Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the purpose of universities, according to the Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), Sir Sam Jonah, who says higher education institutions must urgently redefine their mission or risk becoming obsolete.
Delivering a keynote address at the installation of Professor John Aheto as Vice-Chancellor on Saturday, 1 August, Sir Sam argued that universities were created in an era when knowledge was scarce, but that reality has changed.
“For nine hundred years, the university has been built on a single foundation: the scarcity of knowledge. That world has ended,” he said.
He described AI as a turning point in human history, noting that “for the first time in human history, the cleverest entity in the room may not be a person.”
According to him, answers are now “abundant, instant, and nearly free”, forcing universities to answer a new question: “What is a university for, when the library talks back?”
Sir Sam warned that institutions which see their role merely as transmitting knowledge would struggle to remain relevant. “If our answer is: ‘to transmit knowledge’ then we are finished, because a machine now does that better, faster and cheaper than we ever will. But if our answer is: ‘to form human beings who can do what no machine can do, then the university is about to enter its greatest century,” he said.
While acknowledging concerns that AI could replace jobs, Sir Sam argued that the technology would instead increase the value of practical skills and human-centred professions. “The more artificial the world becomes, the more precious the human becomes.
The economies that will flourish are not those with the most AI, but those whose people can do what AI cannot; the hand, the heart, the judgment, and the presence,” he stated.
He cited reforms at leading global universities including MIT, Stanford and Harvard, saying they were embedding AI across disciplines rather than treating it as a specialist subject. He challenged UCC to follow suit, insisting that the gap between African universities and the world’s leading institutions is increasingly “defined chiefly by resolve” rather than resources.
Beyond technology, Sir Sam called for greater investment in the humanities, saying ethics, empathy, courage and judgment remain uniquely human qualities.
“As the world races to accumulate Artificial Intelligence, the mission of this University must be to deepen Human Intelligence to match their AI,” he said.
Ending on a call for African leadership, Sir Sam urged UCC to become a model for the continent’s educational transformation.
“One day, historians will ask where, when the machines learned to think, human beings relearned what they were for. Let the answer be: in a university by the sea, in Cape Coast, in Ghana where a determined community decided that the future belongs not to those who know, but to those who can do.”
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