The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) is forcefully refuting claims about targeting specific individuals in its intensified crackdown on the misuse of honorary titles.
Instead, the regulatory body says its mission is a broader, necessary effort to safeguard academic integrity across the nation’s tertiary education landscape.
Member of Parliament for Gomoa East, Desmond De-Graft Paitoo, one of many under GTEC’s scrutiny for the use of the ‘Dr’ title, had accused the regulatory body of embarking on an agenda.
In a letter, GTEC had asked the legislator to confirm the institution that awarded him the doctorate, whether it was earned or honorary, and the date of conferment.
Professor Augustine Ocloo, Deputy Director-General of GTEC, addressed the rising concerns in an interview with MyJoyOnline, clarifying the commission’s firm stance.
“We are not targeting any individual. We’re just trying to clean that space. We want to clean it and be a country that has law-abiding citizens,” Professor Ocloo declared.
He emphasised that GTEC’s actions aim to align Ghana with international best practices regarding academic nomenclature.
Preserving the sanctity of earned titles
Professor Ocloo highlighted the critical distinction between earned and honorary academic titles.
He explained that designations like “Dr” (denoting a PhD) and “Professor” are reserved for individuals who have completed rigorous academic programmes and achieved specific scholarly milestones in accredited tertiary institutions.
Honorary degrees, on the other hand, are strictly symbolic awards given for significant societal contributions, not for academic qualifications.
GTEC argues that the pervasive public use of these unearned titles is corrosive to the academic system.
“The argument here is that if we don’t guard against the use of these titles, we would even demotivate hard-working citizens and individuals who want to generally, through their hard work, acquire these titles,” Professor Ocloo cautioned.
He described a troubling trend where individuals may “pay a token or some kind because they have money; they can go and maybe donate some money to an institution or even build a structure for an institution, and then they confer these titles on them. And then the next moment, they are called doctors all over the place.”
This practice, he lamented, significantly dilutes the prestige and value of genuine qualifications, potentially eroding the motivation for pursuing rigorous academic pathways, such as PhDs, which typically demand three to five years of dedicated study and research.
Global norms and aggressive enforcement
Professor Ocloo underscored that Ghana’s struggle with title misuse is an outlier in the global academic community.
“All over the world, all over the world, honorary titles are no use… Most people have five honorary degrees… And they don’t use the title. Because it’s not something that you’ve earned.”
GTEC, which was reconstituted around 2020 by merging the National Accreditation Board (NAB) and the National Commission for Tertiary Education (NCTE) under the Education Regulatory Bodies Act, 2020 (Act 1023), has observed an alarming surge in abuses.
This includes the questionable conferment of “honorary professor” titles and the use of degrees from unaccredited online programmes, alongside a worrying rise in AI-generated certificates in the “AI era.”
The commission’s approach has shifted from passive advisories to active enforcement, beginning with press releases in April and escalating to direct letters sent to individuals found in violation.
Professor Ocloo warned that soft measures are no longer sufficient.
“Beyond that, we have other options. For instance, we can ask the institutions that confer these honorary degrees on people to revoke them. And then we also have legal areas that we can also pursue,” he confirmed, signalling the possibility of legal prosecution for persistent offenders.
Professor Ocloo revealed the substantial scale of the problem, stating that GTEC has identified “at least between 10 and 20” individuals within just the last two weeks, with “daily reports” of new cases continually surfacing.
He stressed the public’s crucial role in this clean-up, particularly urging the media, who often inadvertently contribute to the problem, to exercise caution.
“Until recently, people really didn’t know that some people calling themselves doctors really are not doctors,” he pointed out.
Professor Ocloo called for widespread public support and cooperation to uphold the credibility of academic titles in Ghana.
“If our doors are open, they should reach out to us with this aspect. You know, because if we are not very careful, we will not have this space to enter the face education space,” he concluded.
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