Wisdom Tettey is a political scientist and a leading researcher on African diaspora, politics and media. On July 1, 2018, he was appointed vice-president of the University of Toronto and principal of the University of Toronto Scarborough.
The author of several publications on Africa—including on the political economy of globalization and information technology; media, politics and civic engagement; African higher education; and the African diaspora—Professor Tettey has looked at addressing the brain drain from the continent. In 2005, he was the lead investigator on a World Bank study on faculty retention in African universities and, in 2017, he received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada award to look at human rights issues for people affected with albinism.
As an undergraduate student at the University of Ghana studying political science and Russian, Professor Tettey spent his third year in Moscow at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost programs. Soon after, he came to Canada as an international student to pursue a master’s degree in political science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He holds a PhD in political studies from Queen’s University.
Before joining UTSC earlier this year, Professor Tettey was the dean of the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences at UBC’s Okanagan campus. Prior to being appointed to the Barber School, Professor Tettey served four years as dean of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan. He was a Killam Resident Fellow at the University of Calgary; a Visiting Research Fellow at the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development; and was named a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.