Most Ghanaian Lecturers Deserve Their "Research Allowances"

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

On August 2, 2013, MyJoyOnline.com published an opinion piece titled "Do Our Lecturers Deserve Research Allowance?" I have decided not to make any direct references to the identity of the author, because in the recent past the young man had presumed to cross swords with me over my expression of chagrin over an article falsely offered readers as a book review on the journalistic ouvre of Ms. Elizabeth Ohene, the former editor of Ghana's Daily Graphic and a regular contributor to BBC-African Service.

Interestingly, though, the author himself had been remarkably decent enough, albeit rather wistfully, to concur with me that, indeed, what he had served his audience in the name of a book review was clearly not a book review but, at best, a book report. He had also humbly and honestly attributed his shortcoming in this area of journalism to the very fact of him not having been trained as an academician or a literary journalist.

Anyway, the author whose afore-referenced article is under present discussion took umbrage at my critical observation of the work of the man whom he claimed to be his role model and had, in fact, tutored the young man in journalism school. Well, either out of frustration or anger, or a synergy of the two, to be certain, my critic sought to literally put me in my place by predictably and disdainfully suggesting that maybe I needed to be tutored in the trade by his former mentor.

Thankfully, I did not have to respond, because an avid reader of my journalistic fare, as well as that of the young man's, rejoined by kindly and politely advising my would-be-detractor, or assailant, that he was rather too wet-eared to so cavalierly presume to wrestle with yours truly, figuratively speaking, of course. Whether, indeed, the subject whose work is under discussion heeded the kindly advice of my defender or not, I have no way of knowing. Not long afterwards, however, my critic would be named Journalist Of The Year by the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA).

Anyway, what provoked my desire - or, perhaps, rather inspired me - to weigh in on the quite heated debate over whether, indeed, Ghanaian lecturers and professors deserve to be paid "research allowances," was the at once rather curious and pathetic implication, on the part of the author-critic that, somehow, most Ghanaian college and university teachers neither undertake any meaningful research projects nor publish any qualitative articles in prestigious academic journals, or author discipline-relevant textbooks to warrant the long-established tradition of lecturers and professors being regularly paid research allowances.

My terse contention here is that like many of the blindly approving commentators of his article, far too many Ghanaians lack adequate understanding of the diverse roles played by members of the professoriate. What I mean by the foregoing is that not all professors are "research" and "book-publishing" professors in the strictest sense of the term. At least from the perspective of my own mega-tertiary academy of the State University of New York (SUNY), there are three kinds of unversity professors and/or lecturers.

There are, for instance, Teaching Professors, Research Professors and Academic Administrators or Administrative Professors. One also recognizes these three categories of professors at globally renowned institutions like the Teachers' College of Columbia University, a flagship, or frontline, Ivy League academy. This is not in any way to imply that the categories of professors delineated above are mutually exclusive in their functions. For, needless to say, there are academic administrators who conduct cutting-edge research and publish their findings in reputable academic journals; some of them also publish books with reputable publishers.

Likewise, there are Teaching Professors who conduct research and publish on a regular basis. And then, of course, we also have Research Professors whose primary line of work entails the devotion of most of their working hours to researching, writing and publishing. The common denominator here is that irrespective of their functional categorization, all University Professors do teach to varying degrees. Teaching Professors tend to do more teaching than publishing; Research Professors also tend to do more research and publishing than teaching; whereas Administrative Professors concentrate more on institutional management than on the two other major categories/lines of the professoriate.

Now, I sincerely don't doubt that some professors and lecturers are virtual dead-woods in the academy. Still, it is rather too facile and simplistic for anybody to presume the professoriate to be functionally homogeneous. Then also, we need to bear in mind that not all the results of research findings of lecturers and professors end up in the form of books and journal articles.

One aspect of research, often called Faculty Development, entails pedagogical and/or professional enrichment and refreshment. The latter comes in the form of university teachers attending academic and discipline-relevant conferences in order to learn about the latest corpus of knowledge, and also how such knowledge can be used to enhance pedagogy or teaching content and method of the participants. At these conferences, academic papers may even be written and presented that may never see the proverbial daylight of the publishing industry.

We shall, in due course, discuss other aspects of the professoriate that may not be obvious to even the most astute and perspicuous non-practising college graduate.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 3, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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