30 UCC graduate students benefit from research fund
The President of the Presbyterian University College, Rev. Prof. Emmanuel Adow Obeng, has challenged universities to have a balance between what he called ‘academic and professional degrees’.
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He observed that most professional degrees in science, technology, health and business normally had a positive influence on the socio-economic development of the nation.
He, therefore, underscored the need for the institutions to reduce the high emphasis on the academic degrees and consciously improve the development of professional degrees.
Prof. Obeng was speaking at a public lecture and the presentation of the Samuel and Emelia Brew-Butler Graduate Students Association of Ghana (GRASAG-UCC) Research Fund to beneficiaries at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) last Tuesday. It was on the theme: “Making Post-Graduate Education Relevant to Students and Society.”
Graduate students
Thirty graduate students from the university were presented with cash prizes to motivate them to contribute their quota to national development through quality and timely research.
Prof. Obeng said universities must lobby the government and industry for funds to provide supporting conditions for the development of professional post-graduate programmes.
He further asked the universities to work hard on institutional collaboration aimed at exchanges between students and staff to provide access to well-equipped laboratories, libraries and specialised equipment.
Additionally, Prof. Obeng urged the universities to pursue linkages with industry to enable postgraduate students to use the well-equipped laboratories of industry, as well as expertise of the industry players in pursuit of their research activities.
He said to enable the university and industry gain working understanding of each other’s working environment, the faculty could take up sabbatical leave in the sponsored industry or firm.
He further challenged the country’s universities to create an academic culture that could attract international post-graduate students, stressing that the cross-fertilisation of ideas of students from different cultures helped to lift the quality of the education.
Prof. Obeng called on the government to increase investment in postgraduate education and make it its most significant priority after national security, health and education.
He bemoaned the practice of the government contracting research activities to foreign firms and research institutions, which deprived the Ghanaian universities of critical funds which could have been used for the purchase of specialised equipment and setting up laboratories.
Supervision
According to Prof. Obeng, a chat with some postgraduate students painted a grim picture of supervision and supervisors, stressing that “approachability, availability, readiness and effective communicated feedback are not the characteristics of a number of supervisors.”
In order to scale up quality of supervision, Prof. Obeng stressed the need for the universities to recruit new qualified staff, particularly where there was evidence that staff were overburdened.
An industrialist and a sports administrator, Nana Sam Brew-Butler, who is the brainchild of the fund, called on the institutions to infuse the teaching of moral education in their curriculum.
He expressed grave concern about the recent development in the university where young students went on rampage inflicting wounds on everyone on sight and described such a development as “unacceptable”.
He called on parents to invest in the education of their children instead of infrastructure and other material things, adding that; “What we have to do for our young ones is to support their education.”
Nana Brew-Butler pledged to explore other avenues to resource the fund to benefit a lot of graduate students.
The Vice Chancellor of UCC, Prof. Joseph Ghartey Ampiah, in a speech read on his behalf, expressed the hope that the beneficiaries would put the grant into proper use and achieve the purpose for which it had been given.
