This thesis examines the evolution of Ghanaian higher education through the use of images that education elites have held of the purpose of the vocation of higher education. Initially, the colonial legacy left Ghana with a classical image of higher education, devoted to the formation of an intellectual within the tradition of western civilization. The antithesis after Independence was the nationalist image which saw the educated man as a product of Ghanaian civilization. The dialectical clash between these two images produced a synthesis in a utilitarian image, seeing higher education as the preparation of a person ready to aid the development of his country. The synthesis would have been a comfortable resting place had it not been for a fourth image, drawn not out of content but out of the restraints of economic procedure, that is, a budgetary image which put higher education in a place of lower priority within the shrinking financial resources of the newly independent country. Ghana's higher education today is stuck within that new antithesis, struggling to find again its equilibrium in the synthesis of the previous utilitarian image. As the thesis explains, it was the interplay of these images which prevented a healthy and stable development of the higher education system. This dialectical process of images is portrayed through interviews with the leaders of Ghanaian higher education and through records left by the evolving university system.
