Dear Editor,
The recent public address by the new Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Professor Jacob Opadeyi, has brought into focus the business of tertiary education.
Professor Opadeyi, in his inaugural address, has outlined restructuring plans for the university, which include a potential increase in tuition fees. The rationale is that increased remuneration is expected to attract qualified academic professionals who in turn will be able to provide Guyanese with qualifications of international merit. Essentially, Professor Opadeyi has emphasized the nexus between finance capital and education.
There can be little resentment with these positions when one considers that tertiary education, even in the most developed countries, carries a price tag. Sometimes an unbearably onerous one. Published professors, administrative support, research databases, teaching resources and learning infrastructure are only some of the recurring costs which have to be defrayed. Professor Opadeyi is right. Capital injection- whether state or private- is necessary to improve the University of Guyana.
Be that as it may, Professor Opadeyi’s call signals an ideological shift that has been increasingly enshrouding Guyana. Pervasive corporatization and commodification. Students are now perceived as consumers who shall be purchasing a commodity called tertiary education. Like the consumer strolling the aisles of a trendy store, they will utilize their purchasing power to appropriate the most desirable item. Of course purchasing education in Guyana is nothing new, except that the providers and procurers of such a good will prefer to see the transaction as service-acquisition instead of plain business conducted in the marketplace.
Professor Toby Miller has analyzed this commodification of higher education in the United States and his conclusions are worrying. He cites instances where universities in the US become “competitors for traffic in merchantable instruction”. Though this trend is already evident among the proliferation of private secondary schools around Guyana, the University of Guyana, will not be equally besieged, since it will have the academic monopoly. The concern though is that as with private secondary schools, commodifying education in the university does not guarantee commensurable results. Here I think less of improved pedagogy and more about the country’s ability to retain its qualified citizenry. As inevitably as globalization and neoliberalism impose a new social and economic structure in our society, we still have to be intellectually and politically equipped to address domestic “skill deficits” such as on Marriott projects.
Miller also charted the progressive decrease of public funding for higher education in the US, which has necessitated an increase in tuition fees every single year since the 1980s. Perhaps the University of Guyana is confronting a situation where the current government has chosen to become fiscally conservative with higher education. In a country where hotel projects have become top priority, perhaps “both governments and university administrators construct corporate life as their desired other”. It is
difficult to imagine Guyanese responding favourably if governmental interest in the University of Guyana becomes nothing more than corporate oversight.
If the University of Guyana is framed as yet another governmental business venture, then as Professor Miller affirms, “paymasters and administrators [will] accrete authority over academics”. This means that whether the funding is public or private, university administrators will be dancing to the tune of the investors. More importantly, one can hardly conceive of critical intelligence and intellectual autonomy blooming in that atmosphere. Higher education is most likely, therefore, to become conformist and sterile. Thus, the university student, as consumer and investor, will enter the renovated lecture halls, bedecked with technological apparatuses and highly paid, qualified professors. She will enter on the assumption that her education will be liberal and autonomous, and may actually receive such training. However, she will leave to discover that her political and social environment is inimical to such tutelage and as a result she will become frustrated. Maybe this is the point Professor Opadeyi anticipates when he references eligibility for a visa. That leaves me wondering if educational uplift at the University of Guyana will be less about national development and more about qualifying citizens for vocations overseas. Of course remittances have long benefited economic growth in this country, but with shrinking federal budgets and fiscal austerity measures, it is hardly conceivable that educating- should that be the case- for such a purpose will be shrewd.
No quality education-whatever that concept means- will realize its value unless there are corresponding sociopolitical transformations in the country. Increasing fees in higher education have known advantages, least of which is modernized training, but such skills require amenable milieus. There has to be critical intellectual spaces which foster debates of government policies and failings without risks to physical and economic well-being. There has to be political amplitude for peaceful protest without the spectre of economic exclusion and character assassination. There simply has to be a welcome appreciation of all peaceful expressions of civil liberties and dissent without the blight of acrimony we constantly witness. When these conditions are realized, we can effectively nourish intellectual potential for social and economic development.
Until that time all expectations of commodifying education with the expressed purpose of promoting national development will be an inoperative dream.
Yours faithfully,
R. Khan
