Vice Chancellor of the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS), Prof John Owusu Gyapong says academic calendars may not go back to normal anytime soon as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing strike action.

According to him, universities across Ghana were still in the process of recovering academic time lost due to the effects of the pandemic and then UTAG also went on strike, exacerbating the process.

He stated that in the meantime, however, it will take much longer than expected to recover lost time.

“We have been battling with trying to recover the time lost as a result of Covid and we’re not out of the woods yet. We were hoping that within a period of about two years, we would have been able to get our academic cycle back in shape.

“But with these disruptions obviously it’s not in favour of that. So the academic calendar is still getting more and more challenged and probably getting to its elastic limit. So on the academic calendar front, that is what I can say,” he said.

He expressed worry that the longer UTAG stays out of classrooms, it becomes near impossible to restructure a new academic calendar that may usher the universities back to their previous calendar.

“That it is not very good for us and we’re not even sure how we’d be able to recover the time even if today or tomorrow UTAG were to call off the strike and that we were to get back into our normal academic work. It will take us a bit of time to be able to take us to our usual August to July academic year,” he explained.

Meanwhile, at UHAS, the Vice-Chancellor shared that prior to the UTAG crisis, management had structured a timetable that would have enabled the University to return to normal soon.

“We were hoping that if we were able to compress the academic calendar with very short vacations, we could probably have finished the academic year within 10 months instead of 12 months.

“So if we start in January as we were hoping to have started, then we could have gone to maybe sometime in October thereabout. And then the next year we’ll try and recover again and see if we can get back to the July academic year. So clearly there is a challenge,” he said.