Harris
Earl Moxam, Senior Gleaner Writer
DR. E. NIGEL HARRIS, the incoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI), has identified the large gender gap at the regional institution as an area of deep concern which he would like to address.
At the Mona campus in Jamaica enrolment for the 2003/2004 academic year stands at 12,467. Of that number, 9,022 are women as against 3,445 men.
Throughout the university system, women outnumber the men. At the Cave Hill campus in Barbados enrolment for 2002/2003 stood at 4,336 with females accounting for 2,927 and the men taking 1,436 places. St. Augustine in Trinidad & Tobago had an enrolment of 5,141 female students to 3,488 men in 2002/2003.
Dr. Harris said it was important to investigate whether there were cultural influences that affect one (gender) and not the other.
"I think it has some influence on the sort of crime one sees in the inner-city communities. Somehow the young men feel that the opportunities are not available to them to enable them to stay in school and achieve the sort of productive life that they might," Dr. Harris told The Sunday Gleaner in a recent interview.
Up to December 12, 2003, the Mona campus had 2,582 students reading for certificates, diplomas and degrees for the year. Of that number 1,929 are female and 653 male. Among them, 1,781 graduated with a first degree 1,342 women and 439 men. But this is nothing new to Dr. Harris.
Referring to the Atlanta-based Morehouse School of Medicine where he currently is the Dean, he revealed that 70 per cent of the students are women. "This is a phenomenon that one is seeing everywhere. It requires its own study and scholarship. It is a problem that is primary and urgent," he said.
TRANSFORMATION
Starting August 1 this year, when he takes up his new assignment, succeeding Professor Rex Nettleford, the new Vice Chancellor will have an opportunity to guide the hoped-for transformation. The job of Vice Chancellor is one, he said, that he was looking forward to, having longed for an opportunity to contribute to the development of the region.
"My life has taken me in many different directions around the world, but I've always felt a little guilty about not giving enough to my part of the world the Caribbean. So it's a great opportunity and I'm excited about it," he said.
But Dr. Harris is not under-estimating the enormity of the challenge of guiding the further development of the regional university, describing it "as a very complex organisational structure."
Winning the collaboration of the various stakeholders in the institution, he said, would be critical to the success of his mission one that he asserted he was ready to take on.
The 57-year-old native of Guyana studied extensively in the United States before returning to the Caribbean in the mid-70s to do his medical residency at the University Hospital of the West Indies at Mona.
He later went to England for five years where he was involved in research in lupus, an interest that he developed while working in Jamaica. From there he returned to the United States in the 1980s where he spent six years at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, advancing to a professorship. It was during the mid-90s that he was invited to take up the position of Dean of the School of Medicine at Morehouse College, a largely black institution. Describing himself as somebody who has wandered through academic life over more than 35 years, Dr. Harris told The Sunday Gleaner that he was now ready to share that experience with the people of the Caribbean.
With his background in research, the incoming Vice-Chancellor said that he was interested in promoting that aspect of the university's work, but wanted the institution to go beyond mere research to playing a more influential role in West Indian society.
The UWI, he said, had an opportunity to transform the whole education system to create a new generation of discoverers, even from kindergarten; a new generation of people who will be managers, political leaders, people who will influence policy, and who will influence new discoveries in information technology.
