. Why? The professor wanted us to submit weekly position papers on every reading ( a lot) and because the class was small in number, everyone was expected to contribute. At the end of the day, only 5 students were left in the class and all of us Ghanaian. So if you come to UG to have a fun year abroad and only take courses that would not challenge you, you will not be challenged.

C. On Plagiarism

I think this is a serious concern that can only truly be solved by two things: a lower professor - student ratio, and online submission of grades. I'm here at Texas A&M and we face the same problem with students plagiarizing. What helps us is that we have turnitin to help catch students who plagiarize. With so many students to a professor, it is impossible to singularly catch every plagiarizer manually. And we have too many students per professors at Legon without an online system to catch people plagiarizing. So I do hope the university will require all assignment submission be done online and engage the services of companies like turnitin to help.

D. On Beautification vs Academic/Housing Infrastructure

                                                          New Student Housing Units

I think this is where I am in almost total disagreement with the author. When I entered UG back in 2009, there were 4 students per room at the traditional halls of residence. By my second year, the policy was changed to allow only two students per room. I experienced this first hand and unless a student or group of students in a room flouted the law, most rooms were occupied by two people. At Commonwealth Hall, I lived in second, third, and fourth years on that system. In my second year, I was in a room with three students because we had the extra small room students refer to as 'inner' on campus. The same thing happened in my third and fourth years. To just blanket the whole UG as infested with students living in overcrowded housing is not accurate. A lot has been done on the housing front. We have housing here at A&M where four people share a room. I don't think we have failed here though things need further improvement. There's been massive infrastructure projects for housing going on on campus if you look at the Liman halls and other private residences being built. So no, we have come a long way in terms of student housing. Maybe he lived in a private accommodation facility at UCLA hence we couldn't satisfy his standards but we are not living in squalor.

                                                   New UG Medical School(Teaching Hospital)

What I will agree with on this issue is the academic infrastructure a little bit. We truly do need more classrooms. Many that we have are old and or too large. I think we need smaller but numerous classrooms to help with reducing classroom sizes. As for chalkboards, we truly need every single one of them replaced. Markers were always available in the classrooms which had whiteboards or professors and students had extra markers to augment them. So it is the upgrading of some facilities that needs to happen. But I'm curious as to whether the author sat in only old classrooms. Almost every classroom now has a projector, a massive upgrade from before. So things are improving. But we do need more investment in this area. I'm especially interested in the university upgrading the science labs with better and modern equipment.

E. On WiFi

The author talked about WiFi a lot so I thought I'd spend some time on this as well. Honestly, the Internet infrastructure in Ghana is woefully inadequate and that has extended to what we have on UG campus. What other countries have, we don't. We have no public broadband system in Ghana. So it is difficult establishing proper nationwide internet infrastructure. If government didn't sell Ghana Telecom to Vodafone, we might have been able to undertake such a massively needed national infrastructure. What we have in Ghana is a mobile broadband service offered by private companies and it is spotty and unreliable and expensive.
But UG campus is serious markup from the rest of the country. Unlike the US where almost every home has a WiFi system, Ghanaian homes 99% of the time are unconnected to WiFi. So the WiFi on UG campus is actually much better than anywhere else in the country. But the author was comparing UG to what he has at UCLA, a campus located in one of the most powerful and modern cities in the world. That is not a fair comparison to make. Nonetheless, we do need improvement in WiFi capabilities on campus. I remember going to sit at Sociology Department or Psychology Department at night and got bitten incessantly by mosquitoes just to get some proper WiFi. Nah. Not acceptable. But I think this will require a national effort, not just UG administrators.

F. Conclusion

Whereas I appreciate the author's perspective, I get the feeling that he was not fair. Maybe because it was just his one-sided limited perspective. But the culture of bashing Africa and African institutions without any nuance sometimes creep into the motivation for what outside observers write about Africa. He made great points but he was over-generalizing. Without a balanced look at UG, many people will look at his write-up and thumb their noses at him as just another outsider who can only see the bad in Africa.

I do hope he had some nice experiences at UG as all couldn't be this bad. By the way, I stayed at UCLA for a week in 2015 and I love the campus: the breeze, the trees, the excellent special collections library, the diversity etc. Great place.