The redoubtable Professor Ato Quayson sums up the deeper context to the POTAG - UTAG agitation! There is another possible resolution [of the competing views on research held by the striking lecturers and the government], and that is to acknowledge the validity of the two competing monologues and for the government to set aside some money for teaching related activities to pay to lecturers and a much larger subventions for research. The teaching allowance would be distributed to all university lecturers automatically and on a regular basis while the second subvention would have to be applied for by individual lecturers on the basis of stated criteria and the submission of research proposals. This second set of funds would have higher ceilings of disbursement, say up to 200,000GHC over 3-5 years for research deemed to be valuable to the society in general. A huge part of the research that I undertook for my book on Oxford Street was done through funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The rest came from the University of Toronto. What did this allow me to do? To spend all summers over four years hanging out on Oxford Street, talking to vendors and shop keepers, organizing questionnaires, tracking all manner of vague leads, and generally making a proper nuisance of myself. It also afforded me funds to hire an army of research assistants and to spend countless hours in the archives both in Ghana (Accra, Tamale, Cape Coast, etc) and in London. A couple of trips to Guangzhou to follow African traders there was thrown in for good measure. Could all this not have been done by a scholar based in Ghana. A loud and resounding yes,and at a fraction of the cost because in reality much of the locally based research could have been carried throughout the year and on a much more casual basis just by regular observation. But our locally based scholars would not even imagine such a thing. The reason: they do not have ANY viable sources of research funding to allow them the luxury of following their curiosity to see where it might lead them. Remember to that I was trained as a literary critic and not as an urban studies scholar or historian or sociologist. But the research has led to my own re-training now allowing me to dilate confidently on a subject areas I has no expertise in previously. Thus the research has literally made me a jack of many trades and master of about four. A boon to my employers, and I hope to the world at large. And I expect the book to have a lively readership at the very least among the hundreds of foreign students and their professors that come to Ghana on a regular basis to study and research all manner of topics. This trend has been on going for more than two decades now with American universities as varied as Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, and Berkeley sending their students to Ghana on a regular basis. The most enterprising of them all is NYU, which has gone ahead and actually bought a large property in Accra. And I am not even going to list the European schools that also send their students our way. Many of these kids return to their countries to ultimately become African policy experts. So the Ghanaian government and the lecturers have to be persuaded to frame the research funding question as much broader than merely a struggle over bread-and-butter. A generous and well-endowed national research fund is an absolute necessity for any nation intending to make an impact in todays world. South Africa has both a Medical Research Council and a Human Sciences Research Council, both research funding agencies. by the way. Just so you all know. --- Professor Ato Quayson, Oxford Streetist & Literary Critic (or as Kwaku Sakyi Addo prefers to describe him: the first black Reader in English at the University of Cambridge in 800 years!)
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 14:27:28 +0000
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