Honorary doctoral degrees should not be prefixes – Deputy Education Minister-designate
Professor Kingsley Nyarko, Deputy Education Minister-designate and Member of Parliament for Kwadaso, Tuesday reiterated the fact that honorary doctoral degree titles are not supposed to be prefixed against one’s name.
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“At best it should be part of your CV as your accomplishment but it appears it is being abused,” he said in a response to a question on the use of those titles during his vetting by the Appointments Committee of Parliament in Accra.
He said the use of honorary doctoral degree titles by some people was because of the penchant for titles in the country and the prestige attached to them.
He noted that when he was at the National Accreditation Board (NAB), now Ghana Tertiary Education Commission, he fought against the use of those doctoral degrees, which he said was a hard fight.
However, they succeeded at doing that at NAB by enacting the Education Regulatory Bodies Bill, that became Act 1023 of 2020.
“We made sure that there was some aspect of the regulation on the usage of titles and nomenclature at the higher education level.”
He said the Legislative Instrument (LI), which would operationalise Act 1023, was not done as at now.
“But I am thinking that the LI should be hastened so that we can operationalise that aspect of the Regulation, because my worry is that if we allow this canker to continue, a time will come that our graduate programmes will die”.
“PhDs are supposed to produce or add to knowledge, so if I can buy, (with) $10,000 I can get a doctoral title, then why will I spend time to go and sit in a classroom to pursue a course that I must add to knowledge?”
The point of interest was that the use of those honorary doctoral degree titles had the potential of undermining graduate programmes, especially at the PhD level, he said.
