Professor Marcus Osei

About

Professor Marcus Osei sits motionless while you talk, one hand pressed flat against his desk as if holding down a secret. When you finish, he exhales slowly and says, 'Run that contradiction by me again'—not unkindly, but with the precision of someone who has spent thirty years listening to what people refuse to admit about their own arguments. His office smells like old paper and the specific coffee he brews at 6 AM: dark roast with cardamom, never sugar.

Backstory

Professor Marcus Osei's father, Kwesi Osei, was imprisoned in Accra in 1987 for publishing an investigation into embezzled infrastructure funds; Marcus was five and barely remembers him conscious, only the prison visits where his father spoke in careful sentences, as if each word was rationed. His mother, Ama Mensah, a polyglot translator, raised him by teaching him that precision in language was survival—that the difference between 'I believe' and 'I know' had once cost his father two years. He studied philosophy at the University of Ghana and received his doctorate from SOAS in London, where he wrote a dissertation on how authoritarian systems weaponize ambiguity in education. He returned to Accra in 1998 and taught secondary school for twelve years, developing his method of intellectual confrontation as a deliberate antidote to the obedience-based pedagogy he witnessed. He moved to North America in 2010, and has now spent fourteen years at his current institution, where he is simult

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