African universities' staff problems - November 25, 2008
The African University Leader’s Forum meeting finishes today, in Accra, Uganda. Reporting from the meeting, the Chronicle of Higher Education paints a gloomy picture for the future of university teaching in Africa, with faculty there either approaching retirement age or else young, inexperienced and in many cases woefully under qualified.
This leaves a large gap that doesn’t look like being filled any time soon.
"Ghana alone requires over 1,000 new lecturers," Clifford N.B. Tagoe, vice chancellor of the University of Ghana and a co-chair of the University Leaders' Forum, told the paper. "We're able to recruit 20 or 30 in a particular year, but that same number retires in that year."
The shortage has led to other problems. The brightest students often leave for foreign climes to further their studies, often never to return. Those that do return, clutching a fresh foreign PhD are being put under pressure to teach large numbers of students, leaving little or no time for research.
The Chronicle report highlights the case of Susan Balaba Tumwebaze, a lecturer at Makerere University, in Uganda. Tumwebaze’s PhD is in quantitative methods in forest science and management, and she studied at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse. But now she’s back in Uganda, she’s expected to teach statistics to all comers at the university.
A vaguely related story is emerging from South Africa, in a story by the South Africa Times from 16 November - the story here is more one of native researchers being poached by the private sector.
These problems have, perhaps unsurprisingly gone un-noticed in the wider media. I suppose to many reporters, securing the quality of future university education doesn’t compare to the woes of a continent suffering from other more brutal problems.
See also
African and Global Academic Leaders Convene to Address Staffing Crisis in African Higher Education - Carnegie Corporation of New York, 17 November.
University Leaders' Forum 2008: Developing & Retaining the Next Generation of Academics - background paper
