Vice-Chancellor’s Report
level to fix the primary might seem the right choice, but without an expansive tertiary the industry inputs we need will be unavailable. Politically, it is a bitter conundrum pill. The UWI has done a great deal to address some of these matters beyond the expected output associated with generating social capital through teaching and research, and opening though insufficiently, the door to higher learning to the historically marginalised and still socially excluded. Another aspect of this challenge is whether each UWI campus should be at the core of a national tertiary system of multiple institutions that is largely borderless, delivering a good quality experience for students at lower cost and greater efficiency. The answer is that we are laying the foundations for this approach. We have created a new category called Colleges of The UWI (CUWI). These independently managed colleges will be integrated for programme delivery purposes to meet the objectives of lower costs and better quality. This approach is in its formative phase and there is considerable potential. There are other areas where The UWI can do much more if adequately funded. It is important to note that the funds currently made available by the Caribbean governments would be sufficient if the University had as its primary concern its own preservation. That is, if the purpose of pursuing excellence was for self- aggrandisement then with a 30% less enrolment it could do well on existing budgets. We should not minimise however the result that our subregion has within it the best ranked university in the Caribbean, which is rated in the top 4% of the world’s best 28,000 universities.
In newly post-colonial countries like ours in the Caribbean, which did not receive at independence any reparations development packages from imperial Britain, building out a quality higher education sector is a complicated cost- benefit proposition. There are two aspects to this challenge. First, in modern market economies, there is a tendency for the unit costs in the university sector to rise at a faster rate than in other sectors of the economy. This has to do with the fixed maintenance of libraries, laboratories, and staffing structures. Second, the tendency in democracies for policy to be distorted along the short-term trajectory, while building social capital for economic growth is a middle to long-term strategy. In addition, there is the structural problem of social exclusion and majority market marginalisation that has proven to be very resilient. Truth is, our societies rooted in colonial oppression, have remained among the most unequal globally, with nearly 30% of citizens ‘locked’ away in ghetto conditions. In the 1930s when the colonial state was rejected incipient national liberation movements called for slum clearance as the top priority, even ahead of adult suffrage. We got no support from imperial Britain, who created the colonial mess, and the problem has overwhelmed our national efforts. The result has been that the national social growth which the university sector wants to take responsibility for has not kept up with national expectation. Too many citizens are placed in a situation where they do not believe that national institutions serve their normal living purposes resulting in an opposition approach. But social growth is not a consequence of economic growth but a prerequisite. Herein lies the dilemma. Education cuts don’t heal. In our education system, over generations, ministers have preached about the plumbing being broken in the basement contributing to challenges higher up in the system. Taking from the tertiary
The alignment revolution that brought business and campus together for the national purpose also served to drive the enrolment upsurge
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