The success story of Central University is enough reason to prove that the university is not collapsing as is being speculated by some media outlets, Vice Chancellor of the University Professor Bill Buanar Puplampu has said.
“A lot is happening here, and I would crave Ghanaian indulgence to understand that this is a significant initiative and it’s not about to go down and it’s serving Ghana and the world considerably,” he stated.
Professor Puplampu said this on Monday in an exclusive interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at the Central University, Miotso, Greater Accra, in response to speculations that the Central University was folding up.
He observed that the University had graduated over 14, 000 students in the last twenty years of its existence, adding that, “Many of our alumni are serving in significant roles in this country and elsewhere. It is a significant institution and we should take note of the impact it is having and has had, the voice it has and continues to have in the education front.”
In observing why that level of attack on the University, Professor Puplampu said, “When you have a noted voice, you attract a lot of attention and become susceptible to a lot of criticisms”
He informed that for an institution to collapse, its internal structures would have to collapse, its financial arrangements poor, its workforce not sufficiently skilled, and its technology and clientele not patronizing again, “But in all of these fronts, the University is standing very firm with empirical evidence attesting to that.”
He said currently, the University had 200 faculty members who were made up of eleven professors with distinguished careers leading the various programmes.
He also informed that the institution was run by over 200 administrative staff with a current student population of 7000.
“We have the sort of technology other universities have; the online system we use to manage our students is similar to what other universities use. In terms of our clientele, it is instructive to know that at the present time we are the largest private university in Ghana,” Professor Puplampu said.
He added that, “We have the largest Pharmacy school with 900 students and 25 lecturers. We recently started the Doctor of Pharmacy programme with over one hundred students who are doing fine. We have the largest Physician Assistant programme and one of the largest Law programme in Ghana, and the university is the second and only private institution offering architecture in Ghana.”
He said a university that was about to go down would not have matriculated over 1000 students for the 2018/19 academic year with another 105 students at the Kumasi campus, adding that “this shows we’re firmly on the ground and not about to go down.”
He said news about the collapse of a university could only be true if its source and location was credible stating that, “Where I heard about the collapse of the university from, isn’t the place news about the collapse of a major institution like ours would be coming from.”
He observed that Central University, like any other university, had its challenges and they were fighting to address them and insisted that those challenges were not strong enough to bring the institution to its knees.
He said there was a situation in which the Chancellor of the university happened to be chairman of the defunct Capital Bank, and that people were trying to relate the collapse of the Bank to the school thinking that the University would also collapse “but these are two different entities and the fortunes of one wouldn’t necessarily affect the other.”
The Registrar of the Central University, Mr. Emil Afenyo, responding to query about why the University retrenched some of its staff some months earlier, noted that the University was always engaged in efficiency maximization and would ensure that it balanced its staff resources with its operational needs, debunking the notion that the exercise took place because the University was collapsing.
He stressed that Central University was not interested in pursuing less than credible media houses through the courts as that would be an unnecessary distraction to the University.
GNA