The excellent editorial, “OUR UNIVERSITIES IN THE NEW ERA”, in the Ghanaian Times of March 16 discusses the issue of “academic freedom” in the light of tasks now facing Ghana.

In the same issue, a significant front page note reports on action by the student body at University of Cape Coast. It seems the young people there have expressed “heartfelt gratitude” to Osagyefo our President for launching the Seven-Year Development Plan and have signified their resolution “to assist in the successful implementation of the plan for the realisation of the socialist objectives of the Party.”

Activities

Add these two items to the issuance during the previous week by University of Ghana of its own academic degrees for the first time in our history and a picture is created of progress in educational plans and activities in Ghana. Certainly, with the examples of Cape Coast students now before them, students throughout the country are “on the spot” to take similar action. Indeed, Kumasi and Legon have also done so. At the same time, our planners, especially in areas where such pledges of assistance are made, are now in a position to work out with the student body and faculties of our Universities (and may we not hope to see the same sort of movement starts in our secondary schools?) precise plans for helping our students implement their progressive decision. What a change that will bring about in short order in the real relationships between our hitherto isolated students and the public doing the actual work of building Ghana! At last, learning will serve great purpose, instead of existing as some sort of “crown jewel” in a display case! It seems to me that the whole matter of academic freedom belongs within this hopeful context. Just what is freedom, academic or otherwise? For some reason, there has existed a notion that “academic” freedom is separate and different from any other.

Specific Struggle

But isn’t such an idea just another facet of the whole concept of the student-and-faculty elite? And, that being so, isn’t the true meaning of such “freedom” better expressed in that more wanton word, “licence”? First and foremost, therefore, “freedom” on all our campuses comes down to the hard earth of reality – that is, onto Ghanaian soil where a specific struggle to build socialism is going on. As the TIMES editorial pointed out, freedom also is not now, nor has it ever been, an abstraction. Now as always, it is freedom for something and someone. The so- called old academic freedom was for an elite to lord it over the people, to perpetrate alien ideology within the bosom of its own family, so to speak.

Economic Czars

In that light, what other course is open to Ghana but to stamp out this sort of thing? Freedom exists in Ghana. There is more of it for an individual here than in Britain, for all she boasts so much of hers; and I know from a lifetime that there is more of it in Britain than in the United States today, which puts Ghana far ahead of the world’s self-styled fountainhead of the other kind of freedom which is really licence. I take this position because in Ghana freedom is for the vast majority of the population. It is not, as in Britain and much more so in the U.S., for that small percentage of the total number of inhabitants who, in those more “advanced” lands, rule the roost. Ghana’s freedom is for building a better life; not to take what is crammed down our throats by economic czars whose decisions affect millions of people without prior consultation. And, because Ghana’s freedom is for the majority, those who mouth their “concern” over the other “freedom” which thus far on our campuses has served an alien purpose, now merely expose themselves as hypocrites and enemies. So, in this light, the issue of academic freedom is really quite useful to us as the smoker-out of potential or actual ill-wishers. We have no need to apologize or explain our stand on this vital matter. It is actually quite clear. There is no “freedom”, either on campuses or anywhere else in our borders, for destruction or for injury to our people. Such activity is “licence”, pure and simple.

Let us not allow people with questionable purposes to misuse these grand concepts which have always motivated the advanced contingents of humanity in their inexorable march…