Professor Ed Kay sharpens Lehigh’s ties with Cameroon

The Atlantic Ocean and a half-dozen time zones separate Lehigh University from the University of Buea in Cameroon, but the distance between the two schools has shrunk in the past eight years.

From 1995 to 1997, Edwin Kay, professor of computer science and engineering, and his wife, Janice, a social worker, served with the Peace Corps in the West African nation. Kay taught math at Buea, while his wife worked for the Cameroon Opportunities Industrialization Center.

Ed Kay donating computers to
high schools in Meru, Kenya

After the Kays returned home, students who had taken Kay’s classes in Cameroon began following him to Lehigh. Today, seven Cameroonians study at Lehigh, pursuing graduate degrees in physics, math and chemistry.

Next month, Kay and his wife will return to Buea, where Kay will teach computer science for two months through the auspices of the Rotary Foundation, which has awarded him a Rotary Grant for University Teachers.

Kay hopes to take 50 used computers to Buea. He has collected 35 so far and is seeking donations of any PC that can run Windows 95. This will be his second PC run to Africa – two years ago, Kay accompanied eight Lehigh students on a three-week visit to Kenya, where they donated and installed 125 computers in the public schools in the village of Meru.

Kay's students in Buea

The Kays went to Cameroon in 1995 to experience another culture and to fulfill a 30-year-old dream. They found Cameroon, which is slightly larger than California, to be rich in variety, with 240 separate language groups and a topography that includes grasslands, rainforest, mountains and desert.

They also discovered many similarities between Buea and Lehigh. Some Cameroonian students, says Kay, also have relatives capable of living many lives.

“One day a student came to me and said he’d missed a test because his brother had died back in his village. I used the same approach that I use at Lehigh. Here, when a student says a relative has died, we professors ask for a copy of an obituary. That may sound harsh, but no one has ever been offended. In fact, it seems to have reduced the grandparent mortality rate.

“I told this student, ‘I need evidence that this happened.’ He said he would bring his sister in to corroborate. A week or two went by and nothing happened. Eventually, the student dropped my class.”

The vast majority of the students he had at Buea are serious and hard-working, Kay says, probably because Cameroon’s primary, secondary and high schools pass only a small percentage of students on to the next school. The country’s universities are just as demanding.

“Only 35 percent of the students graduate in the three years allotted,” says Kay. “Getting through the three years without failing a course – and you have to earn a C to pass – is unheard of. In one of my courses, 30 percent of the students failed. A professor said to me, ‘So few failures! What’s your secret?’

“It’s a very ruthless system. But the curriculum, especially in math and physics, is very sound. And the students who do graduate and come to the U.S. for graduate school have been quite successful.”

The Cameroonian contingent at Lehigh includes Miranda Teboh- Ewungken, who will receive a Ph.D. in mathematics at this Commencement on May 19, and her husband, Julius Ewungken, who will receive an M.S. in manufacturing systems engineering.

Teboh-Ewungken, one of the first Cameroonian students to enroll at Lehigh, has worked here as a teaching assistant in the math department and also as a math tutor in Lehigh’s Learning Center.

She said she was drawn to Lehigh because of the class she took with Kay.

“Prof. Kay was very well-liked at the University of Buea because of the simplicity of his teaching style. He was one of the few lecturers who had more students pass than fail.”

Photographs courtesy of Ed Kay