Robinson: We have a number of things on campus that are income generating and the direction is that we are going to try and increase those.

Nkrumah-Young: We are finding that as institutions are strapped for funds and you are going out there to raise funds on your own and to bid for contracts and so on, you have to respond in a timely manner.

Hamilton: We feel extremely constrained by the rules that in fact are set up to guide the Government and the public service, and we are being effectively run as if we are an arm of Government.

With emerging competition, declining state funding and the impact of the global economic crisis, tertiary entities have turned to entrepreneurial activities to assist in financing higher education.

In the same breadth, the University of Technology (UTech) in St Andrew is calling for a relaxation of measures which it says have stifled its ability to raise funds.

"The importance of that (relaxation of measures) is linked to the rapidly changing environment for competition in the Jamaican and external market so, if we are limited, it limits our capacity ultimately to compete," said Dr Rosalea Hamilton, vice-president of development at UTech.

Hamilton, along with Dr Kofi Nkrumah-Young, vice-president, planning and operations at UTech, complained during a Gleaner Editors' Forum at the newspaper's North Street, central Kingston, offices yesterday that UTech has been hampered by specific governmental guidelines.

"We are finding that as institutions are strapped for funds and you are going out there to raise funds on your own and to bid for contracts and so on, you have to respond in a timely manner," Nkrumah-Young said.

"So, the question is, how do we actually develop a system to encourage educational institutions to be entrepreneurs and at the same time ensure that you have accountability in the system."

Hamilton gave a recent example of how an external body halted the university in its tracks when it sought to raise revenue from manufacturing memorabilia for UTech's 50th anniversary.

Constrained by rules

"We feel extremely constrained by the rules that in fact are set up to guide the Government and the public service, and we are being effectively run as if we are an arm of Government, and our employees, our professionals, are being treated as civil servants by those rules," said Hamilton.

She added: "We have to rethink those rules. We have, for example, a public management and accountability act that is set up to regulate government bodies. I suggest that it is inappropriate as a set of rules for a university and, in fact, we looked at the University of the West Indies (UWI), and the rules in some cases may be even more strict. But (there are) those important areas where it allows the UWI certain kinds of freedoms that are required to respond quickly."

The UWI has also emphasised the importance of going the entrepreneurial route with the Government having signalled its intention to pour more funds into primary and secondary education rather than tertiary.

"In the case of UWI, the whole matter of becoming more entrepreneurial is something that has been on the table for a long time and the direction in which we have been forced to go for a number of years.

We have been doing that by more commercialising of our programmes, offering those at an economic cost," said Elaine Robinson, campus bursar at UWI. "We have a number of things on campus that are income generating and the direction is that we are going to try and increase those."

mark.beckford@gleanerjm.com