T he Caribbean economy, while slowly emerging from the 2007/2008 global financial epidemic, has been crippled by the COVID-19 public health pandemic that heaped further havoc upon all economic and social life. Within this destructive, dreadful, existentially threatening context, our task has been to keep The University of the West Indies (UWI) abreast and ahead and rising to the expectations of stakeholders. I am pleased to report, that because of the persistence of commitment from our caring and courageous university community and its allies we have achieved the objective of delivering our services as mandated. We succeeded in the face of the COVID scourge, and the illness and death visited upon our campus and general communities, to achieve the widely considered impossible objective. We kept our classrooms available to our students; converted hundreds of their academic programmes to online, remote formats, took them through examination processes and on to graduation. We are proud of this excellent achievement. We honoured our pledges to our students and their families. This is our core business and we succeeded in banishing all doubt from our doors. During the year, the university skillfully managed the double agenda of building out its academic reputation as a first-class, globally-respected enterprise while deepening strategic plans to accelerate non-government revenue-generation. It was the year in which we pivoted in the Strategic Plan from the phase one “ Reputation Revolution ” to phase two “ Revenue Acceleration ”. We have become known as an enterprise of integrity that delivers upon its promised objectives. We are also known as an activist university that stands up for our stakeholders in meeting their most dire challenges.
On the reputation side, we are happy to report that in 2020, the Times Higher Education presented us with a Triple 1 st Ranking: first in the Caribbean; top 1% in Latin America and the Caribbean; top 1% in the Golden Age category of universities in our 50-80 years cohort. This is a magnificent performance achieved within the context of global competitiveness that reaffirmed the enlightenment of our leadership and the correctness of our collective strategy. Meanwhile, we met head on the challenges associated with the impact of regional economic decline upon our revenues as a publicly funded university. There is no escaping the significant negative consequences of the regional economic catastrophe upon the operations of the enterprise. The challenge has been to seek to arrest and stabilize the decline in government contributions; settle as far as possible the enormous public debt accumulation on our balance sheet; and suppress the annual impairment of millions of dollars in respect of this debt that weakens our financials. On the other hand we went about the serious business of radically enhancing revenue generation as part of an entrepreneurial exercise intended to offset balance sheet leakage and promote the financial health of the enterprise. We set out on this path in a scientific, strategic fashion. University leadership in our developing nations’ context is not an ad hoc affair. It is at once an art and a science. In short time we saw positive results from the collective efforts of some campuses. At the core of this strategy was the importance of facilitating the transition from the 30-year-old deficit financing model to the balanced budget approach. The
It was the year in which we pivoted in the Strategic Plan from the phase one “Reputation Revolution” to phase two “Revenue Acceleration” .
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