It’s unethical to use fictitious doctorate titles
The Chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana, Dr Yaw Adu-Gyamfi, has described the use of fictitious doctorate titles as “unethical” and urged ministers of the Gospel to desist from using such titles.
Advertisement
He cautioned that apart from the fact that some of these awarding institutions were fake and unaccredited, “by convention recipients of such honorary doctorate degrees do not use the title ‘Dr’ in general correspondence except instances where the awarding institution addresses the recipient”.
Dr Adu-Gyamfi, who is also the President of the Ghana Baptist Convention, was addressing the 53rd annual session of the convention at Ejura in the Ashanti Region last Friday.
It was on the theme; “Achieving the great Commission through Human Resource Development”, and attended by over 200 pastors of the Baptist Convention throughout the country.
Fake degrees
Two Ghanaian professors from the Valdosta State University in USA recently undertook investigations into how some prominent Ghanaians earned honorary doctorate degrees and concluded that many of the private universities dishing out the degrees were unaccredited.
In their conclusion they gave an alarming list of tertiary institutions and names of prominent Ghanaians who got their degrees from some of those “unaccredited schools.”
Academic pursuit
Dr Adu-Gyamfi reminded the ministers of the Gospel about “the belief that Baptists are people of the book. I would, therefore, like to admonish all our members to pursue real academic studies so that you can walk out boldly as recipients of accredited earned degrees”.
He noted that his office had received a lot of notifications from some Baptist ministers who had received such doctorial degrees and cautioned them not to use them.
He said people should not run around looking for paper which did not carry anything and encouraged them to desist from such practices.
Politicians
Dr Adu-Gyamfi further urged people seeking elective political office to be true to themselves and promise within their abilities but not to pledge when they knew they could not deliver when given the mandate.
For parliamentarians, he said, going to the House was for legislating laws to build the country, therefore “if you don’t have what it takes to be in Parliament, why do you want to be there”? He added that there parliamentarians who hardly contribute to discussions on the floor of Parliament but yet go to their constituencies to ask to represent the voice of the people.
He cautioned politicians to be cautious with their utterances and actions.