In a recent University World News article, Patrick Swanzy and Francis Ansah argued vehemently against the Ghanaian government’s cut-off policy for retired lecturers/professors from public universities.
The policy required all public universities to remove the names of retired contract lecturers/professors who are 60 years or older from the government payroll. As public servants, public university lecturers/professors are paid through the government payroll.
The policy directive invoked the Ghanaian constitution which sets the retirement age of public servants at 60 years old, although subsection (1) of article 199 allows hiring authorities to continue the appointment of retired public servants for a period not exceeding five years. This indicates that retired university lecturers/professors who are public servants cannot be rehired in public universities or any public sector more than five years after their retirement.
The policy further indicates that any public university that requires the services of contracted retired lecturers/professors must finance them through their internally generated funds rather than through the government payroll.
Quality higher education
Swanzy and Ansah argued that the implementation of the government’s cut-off policy is likely to have severe negative consequences for quality university education, research output, doctoral research supervision and mentorship of younger or new faculty members.
They argue that retired lecturers/professors make up for the paucity of existing lecturers/professors and allow public universities to manage the explosive growth in the student population. They add that universities “find it difficult to attract younger academics with the critical skills and knowledge needed to sustain a department or programme”.
Without retired lecturers/professors, they warn, the lecturer to student ratio will plummet to a dangerous level that will adversely impact the quality of education the universities provide to their students. This is because public universities do not have a sufficient internal revenue base to finance the expenses involved in hiring more lecturers/professors.
The authors suggest that retired lecturers/professors have been used as part of the public universities’ strategy of managing the excessive enrolment numbers which have come about due to government policies. However, if this is the case, surely university leaders should have communicated this critical issue to the government long before the cut-off policy was enacted.
Moreover, there is no credible evidence to support the authors’ assertion that it is increasingly difficult to attract younger academics capable of managing a department or programme effectively. On the contrary, the availability of a pool of retired lecturers/professors has not motivated public universities to develop appropriate strategies for recruiting and retaining younger academics from inside and outside Ghana.
Research output
The authors also argue that the research agenda of universities is led by experienced and reputable lecturers/professors who are normally 65 or older. Without them, they suggest that both the quality and quantity of research output would be abysmally low.
Nevertheless, this argument ignores a significant historical antecedent. Ghanaian universities started paying serious attention to research production in the early 2000s. Prior to that, Ghanaian public universities concentrated exclusively on teaching as their core mission.
Thus, it is fair to observe that those retired lecturers/professors may be consummate teachers rather than research producers. That is due to the fact that they developed their lecturership/professorship in an academic environment where research production and dissemination were never part of the mainstream culture.
Moreover, some retired lecturers/professors have exhibited inimical attitudes towards academic research. For instance, there are alleged cases where retired lecturers/professors have ostracised, harassed and discouraged exuberant younger academics who wish to engage in research production.
Ghanaian public universities cannot rely on retired lecturers/professors to spearhead and bring a core mission which emphasises research output to fruition. What is more, ensuring research is a core organisational mission of public universities entails the establishment of a vigorous research culture.
Doctoral student supervision
The authors further argue that retired lecturers/professors have more experience and expertise to supervise doctoral students so they produce quality dissertations or theses. A consequence of terminating their ability to be hired is, they argue, that doctoral students would be reassigned to inexperienced faculty members and poor quality work would result.
However, that argument does not take account of available historical records. It is a historical fact that doctoral programmes and doctoral supervision are both recent phenomena in the history of Ghanaian universities.
Until recently, Ghanaian public universities did not offer doctoral programmes. Most lecturers and professors at Ghanaian public universities did not possess doctoral degrees and those who did obtained them from Euro-American universities.
Therefore, it is highly likely that doctoral programmes were in their embryonic stage or unpopular during the time most of the retired lecturers/professors were employed full time in their respective public universities. Given this premise, retired lecturers/professors do not have as much experience and skill in doctoral supervision relative to other professional peers.
Mentoring services
Finally, Swanzy and Ansah argue that retired lecturers/professors provide essential mentoring services to young and new faculty members. Accordingly, the authors assert that the new policy directive will deprive younger and new academics from tapping the rich reservoir of experience and expertise of retired lecturers/professors.
It is a truism that all the public universities in Ghana have mentorship programmes. Upon appointment a new lecturer/professor is placed under the mentorship of a more senior faculty member for a period of between six months and one year. This is the probationary period for the new lecturer/professor. After the probationary period is up, the mentor is required to send a progress report to the appointment committee.
But the appointment of the new lecturer/professor is invariably confirmed regardless of the content of the mentor’s progress report. Thus the mentoring programmes have an insignificant impact on the effective professional development of younger or new lecturers/professors.
It has been observed that private universities in Ghana compete fiercely for the part-time services of retired lecturers/professors from public universities. The reason is that private universities do not have sufficient financial resources to hire full-time lecturers or professors.
Consequently, it is most likely that retired lecturers/professors will take up part-time teaching positions in private universities to maximise their economic well-being rather than devoting their time to mentoring or doctoral student supervision with little to zero economic returns.
In other words, why would retired lecturers/professors spend their scarce time on mentoring or doctoral supervision when they can make more money working for private universities?
Recommendations
Based on the arguments above, we would like to make the following recommendations:
The Ghanaian government should modify its retirement cut-off policy to give exemption to retired lecturers/ professors whose fields of study or expertise are in high demand for the development of Ghana. They include but are not limited to communication technology, food science, medicine, radiology, medical technology and industrial engineering; the universities’ leaders should vigorously explore other sources for generating funds to supplement government-allocated budgets. Measures should also be put in place for the efficient management of resources, including cash assets, any wastage should be eliminated and assets with financial returns should be invested in. That way, the universities will have the necessary funds to hire part-time lecturers/professors and also undertake projects they deem critical to their operations. there must be a definitive cut-off point for retired lecturers/professors who are hired on a contractual basis. A contract retired lecturer/professor should be hired for a period not exceeding seven years, provided she/he is physically and mentally healthy. They should not be hired indefinitely. This would encourage contract retired lecturers/professors to mentor young faculty members; Ghanaian university leaders should demand from the government some financial autonomy with associated accountability to allow them to explore in-depth other sources of internal revenues besides tuition fees, student user-fees and book sales.
Ensuring adequate funding of universities is a monumental task for governments in any region of the world. Owing to a raft of budgetary constraints, governments in the rich Western world occasionally ask universities to find ways to generate their own internal revenues to finance their operations.
As a result, most Western universities fund-raise from their alumni and philanthropists and solicit financial gifts from wealthy people to supplement government funding. In addition, some Western universities have embraced the idea of naming their faculties, science laboratories, student residences, libraries, professional schools and academic centres after wealthy business people in exchange for hefty sums of money.
Nor is that all. Some Western universities even recruit and hire lecturers or professors with the potential for attracting or obtaining research funding or grants from both external and internal sources. In this case, research excellence, rather than teaching excellence, is paramount in hiring them.
The vigorous recruitment of international students for specific programmes has been one of the financial strategies used by some universities. This helps universities to increase their revenue baseline and manage their budgets effectively.
Ghanaian public universities should explore other sources of supplementary funding. Ghanaian public university leaders cannot expect the existing level of government funding to continue forever. Indeed, the government’s salary cut-off policy represents an opportunity for Ghanaian public university leaders to think outside the box, so to speak, and gradually ease their total dependency on government funding.
Admittedly, leading Ghana’s public universities is a challenging responsibility. It requires creativity, medium-term vision, communication excellence, financial management skills, political acumen and knowledge of how to increase economic efficiency. It should never be regarded a sinecure appointment meaning the appointee does nothing or merely maintains the status quo.
