Dear Editor,

I was not at the lecture of Professor Winston McGowan entitled, ‘Modern Guyana: A historical interpretation – the PPP years, 1992 to the present.’ The presentation was done under the auspices of the Walter Rodney Chair at UG. The Stabroek News reported Dr McGowan as telling his audience that one of the negatives of the Jagdeo government is “the progressive decline of the university because of a failure to inject the money needed to recruit and maintain highly qualified staff, an adequate library and laboratories.”

I have deep respect for the scholarship of Dr McGowan, who taught me when I was a student at UG. But the way he has outlined this particular non-achievement of the Jagdeo government is a literal misinterpretation of a particular aspect of modern Guyanese history. From the time the Forbes Burnham government ran into balance of payment problems, UG suffered financial difficulties. The pecuniary nightmare of UG continued under Hoyte and the post 1992 government. So there was progressive decline since the early eighties. The present government simply does have the money to stop the withering away of the university.

But the level of political interference by the Jagdeo government that has led to the moral deterioration of UG is unprecedented. I lived under Burnham and was a student at UG under Burnham. I worked at UG under Hoyte. I can say most unhesitatingly and unreservedly that the crudity and atrocity of governmental intervention and manipulation of UG by the Jagdeo administration have surpassed anything Mr Burnham did.

The Jagdeo approach to UG has been a destructive one. I do not think that Mr Burnham would have been as inelegant and vulgar in his attempt to subdue the university as has been done by the present government over the past six years. I say that Mr Jagdeo’s political interference in the autonomy of UG has made him in my honest judgement, a president worse than Burnham in terms of the bullying approach to getting what he wants. I make this statement fully conscious that I know what Mr Burnham personally did to me – he banned me from working at UG.

I do not believe these graphic examples could have escaped the attention of Dr McGowan because they generated widespread controversy in the country. Where was Dr McGowan when these egregious policy decisions were being made? I want to be respectful and polite to Dr McGowan, but I must admit that his failure to capture the nasty injection of party politics for six consecutive years at UG is a serious blot on his interpretation of modern Guyanese history. If Professor McGowan could be oblivious to the three episodes of the vice-chancellor contract crisis, then one is forced to ask what other omissions have occurred in his treatment of modern Guyanese history.

In the end, given his interpretation of this negative aspect of the Jagdeo presidency one can say it is not a negative at all, because Mr Jagdeo can claim that the decline began long before he wore long pants. In his evaluation of the present PPP government’s attitude to the university, Dr McGowan, I am afraid, has done a disservice to contemporary Guyanese history. As a former student of history at UG and as an academic interested in the facts of Guyanese history (not the truths), I find this obliviousness of Dr McGowan very worrying.

It would be interesting to hear or read how Dr McGowan would react to questions about the history of political assault on UG from the corridors of power since 1970. Are Burnham’s ban on Rodney and me working at UG and the forceful introduction of National Service the only examples of authoritarian intrusion at Turkeyen?

Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon