Professor Emmanuel Adow Obeng, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, recently told lecturers that many of them are more focused on publishing books and papers than on nurturing and mentoring their students, and that this trend needs to be reversed. He made the remarks at a conference honouring a colleague, a man he rightly praised for combining scholarship with genuine care for students.
I read his comments with respect, and also with a question I think deserves an honest answer.
Professor, when did you come to know this?
I ask because the phrase publish or perish has been the operating law of university life for the better part of a century. It did not arrive quietly. It shaped how young lecturers were hired, how they were promoted, how they were tenured, and how they were, in the plainest sense, kept employed. A lecturer who spent a decade pouring into students but produced few publications risked being told, gently or otherwise, that his career had stalled. A lecturer who published prolifically, whatever the state of his relationships with students, was called productive. This was not a secret. It was, and largely still is, the system.
So when a former Vice-Chancellor, someone who sat at the very top of that system for years, now tells lecturers to focus less on publishing and more on mentoring, the first honest response is not agreement or disagreement. It is a question. Did you not know this before now? And if you did know it, what did you do about it while you held the power to change it?
Let me be clear about where I stand on the substance. Mentorship is not a favour a lecturer does for a student. It is the core of the profession, as essential as the knowledge being transferred. It is ethically right because a lecturer who shapes only minds while ignoring character has done half a job. It is morally right because the trust a student places in a teacher is a trust that deserves more than a lecture and a grade. On this, Professor Adow Obeng and I agree completely.
But here is the difficulty. If mentorship is truly the core of the profession, why does the system built to develop, grow, and evaluate lecturers not reward it? Why does a young lecturer who spends hours guiding struggling students, writing references, checking in after a bereavement, or simply being present, gain nothing measurable for any of it, while the same hours spent on a journal article count directly toward promotion? Why does mentorship appear nowhere on the criteria that decide who becomes a senior lecturer, an associate professor, or a full professor? The system does not merely fail to reward mentorship. In most cases, it does not recognise that it happened at all.
This is the question I would put to Professor Adow Obeng directly, not as an attack, but as one lecturer asking a fair question of another who has walked further along the same road. As Vice-Chancellor, what did you do, structurally, to change this? Did any promotion criteria under your leadership formally credit mentorship? Did any policy require it to be documented and assessed the way research output is documented and assessed? And, if I may ask plainly, did you yourself rise to the rank of professor primarily through the mentorship of students, or through the publication record the system has always demanded of everyone who wishes to rise?
I do not ask this to embarrass him. I ask it because his own answer would tell us something important. If even those who now call for mentorship rose through a system that rewarded publishing, then the honest conclusion is not that today’s lecturers have lost their way. It is that the system has never asked them to find it. You cannot fairly judge a generation of lecturers by a standard the institution itself never built into their evaluation, promotion, or survival within the profession. The lecturer is not the problem. The system is.
This is not only a Ghanaian or an African challenge. Ernest Boyer’s landmark 1990 report for the Carnegie Foundation, Scholarship Reconsidered, made precisely this argument at the international level, proposing that scholarship be understood as four equally valid pursuits: discovery, integration, application, and teaching, rather than research alone. More than three decades later, most universities worldwide, including many that quote Boyer approvingly in their mission statements, still weight publication far more heavily than teaching or mentorship in tenure and promotion decisions. The phrase publish or perish itself has been traced by researchers to at least the 1930s and 40s, when academic leaders openly used publication counts to decide who stayed and who was let go. The habit is old, and it was built by the very institutions now asking lecturers to unlearn it without changing the incentives underneath.
Some universities have begun to try. A small number now include documented mentorship, teaching portfolios, and student outcomes as part of formal promotion review, following frameworks such as Glassick’s standards for assessing scholarship of teaching. These remain the exception rather than the rule, and Ghanaian and African universities, where promotion criteria still lean heavily on publication counts set by national accreditation bodies, are largely no different.
If Professor Adow Obeng, and others in positions like his, genuinely believe lecturers should be judged by how well they nurture students, the honest next step is not another speech asking lecturers to change their hearts. It is the harder work of resetting the system that trained them, promoted them, and will continue to shape the next generation long after this conference is forgotten. Reward what you want to see. Measure what you claim to value. Until then, we are asking individuals to abandon a game whose rules the institution itself has never rewritten.
The lecturer did not build the system. But the system, undeniably, built the lecturer.