My attention has recently been drawn to an article by Dr. Isaac Yae Asiedu making the rounds on social media. It is titled “African Professors must stop counting publications - And start building nations”. While I appreciate Dr. Asiedu’s concern that we all do all that we can to improve the quality of life on our continent, I have real problems with his approach to the issue.
First, what Dr Asiedu calls “nation-building” is properly referred to as “national development”. The former has to do with creating a sense of solidarity in a country, while the latter is about improving the quality of life in such a polity.
Second, Dr. Asiedu’s view that academics should be promoted on the basis of their innovations rather than their publications might appear impressive, but it reduces academia to the servant of industry. Dr. Asiedu’s disdain for theory is manifest, as he articulates the trendy idea of “market-driven courses” thus: “Each paper should be the beginning of a product. Each thesis should end with a tool. Each classroom should be a workshop.” However, such an outlook is a cheapening of academia spearheaded by wealthy college dropouts, many of whose wealth is the result of inheritance and fraud rather than genuine hard work. Tragic that even academics will listen to such while dismissing colleagues offhand.
Third, Dr. Asiedu needs to reflect further on the relationship between theory and practice, and to appreciate that there is often substantial innovation in the formulation of theory. Remember the Roman myth of the two boys who made wings for themselves and had successful flights? It took over two millennia for the two Wright brothers to step into history and invent aircraft. I know that the myth was not theory in the strict sense, but whoever came up with it did some theorising in the wider sense of contemplating a possibility and attempting to identify the means of turning it into reality. Be that as it may, the history of science is replete with theories that seemed impracticable or only minimally useful for centuries, only for them to eventually be put into phenomenal use. The ancient Greeks wrote about atoms, but the atomic bomb only appeared in the twentieth century; Aristotle, and the ancient Egyptians before him, theorised the laws of logic that are the foundation of contemporary computer science; the work of earlier physicists provided Einstein with a basis for working towards his even more all-encompassing relativity theory.
Fourth, how do scholars of the humanities and social sciences relate to Dr. Asiedu’s call to innovations that “change lives”? Does it mean they have no role in society if their work does not yield immediately tangible results? Is this not the thinking through which subjects such as literature, history and philosophy are dismissed as useless simply because they are perceived not to be immediately applicable to “the market”? Is life only about “the market”, and therefore devoid of emotional and social intelligence? Is this piece not simply a diluted latter-day articulation of pragmatism, with all its inherent weaknesses?
Fifth, Dr. Asiedu’s aspiration is for the countries of Africa to “industrialise”, meaning he/she subscribes to the idea that “development” means playing “catch-up” with the West. In this he fails to appreciate that there is substantial literature attesting to the fact that it was the Western imperialists who fabricated this very “development” narrative as part of their exit plan, so that they would re-brand themselves from “colonisers” to “development partners” in the current neo-colonial era.
This philistine narrative about the need for academics to churn out “innovations rather than publications” that address our immediate problems is now choking almost every aspect of our lives – public health, conservation, gender studies, human rights, etc. Even the disgusting question now posed to academics during promotion interviews as to how many grants they have brought to their universities is a manifestation of this sacrilege.
So let academics labour in theorising, and provide immediate solutions when they can identify them, but refuse to be intimidated by so-called “captains of industry” and their facilitators who threaten to send genuine scholarship to its grave.
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