Robert Buddan, Contributor

The University of the West Indies officially begins its 60th anniversary celebrations today. Those 60 years were directed at producing a new Caribbean from out of the old. The next 60 years will have to be about producing a global Caribbean and happily the UWI has a strategic plan in place to equip it to do so.

The UWI was a product of many things happening at once - modernisation, decolonisation, regionalisation, and nation building. One of the sins ofcolonialism was that for 300 years the British never saw it fit to build a university in the region. It was only after a series of riots in the 1930s that a British commission realised the need to promote a middle class in preparation for eventual self-government. Before adult suffrage, there was no university in Jamaica. By the start of the new century, almost 15 per cent of Jamaicans had access to tertiary education. Access to UWI will increase further with the launch of the Open campus and the western campus, this year.

Providing upward social mobility

The UWI has led the way in providing upward social mobility for the children of black working class and small farmers who largely supported the political parties in 1944, and their vision of building a middle class through education and business. It is these graduates who make up the region's middle class across a range of professions.

Early party leaders like Norman Manley, Grantley Adams and Eric Williams were Rhodes or Island scholars. In the first half of the 20th Century, only the very bright were able to win the very few available scholarships and had to go abroad to study. These leaders wanted a regional university so that others could attend university right here at home and do so even if they did not win prestigious scholarships. Their vision has succeeded.

Eight current CARICOM prime ministers are UWI graduates. Jamaica's Governor-General is a recent former UWI principal. The Speaker of the House is a former UWI lecturer. In Jamaica's first House under adult suffrage, 47 per cent of the members had tertiary education. By the end of the century, 82 per cent did, and a majority had UWI education. UWI has helped to change the social character of politics by helping to produce a middle class and to create a political class of the middle class. Munroe and Bertram's study of political administrations in Jamaica say that, "as the society developed and became more middle class, the lawyers, doctors, and businessmen took over" the House of Representatives from the trade unionists, agriculturalists and educators.

Region building

UWI was also a part of region building. West Indies cricket, the University of the West Indies, the Caribbean Congress of Labour, the West Indies Federal Labour Party, the Democratic Federal Labour Party, and the Federation of the West Indies were the driving forces of region building displacing colonial occupation of the Caribbean space. But UWI has outlasted most of these. It did so because it represented the successful idea of inter-governmentalism through functional cooperation between states to promote peace not war, and the pragmatic idea that the region could better afford a university than any one territory could.

UWI has had to fight back the advocates of national universities. The Rodney Riots of 1968, for instance, caused those advocates to try to split Jamaicans off from other Caribbean people arguing that those others, like Rodney, who was Guyanese, were trying to bring black power radicalism to Jamaica, and were not good for the country. But the issue of a national versus a regional university for Jamaica was pretty much settled after CARICOM was formed in 1973, and UWI became, and remains a showpiece of regional cooperation.

UWI survived because it was more than merely symbolic of region building. It contributed to nation building as each territory gained constitutional advance and more power to govern its internal affairs. From its earliest days, members of Jamaica's House of Representatives engaged the Institute of Social and Economic Studies, at UWI, to help in aggregating statistics on thenational economy so they could measure and understand the economy and how to make it grow. The debate over development led these representatives to take an interest in the work of the St. Lucian economist, Sir Arthur Lewis, who worked at the Mona campus, and both Donald Sangster and Norman Manley cited his ideas in developing a strategy for industrialisation in Jamaica. By the mid-1950s, Manley was suggesting to the House that the UWI would be an important source from which to appoint public officials to serve on state commissions like the public service commission and on state boards. The UWI was to provide a new class of administrators for the new Caribbean states.

The growth of UWI, alongside the growth of the new states, was fortuitous to both. As the new states expanded their scope and functions in the 1950s and 1960s, in health, education, foreign affairs, public administration, sports and culture, UWI expanded its own courses, staffing, and research to supply a new class of leaders of the new institutions. This made it possible to Jamaicanise, and across the region, Caribbeanise the public and private sectors. National states need people with skills to draft the necessary legislation, research the required ministry papers, construct the social, economic and cultural policies, and man the judicial, administrative and other institutions that are required for nation building and state construction. States must govern through regulatory boards like those for coffee, banking, beach control, airports, broadcasting, tourism, urban development, and all of these require a class of people exposed by education to envision, plan, and manage these domains. UWI graduates are found in all of these and other governing bodies.

Next challenge

UWI has created an educated middle class for the Caribbean. As it expands its social base to pull up more persons into the middle class it comes to face a challenge that many of its contemporary problems relate to. Principal Gordon Shirley explains that, "some 75 per cent of our students today originate from the lower middle-income and lower-income groups. About half of our students come from rural parishes, that is, those areas outside of Kingston, St. Andrew, Portmore and Spanish Town - the Kingston Metropolitan Area. That means that the social skills (language and behavioural) that one took for granted as developed in the majority of our students who were from the middle classes and above, some 25 years ago, are today largely underdeveloped.

The campus has sought to assist students in developing these skills through a number of programmes, including the foundation courses, language development training programmes, leadership and other social development interventions run through faculties and the Office of Students Services and Development.

This means that the university now has to create the social skills that used to be taken for granted as it brings up the classes from below while enriching them with the Caribbean experience and making them nationally competent and globally competitive. This is the task of the UWI and all other educational institutions in the region, and even as UWI celebrates 60 years, it will be preparing itself for its task already outlined in its strategic plan to 2012.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.