Wilberne Persaud, Financial Gleaner Columnist
Both pictures show the site of the first lecture given by Professor Cedric Hassall at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, then the University College, in 1948, which now lies in ruins. - photos by Wilberne Persaud
My Editor has promised to indulge me, if I give prior notice, and if I feel an issue is important enough, by allowing me a longer column.
Usually I don't seek her indulgence. Why? Opportunity cost of Financial Gleaner, print media 'real estate' is expensive - the negative; and the concise column requires economy of words hence clarity of ideas - the positive.
Vice Chancellor Professor E. Nigel Harris's vision - Rebranding the University of the West Indies, (Financial Gleaner July 13) - for the University of the West Indies, is to my mind so important and is so likely to be lost in the election fever, that it warrants my now making that request.
First a bit of background:a story apocryphal perhaps, has gone the rounds at the senior common room for years. Former Vice Chancellor A. Z. Preston upon hearing of the political directorate's determination to separate the vice chancellery from the Mona campus is reputed to have said: 'Over my dead body'. He subsequently died.
The implication of this tidbit is the suggestion that without a campus, the vice chancellor is literally powerless to achieve the goals he may have. Worse, the vice chancellery becomes a parasite, duplicating services, gormandising resources, being merely ceremonial.
Thus upon hearing of Prof. Harris' acceptance of the position as reluctant groom to UWI's bride, many there were of the opinion that he was as we say 'getting basket to carry water'.
The vision indicated last Friday to my mind puts paid to those previous speculations. Why? First Harris is the quintessential academic, no question. And he believes both in the enterprise and its role in development.
Impeccable genetic stock
While he shall disapprove my mention of this, he went to good schools and hails from unique, impeccable genetic stock. His father is, of course, Wilson Harris the Guyanese/Caribbean anti-colonialist and novelist who, discussing his work and cultures in time and place, relating it to man's misunderstanding of his role in the universe, says to Maya Jaggi in the Guardian: "You can advance, see things you never saw before, move out of boundaries that have been a prison."
Well, Nigel Harris is putting these kinds of ideas into practice for UWI.
He is well equipped to do so. He listens intently. His academic discipline mandates exploration of the underlying facts. He transfers this to administration of the university. He has something in common with Bill Clinton: he is soft spoken, intense and highly persuasive - perhaps not to a political meeting, the Bill Clinton specialty, but certainly to small groups.
These, of course, include his colleagues, Prime Ministers and Ministers of Education of theCaribbean who must fund the UWI and who are sometimes trained at UWI. Of course, his vision is pertinent.
But I take exception to the Financial Gleaner's headline and use of the term 'rebranding'. I hope that is not the way Harris describes the endeavour, and if it is, I hope it is not his word but that of his publicists. We pay too much attention to the form and not the function.
What I read last Friday does not suggest a re-brand of UWI. Harris it seems, wants t its focus fundamentally, to make it 'evolve' to deal with 21st century realities.
This leads me to a central issue of tension that has always existed in conception of the UWI: Is the mission to create 'work-ready graduates' or to push knowledge frontiers in ways that can be useful to the Caribbean and the world? Does that tension, conflict, have to exist? It seems not; Harris plans to do both.
He is fortunate. For the earlier tensions that existed between local capital and the intellectual class that had its upheavals in the late 1960s and 1970s is now significantly abated.
Like yeast in ginger beer
Governments across the world worry about what their universities do. Education can be dangerous. Radicals feeding youth revolutionary ideas can be like yeast in the ginger beer. Just enough is exquisite, too much bursts the bottle.
So in the Nixon years, campuses were infiltrated and in the late 1960s and early 1970s we had upheavals. Yet, today's concerns do not appear to be ripe for Walter Rodney riots or Black Power demonstrations and attempts to seize power. And the national business class appears to have recognised the pivotal role a research and entrepreneurial university can play.
This is not unconnected to the fact that we have people - just to name one - like Douglas Orane in charge of our conglomerates. We have indeed evolved.
In this evolution that Harris and his team have identified, it would be a mistake to look upon it as a break with tradition. Indeed the University of the West Indies has more than a50-year tradition of excellence. It has not always been a continuous upward movement. But as early as 1954, a mere six years after its establishment, the work its faculty undertook from the earliest stage rapidly became internationally known, regarded and recognised.
The penson report "emphasised the excellence of the research in the humanities, in pure and applied science and in medicine which is being undertaken at the College. (It) ... emphasised too the importance of the fact that in the course of the promotion of their research the members of the College have had an admirable regard to the special conditions and needs of the West Indies."
A significant benefaction
The Nuffield Foundation, also in 1954, made a significant benefaction to the College, a capital grant in recognition of its work and as "a tribute to its considerable achievements."
The transmittal letter accompanying the gift says the Nuffield trustees had been so "much impressed by the progress which your College has made during its early years and, as a tribute to its considerable achievements during this period, and as a measure of help to the development of its life and work during the next critical phase, the Foundation wishes to offer the College a capital grant of £50,000."
In today's values this is millions of pounds sterling.
Excellence is not alien to the UWI culture. Neither is evolution. I have lamented publicly in the past, the fact that in its search for quick and easy funds, KFC was placed immediately in front of the Library and Juici Patties took prime space on the Queen's Way while the Gibraltar Camp building site of the first lecture, was unceremoniously demolished - history abolished in an hour one Sunday morning creating, an absence of ruins. A visiting former UWI academic described that act as vandalism. But be that as it may, I am now most heartened by the proposed push to evolve the institution to which so many of us feel organically connected.
wilbe65@yahoo.com
