‘Antagonistic’ state and HE relations a colonial relic?

The poor relationship between the government and public universities is not a new thing in Ghana. It started with the colonial authorities in the Gold Coast in the 1940s, when they fought against the establishment of a university for fear that “it would breed anti-colonialists who would challenge British rule”, Professor Nana Akua Anyidoho, the director of the Centre for Social Policy Studies of the University of Ghana, has said.

Anyidoho said: “There was that resistance until it suited them to set up such a university in anticipation of eventual political decolonisation,” adding that it was evident from “their own documentation, that the plan was to use higher education to extend the colonial projects by creating an elite class to whom power could be transferred only incrementally and, hopefully, not completely”.

She said higher education in the Gold Coast and other British colonies of West Africa were based on the relationship of the colonial university colleges to Britain and to British higher education systems with their traditions, ideologies and values.

Thus, the first public university college in Ghana and other anglophone colonies were fundamentally colonial institutions, built to follow the pattern of British civil universities in constitution, in standards and curricula as well as in social purpose.

For a while, especially between 1952 and 1954, the administration and the University College of the Gold Coast found a common cause in the Africanisation of the public service through the development of human resources.

Education in post-independence phase

Presenting a paper titled ‘Relations between the state and public universities in Ghana’, as part of one of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences’ policy dialogues on higher education in May funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Anyidoho said the genesis of public university education in the country has influenced the trajectory of the relationship between these universities and the state.

“In the immediate post-independence period, the university joined other symbols of independence,” which, she said, meant “every independent country had to have a flag, a national anthem, a national currency, an international airport and a university”.

Anyidoho said that, for the newly independent African nations, education was seen as central to nation-building to produce human resources needed for socioeconomic development and also to socialise modern citizens for a modern state.

She said the nationalist governments in Africa wanted a developmentalist university, which had a mission to develop.

But, after independence, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, envisioned higher education that would serve as a tool for a decolonising and pan-African project.

The Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, then called the University College of the Gold Coast, was funded directly by the government and it was emblematic of this political project.

It was seen by Nkrumah as a way to develop the social economy. Nkrumah’s administration had a vision of an African intellectual class within a nationalist developmentalist university which would embrace an agenda of nation-building that included socio-economic progress as well as a cultural and political project of decolonisation and pan-Africanism.

Government-university tensions

The fault line, she said, developed when it became evident between a patently nationalist government and a university very much shaped by its colonial origins.

This developed some tensions as the authorities saw the university as protective of institutional autonomy, including their freedom to pursue research and teaching without government interference, which was consistent with the way that they were set up.

Later, there were some policy attempts to thread the needle between institutional autonomy and the need for public universities to serve Nkrumah.

Gradually, the state’s action towards the universities traversed into the management of appointments and promotions within public universities and revisions of conditions of service, especially in 1964 when the government’s exasperation with the University of Ghana was demonstrated in dismissals, detentions and deportations of university faculty members.

“These trends were happening in other former West African colonies that had inherited similar ideas and practices of academic freedom from the university or institutional autonomy brought more broadly but who were not yet convinced – well, at least, the states were not yet convinced – that they served the interests of their new societies,” Anyidoho said.

Another attempt at exerting control over the universities which has become a real threat to institutional autonomy is under-funding, Akua Anyidoho said, adding that, “without funding, really, the vaunted autonomy was hard to take seriously”.

Avoiding antagonistic relations

In the same way, she described some of the actions of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission, such as a threat to jail vice-chancellors if they allowed the running of unapproved courses, as likely to be “perceived” as “a political tool rather than an independent regulatory body. This will bode ill for the public universities.”

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai of the University of Ghana Business School said universities must exert an optimal level of institutional autonomy and must be careful to avoid antagonistic relationships with governments.

He said if governments are convinced that the universities are partners to help them to achieve development, the relationship between the two will be less antagonistic.

Daniel Oppong Kyeremeh, the president of the National Union of Ghana Students, said that, in order to reduce the tension between the state and the universities, there must be a long-term development plan to guide how these higher institutions should operate and contribute to national development.

Currently, any change of government which results in the implementation of different plans has not been helpful to the country.