Bernard Headley, ContributorCOLLEAGUE STEPHEN Vasciannie is doing the nation a priceless service. Over past weeks he has, in his regular Gleaner column, been (re) educating us on the role of the university in society, and particularly that of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in the Jamaican/Caribbean setting. I especially commend him for venturing this past Monday (as I also boldly did some weeks ago) into the 'den' of radio talk show host Wilmot Perkins; and for effectively demonstrating that Perkins' roar, and his particular kind of ranting at the UWI, are more punishing than his bite.
TIMELY DEBATE
The debate on the role and mission of the UWI is particularly timely and useful. It's taking place in an era of memoranda of understandings and compulsory budgetary restraints; a time when the UWI, Mona campus, a public taxpayer-funded entity, is faced not with whether to cut, but from where to cut. For the academic year 2004-05, the principal's office informs us, the campus will receive $793 million less than it did in 2003-04. That's no small change, no insignificant cut. The decision about where and what to cut could ultimately determine 'what kind of university'; but also, more immediately, which branch of its mission will the UWI, Mona, community seek to uphold, protect and defend.
In his comprehensive and typically generous review of the kind of scholarly activities faculty at the UWI, Mona, are engaged in, Professor Vasciannie presents a view of one of the important missions of a university. He argues persuasively that a number of scholars (certainly, I hasten to add, himself among them) there on the Mona campus are engaged in what he describes as the "patient pursuit of knowledge, and the creation of ways of seeing and understanding the world around us."
Professor Vasciannie points proudly to a representative number of erudite UWI-authored publications (one of them copiously cited by Opposition Leader Edward Seaga in his recent budget presentation) that support his claim.
There are, in other words, on this very campus, a significant number of brilliant people, in all faculties, engaged in research-typically on issues and problems that are of pressing importance to Jamaica and the region.
'RESEARCH UNIVERSITY'
This research function Professor Vasciannie calls the "true mission of the university." But that's a proposition I'd challenge. It's a proposition, and only a proposition, that ought to be central to the debate we meaning the broader national tax-paying public must now have.
The idea of a 'research university', which Professor Vasciannie represents the Mona campus of the UWI as having over the years aspired to, is one that should undergo scrutiny, that is, at this critical juncture when we are being called upon to make difficult choices.
It will simply have to, when pitted against what surely has to be an equally weighty priority mission for the UWI; that is, to provide quality instruction, superior learning experiences, and necessary guidance, counselling and modelling to an expanding number of students.
UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Increasingly, many of these students arrive at the UWI gate not yet ready for prime-time university work, for the university environment or even serious learning. In other words, can the UWI, Mona campus, continue to make the case that, as it too, just like other institutions in the society, gets bruited daily by the rough edges of underdevelopment (for which the UWI arguably shares in a certain kind of historical culpability), it ought to be the tropical version of a Harvard, Princeton, Oxford or Columbia-all renowned, but also private and elite, 'research universities'?
Or should the UWI, Mona, be held to a more critical and culturally germane function: being a large public 'teaching university', the penultimate vehicle through which limited resources centre on teaching men and women how to 'deal critically and creatively with reality' (to borrow from the eminent Brazilian educator Paulo Freire), and how they can participate in transforming themselves and their world?
Ideally and under normal times, we shouldn't have to choose between the two missions, pose them as an 'either-or' dilemma or even treat as debatable propositions. But these are not normal times. Besides, the times are indeed 'a changing'.
Bernard Headley is a professor in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work.
