The haste with which the last two chancellors – Professor Calestous Juma and Dr Bertrand Ramcharan – abandoned their appointments in mid-tenure; the rough justice meted out to two Vice-Chancellors – Professors Denis Craig and Harold Lutchman – and the Council’s churlish treatment of Pro-Chancellor Dr Joshua Ramsammy cast faint light on the recondite administration at the upper levels of the University of Guyana. Believably, conditions are worse at the lower levels.
The situation at the university is not good. Dr Nanda Gopaul, Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President and a leading member of the government group on the University’s Council, wrote earlier this year, “The government… was always dissatisfied with the manner in which the University of Guyana was administered and to date some of that dissatisfaction still exists.” Dr Gopaul then apportioned blame, writing, “The problems at the University of Guyana are immense and have always been complicated by academics [who] more often see things differently as against those who try to formulate policies.”
Not only the government, but the entire nation is dissatisfied with the university. Several attempts have been made to investigate and resolve the university’s chronic problems over the past 20 years. When Dr George Walcott was Vice-Chancellor, the Cambridge Education Consultants completed a thorough study of the university which the Inter-American Development Bank was meant to use as the basis for a Technical Co-operation Agreement with the Government of Guyana back in 1988-90.
When Professor Denis Craig became Vice-Chancellor, he attempted to take the ‘Cambridge Report’ further. In so doing, he used as his basis for reform a 13th March 1993 Stabroek News editorial which read in part: “Salaries are deplorable, physical conditions of buildings, library and laboratory leave much to be desired and demoralisation is widespread. Money must be raised to deal with all these problems and the University has cobbled together a plan, part of which includes local fund-raising.”
Craig drafted a ‘Development Plan’ to improve the academic standards at the university. In an effort to attract better-qualified staff and to retain good lecturers, he achieved the rare feat of practically doubling academics’ salaries. But he was soon made to understand that he was the wrong man and in the wrong place when the administration changed in 1992. The Ministry of Finance withheld funding for the University, thereby precipitating a financial crisis; the Ministry of Labour intervened in an industrial dispute, thereby creating confusion that eventually drowned him in what he called “a flood of uncivilised behaviour,” that forced him to resign.
Ignoring the groundwork of these two studies, the new administration convened a Presidential Commission on the University of Guyana with the ironic objective, among others, of making UG “less political.” The report was handed to President Cheddi Jagan in May 1996. A decade later, Director of Resource Mobilisation and Planning Dr Marlene Cox was still hammering away at a fresh plan. This time, she coordinated consultations on UG’s Draft Strategic Plan 2006-2011 under the wordy slogan: “Enhancing Quality, Efficiency, Effective-ness and Relevance.” This Plan, in theory, ought to have been running for the past three years. Nobody in the present-day administration, therefore, much less the officials on campus, should be unaware of the innumerable recommendations of these four studies and the fact that none of them seemed to have been implemented fully or to have achieved its objectives.
At this stage, the real purpose of Professor Lawrence Carrington selection becomes clear. His is the task not of administering that difficult institution but of putting forward a friendly foreign face to the international donor community, local captains of industry and “key stakeholders.” Appointed on the inauspicious day of 1st April this year, and coming after the controversial eight-year Vice-Chancellorship of Dr James Rose during which university standards continued their downward slide, the big questions will be, how much can he achieve?
In the prolonged absence of a Chancellor, it is the Pro-Chancellor – Dr Prem Misir – who really runs the university through the Council with the unwavering support of the controlling group of political appointees. Misir expects that Carrington’s face will magically inspire national and regional credibility so that the university can “gain respect” both here and abroad.
Misir stated that Carrington, during his tenure, will embark on several initiatives that will include reviewing UG’s Strategic Plan which includes consultations with key stakeholders to ensure its feasibility, sustainability and contribution to the national developmental goals of Guyana; making proposals for financing the Strategic Plan by the university, government and donor funding; identifying internal constraints to the implementation to the Strategic Plan; examining proposals put forward by UG to achieve efficiency in its overall operations and exploring areas where collaboration between UWI and UG might enhance the quality of both institutions and proposing mechanisms for such partnership.
Carrington has been deliberately designated only as “Interim” Vice-Chancellor. But the short-term nature of his appointment and the narrow terms of Misir’s mandate astonished those who anticipated some long-term strategy for rehabilitating the university. It should be clear that no single person will be able to change conditions on the campus unless the administration itself changes its tightfisted technique of financing the university and its retarded attitude to tertiary education in this country.
It has taken a long time for UG to reach this nadir. Over the last 20 years, the tone of various Vice-Chancellors’ monodic lamentations to the annual convocations has become increasingly desperate. They have made it clear that the administration needs to do much more if UG is ever to be transformed into a credible academic institution that can compare, much less compete, with the University of the West Indies campuses at Cave Hill in Barbados, Mona in Jamaica and St Augustine in Trinidad. All of them have become platforms for the educated managerial and scientific élites that are leading their countries’ economies. Things have been different at the Turkeyen and, for that reason, Guyana.
Cleaning up the Turkeyen’s ‘Augean stables’ will not be easy. The squalid physical conditions, scrawny assets and shaky standards are notorious. Even in the halcyon days of Dr Denis Irvine’s Vice-Chancellorship, funding was inadequate but at least the staff was better qualified and highly motivated and a few foreign lecturers and research fellows came to Guyana.
In his day, Vice-Chancellor Denis Craig complained that conditions at UG were “bad.” The University’s state subvention, he said, was always inadequate, covering only essentials such as salaries, and what was left was inadequate for maintenance, with the consequent results.
In his day, Vice-Chancellor Harold Lutchman criticised the quality of lecturers − some of whom saw their task as exclusively one of delivering classroom lectures and not to research − as well as the state of the library, the materials with which students have to work, and the quality of the instruction that they receive.
In his day, Vice-Chancellor James Rose lamented the limited knowledge of many inexperienced lecturers, their responsibility for teaching extra-large classes and advanced-year courses and their reluctance to engage in independent research. He bemoaned the university’s financial predicament which made it impossible to attract and retain better qualified staff, provide more lecture-room space, retool laboratories and restock the library.
The Government Information Agency last April happily boasted that the administration − which for the last seventeen years evinced more interest in controlling the Council than in correcting the conditions on campus − “has been implementing measures to address deficiencies at the University of Guyana to complement the injection of increased funding into the institution.” GINA trumpeted the appointment of Professor Carrington as interim Vice-Chancellor for one year as “the latest intervention taken by Government in its quest to enhance the credibility and academic standards of the University of Guyana.”
Professor Carrington, no doubt, is a credible choice. He had been chair of the UG-UWI Working Group on collaboration between the two universities so there should be little to shock him either in the Council or on the campus at Turkeyen. He realises that UG faces an uphill task; he recognises that replenishing the reservoir of educated citizens is an ongoing problem, given the rate at which graduates migrate. But he acknowledges that graduates will stay at home only when living conditions improve and they can find lucrative employment.
Carrington, in the flush of newness, plunged into a highly-publicised meeting with the Guyana Manufacturers and Services Association promising the businessmen: “The resultant interaction between university and work enterprise can propel the institution into lines of research that feed back into its teaching and enrich the experience of students and faculty even beyond those who are directly concerned with the research project.” He hailed the indication of the businessmen’s willingness to sponsor research and finance development work as the most important ways to develop the institution to serve its needs. So far, so good.
It seems trite, but true, to say that the university is at a fork in the road: one way leads to adversity and the other to prosperity. When he spoke at the graduation convocation at Tain campus two years ago, Minister of Education Shaik Baksh said dreamily that “We are aiming that in a few years time one person in each household must be a graduate of the university.” He and the Minister of Finance know for sure that unless there is a massive injection of funds and a manifest demonstration of political will, that dream will turn into a nightmare.
There is no silver lining to the clouds that overshadow the campuses at Turkeyen and Tain. Sixteen years after it was written, the Stabroek News editorial of March 1993 still seems relevant: “Salaries are deplorable, physical conditions of buildings, library and laboratory leave much to be desired and demoralisation is widespread. Money must be raised to deal with all these problems and the University has cobbled together a plan, part of which includes local fund-raising.”
As the Administration consolidates its control, UG continues to languish as a third-rate tertiary institution of diminishing international repute. In sum, without serious fresh funding and new thinking, Professor Carrington will get nowhere and he has been given just one year to reach there.
