Graduates of the Mona Campus of the UWI.Elombe Mottley, Contributor
The late Prime Minister of Barbados, Errol Walton Barrow, used to refer to the public service of Barbados as an army of occupation. Without apology, I would like to transfer this description to the majority of the staff of the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. Perhaps I should apply it to all three campuses, but I feel I must restrain myself.
Dr. Stephen Vasciannie, in his Public Affairs article in The Sunday Gleaner of May 26, 2002, wrote a beguiling piece of nonsense purporting to interpret Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies' concerns about the allocation of resources to tertiary education (UWI). This article was titled "The cost of 'free education' versus scarce resources." It does not take a genius to understand the reality of what Dr. Davies is saying.
The real question is not what Dr. Davies and students must do but what the UWI with all its brain power is going to do to offer students the protection within the five points of "principle" that Dr. Vasciannie raised.
For the last decade, governments of the region have been concerned with the escalating costs of education at the UWI. Cost recovery became a buzz word. In some cases, campuses have made meagre attempts to generate income from a variety of projects.
Most of these attempts have been half-hearted at best and/or sabotaged by inaction after a while. Yes, new initiatives have been made to tap the resources of alumni in New York or cap-in-hand begging from Caribbean corporations whose history of giving is guided by an extremely myopic self-interest.
In the meantime, foreign universities (from the USA, Canada and the UK) and foreign investors have come into the region selling high-cost education to our citizens or using our location to sell high-cost education to other foreigners.
Look at the various MBA programmes offered by Nova University, Florida International University, New Orleans University, Barry University, etc. from the USA.
In the Eastern Caribbean, English entrepreneurs offer MBA and PhD programmes directly to corporations whose staff use their on the job situation as part of their study. None of these programmes come cheap and they are all paid for by the participants.
Look at St. Georges University in Grenada with medical, (graduating 400 doctors a year) nursing and veterinary schools; Ross Medical School in Dominica; American University of the Caribbean in St. Martin; Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine: Berne University International Graduate School, International University of Health Sciences, and Grace University in St. Kitts; Saba University in Saba; Spartan Health Sciences University in St. Lucia; and University of Health Sciences in Antigua.
These schools charge from US$30,000 to US$45,000 per year. Some perhaps even more and there is no shortage of applicants.
From the beginning, UWI and its graduates have been skinning up their noses at these universities, ignoring them, scorning them and bad-talking them as if that would make them go away. After 25 years they are still here and expanding steadily. Anyone who wishes to check, go to their web sites and check and then compare them with the UWI.
UWI Mona continues to be a myopic sanctum of inertness, inbreeding and misplaced self-preservation. Too harsh? Then explain to me why the UWI after 50 years only graduate 100 doctors a year? This is not meant to suggest that UWI medical school is below par. It is not. It is the opposite, so why hasn't this fact been promulgated into something more. I have heard English and Scottish interns extolling the virtues of doing their internship at KPH because of the wide variety of medical conditions that they are exposed to, conditions that they will never see in the UK.
So why is it that other people can come into the region from all over the world and set up facilities to educate people in medicine, nursing, veterinary medicine, science, business, finance, tourism, cricket, etc. and the UWI has been unable to generate institutions that are self-sufficient and capable of generating income to help offset the high cost of operation for Jamaican and Caribbean students? Why are there so few foreign (non-West Indian) students at UWI? If there were more would it mean that staff would have to do more work and cease being an army of occupation?
The Caribbean has four Nobel Prize laureates: Sir Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott from St. Lucia; V.S. Naipaul from Trinidad and Tobago and Perce St. John from Guadeloupe.
Is it not possible for the UWI to create a special International Institute with the following schools:
Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Developing Economics
Derek Walcott Institute of Caribbean Literature in English
V.S. Naipaul Institute of Indian-Caribbean Literature
Perce St. John Institute of Caribbean Literature in French
Butch Stewart Institute of Tourism
Bob Marley Conservatory of Caribbean Music
Kamau Brathwaite Institute of African-Caribbean Litera-ture
Peter Minshall Institute of Caribbean Design
Gary Sobers Institute of Sports.
These institutes are not necessary for Caribbean students but for international students who would want to pursue whatever programme is offered.
The programmes can also take place in any part of the world, just as the foreign universities come to us and sell us their programmes, we can go wherever and sell our programmes. And the staff does not have to be UWI staff but the best available specialists from around the world in any language.
The principle, Dr. Vasciannie, is a cost plus operation to bring in income to the UWI and cut the cost to the Jamaican student.
But that is not all. The Inter-American Development Bank up to about five years ago had in the Caribbean about US$4 billion of contracts for development of the region.
Less than two per cent of this went to the Caribbean consultants and businesses. Yet the brains and the best are at UWI and nutten don't happen. Why is it that these brains are unavailable to the business sector in the Caribbean to assist us in getting a bigger share of these development projects?
On the other hand, why is it that we are unable to go out into the world and get some of the projects that are out there in other countries? Why? Too much ganja?
I nearly forget about the super-computer at UWI. I heard it was for the region. Is that correct? How much income did it or does it generate? How many campuses or non-Mona researchers have access to it? Does it have anything on it besides e-mail addresses?
How many Russians came to Mona to use it? Anyone else? Was it ever marketed to other universities in and out of the region? And what about Informatics? Does it still function? Has it ever offered its services to regional governments or the private sector to assist in the mapping of the region?
Finally, Radio Mona. I will ignore television for now. The mission of the UWI is education and research. Education does not stop at the gates of Mona. So UWI applies for and gets a commercial radio licence. It now has islandwide coverage from Negril to Port Antonio with transmitters provided with the compliments of the Minister of Finance.
Obviously with a commercial licence, Radio Mona will be seeking to do what the other dozen or so commercial radio stations are doing. At present, it has been playing 14 hours of information-lacking, education-missing Euro-classical music per day. I am yet to discover what the target audience is. I can raise questions about mis-information in the jazz, World and Caribbean music programming, but I will not.
The emphasis on National Public Radio and Alternative radio of the USA and the smattering of JIS, UWI Public Relations Department promotion, and student programmes belies the fact that there are Caribbean perspectives that are not even mentioned or even hinted at. What in Shango's name is going on?
Are the faculties of law, history, government, politics, literature, sociology, public health, medicine, geography, tourism, marine biology, engineering, agriculture et al without shame?
How can members of staff sit and hear the voice of their university demonstrating shamelessly that the army of occupation has no opinion about world affairs or the main issues confronting the Caribbean today?
My question however is this. Should this technology not be used to offer to the public an extension of the UWI's mission on education? But I don't even want to stop there. Should it not be a network (with stations in Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, and all of the OECS islands) offering educational programmes to the region? And can these programmes not be linked with new ways of reaching students (along with the Internet and television) in rural areas or persons who are working full-time but who want to pursue a tertiary education? But not everyone who listens will want to pursue a course of study.
RADIO MONA
Many will be looking for intelligent answers to the many conundrums they now face, especially those created by the ubiquitous opinion-based/biased call-in programmes across the region. Radio Mona must be more than a fancy jukebox to bed-down and bay-sit a high-brow audience who can afford to buy its own pacifiers.
For example, have you ever heard about the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, better known as CARDI?
CARDI's staff travels across the Caribbean with their own IDs. No passports. CARDI has researched almost every single problem in agriculture in the Caribbean and published pamphlets on how to deal with most of these problems.
These pamphlets sit in boxes all around the Caribbean gathering dust because nobody not CARDI, not the UWI, and certainly not the Ministries of Agriculture - distributes them or disseminates the information to the farmers who need the information. Call them and ask them about yam viruses. That is what UWI Radio should be doing.
The UWI possesses an audio archive that is second to none. It has all types of manpower in a wide variety of fields that must be able to share their knowledge with the public.
Why is the university not able to have 100,000 part-time students using radios and the Internet to study towards a degree? And I don't mean for free. There must be a way in which you can generate income from merchandising education in ways that makes education accessible at a reasonable cost. So why does Radio Mona need a commercial licence and why was it granted one?
So, Dr. Vasciannie, it is not for Dr. Davies to let you know exactly how he thinks university fees should be divided up, so that some degree of responsibility rests on his shoulders as well.
It is up to you and your colleagues to come up with solutions to increase revenues to the UWI, educate more students at a lower cost, cut the cost of operating the university and embrace a public out there that is thirsty for knowledge and solutions.
