Cape Coast, Jan. 25, - Professor
Kwesi Yankah, Minister of State in-Charge of Tertiary Education, has
underscored the need for Technical Universities to guard against the tragedy of
institutional imitation, duplication and copycatting.
He said a technical university
must develop its institutional niche for which it would be uniquely identified
with adding that, “if the current trend is left unchecked, it will virtually
amount to the technical universities writing their own obituaries in the near
future”.
Prof. Yankah was speaking at the
launch of a Partnership for Applied Sciences Project (PASS) by the Cape Coast
Technical University (CCTU) and the Kumasi Technical University (KTU) in Cape
Coast.
The four-year partnership
agreement is aimed at building the capacity of staff of the two institutions to
carry out projects in their individual niche areas.
Prof. Yankah advised the
technical universities not to slip back to become prime centres of business and
humanities, the tragic past that had derailed Ghana's strategic agenda of 60:40
science and humanities ratio in technical universities.
He lauded the partnership between
the two Ghanaian technical universities and the German Universities of Applied
Sciences saying, institutional partnerships were one of the most important
means of experience sharing, boosting human resource capacity and a crucial
prelude to the adoption of best practices.
Prof Yankah told the
collaborators not to be oblivious of the socio-cultural idiosyncrasies and
relative areas of strength which should result in processes of adaptation,
rather than blind imitation and copying.
He discarded the emerging
phenomenon in Africa, where many academic partnerships had come to be accepted
as more realistic alternative to 'patronage of eternal dependency' where
considerable inequality between stakeholders was assumed.
According to him, the nature of
modern universities, called institutionalisation regardless of location to
undertake research in variety of disciplines targeted at issues that
transcended local interest may arouse intellectual curiosity.
Prof Yankah said government of
Ghana was hugely inspired by the German TVET model in the conversion of
polytechnics into technical universities, and that it was only a natural sequel
that the project was inclined through institutional collaborations.
He expressed government's unflinching
support to the technical universities to go through the processes of transition
smoothly as stipulated in the Transitional Provisions of the Technical
Universities Act, 2016, (Act 992), Article 42, Clause 7.
Professor Lawrence Atepor, the
Vice Chancellor of CCTU, expressed the hope that the new friendship would bring
improvement in curriculum development in Eco-tourism, hospitality management,
sustainable engineering, applied research and renewable energy systems.
GNA
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