Professor Dr Dr Otchere Addai-Mensah, former KATH CEO and Snr Lecturer at KNUST
The unfolding controversy over the reopening of public universities exposes a troubling failure of judgment on both sides:
The decision by the University of Ghana and KNUST to postpone reopening amid a nationwide GAUA strike, and GTEC’s apparent conviction that regulatory authority entitles it to dictate the administrative decisions of institutions whose Governing Councils possess their own statutory responsibilities.
The first question is why UG and KNUST considered indefinite postponement necessary when the industrial action was nationwide, yet other public universities proceeded with their academic arrangements.
If the same strike confronted the entire public university system, what sufficiently compelling institutional circumstances justified the divergent responses?
Were alternative arrangements seriously explored, or did management simply allow the existence of industrial action to become a justification for suspending academic activity?
These questions demand answers because university leadership is measured not merely by its ability to respond to a crisis, but by its capacity to exercise sound judgment when circumstances are difficult.
More consequentially, postponing reopening risked strengthening GAUA’s bargaining position by increasing the disruption to academic life and intensifying pressure on Government to resolve the dispute.
Whether or not this was the intention, the effect could have been to convert institutional disruption into additional leverage in a national industrial dispute.
UG and KNUST must therefore explain why they adopted a course that risked imposing further costs on students and the academic calendar when other institutions apparently found a way to proceed.
Autonomy confers the responsibility to make independent decisions; it does not confer immunity from scrutiny when those decisions have wider consequences.
These notwithstanding GTEC’s response is hardly a model of institutional sophistication.
Its directive reads like an administrative edict from a headmaster to subordinate schools, betraying a conception of regulatory authority that risks confusing oversight with command and coordination with control.
GTEC is a regulator, not a super-Governing Council; Vice-Chancellors are not headmasters, and university councils are not rubber stamps.
Public universities are semiautonomous statutory institutions whose governing structures are integral to their existence, not ceremonial arrangements to be respected only when their decisions coincide with the regulator’s preferences.
Although institutional autonomy does not place universities beyond national law or legitimate regulatory oversight, neither does GTEC’s mandate automatically confer the power to displace the lawful judgment of their Governing Councils.
If institutional decisions can effectively be dictated from outside whenever the regulator considers them inconvenient, then university autonomy becomes little more than an administrative fiction.
The irony is that UG and KNUST risked allowing a nationwide industrial dispute to dictate their academic calendars, while GTEC now risks responding to that disruption by treating university governance as an exercise in bureaucratic obedience.
One raises questions about institutional leadership; the other raises questions about regulatory restraint.
Neither should be excused merely because the objective of restoring academic activity is desirable.
The fundamental issue is not whether universities should reopen, but whether the pursuit of that objective justifies bypassing the very governance structures through which universities are legally constituted to operate.
Government must resolve the industrial dispute, university management must account for its decisions, Governing Councils must exercise meaningful oversight, and GTEC must enforce its mandate without confusing regulatory authority with administrative supremacy.
A regulator does not strengthen its legitimacy by issuing increasingly imperious directives, just as a university does not demonstrate autonomy by suspending academic activities without adequately explaining why it could not proceed when others did.
Ghana’s public universities deserve better than managerial indecision on one side and bureaucratic overreach on the other.
GTEC must regulate, not rule; Governing Councils must govern, not rubber-stamp; and university leaders must exercise judgment, not merely react to industrial pressure.
Anything less diminishes the integrity of the entire tertiary education system.
The Horns of the Altar!!
Prof. Dr Dr Otchere Addai-Mensah
College of Health Sciences
KNUST
