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Against this backdrop President Donald Ramotar, on assumption to office, announced that among his priorities is the restoration of UG in accordance with acceptable academic world standards.
UG, a brainchild of the late revered President Dr Cheddi Jagan, started in 1963 and enjoyed a very high level of academia, with its first Vice-Chancellor being the world famed mathematician Dr Lancelot Hogben and continued with a long list of illustrious and distinguished academicians including Professor Bill Carr, Kathleen and Harold Drayton, Clarence Drayton, Dr Havildar Singh, Dr Mohamed Insanally, Dr Rupert Roopnarine, Dr Joshua Ramsammy and a host of others.
And it would have been also graced with the presence of that brilliant son of the soil, Dr Walter Rodney, but because of political interference by the then PNC government he was prevented from being employed at UG – a real academic tragedy. A clear case of “A prophet is without honour in his own land.”
It was in this period, under the doctrine of paramountcy of the party and compulsory national service for entry into UG when the decline started from which it has never really recovered. And so today we have our highest academic institution in a tattered state.
However, newly appointed Vice-Chancellor of UG, Professor Jacob Opadeyi, a couple of days ago, announced some interesting plans to enhance the quality of academic programming at the institution.
Among the plans he announced include a review of the curriculum once every five years and the appointment of external examiners and reviewers for academic programmes.
A functioning quality assurance unit will also be established before the end of this year, he said, while expressing hopes to have all the academic programmes at UG internationally accredited.
Opadeyi further said his hope is to upgrade the students’ assessment of lecturers system and establish a staff/student liaison committee in each department of the university.
He said there will be a faculty advisory board, as well, which will meet once per year and a health and safety committee for each faculty that would receive training in health and safety.
Opadeyi also emphasised the importance of building a strong relationship with the private sector, as the university cannot rely solely on the government.
Such a relationship, he explained, will include support to conduct short courses and training workshops, commercialisation of research and grant funding for primary research.
These are pertinent and necessary initiatives, but it is not that all or most of them have not been adumbrated in the past. Unfortunately, they have never fructified at an optimum level and therefore the situation at UG never really improved in a significant way.
So the task ahead for the new Vice-Chancellor is to ensure that these commendable initiatives fructify and become a reality and this could only happen through an unflinching commitment on the part of UG’s administration to the process of improving standards at the institution and greater collaboration with the wider society, particularly the private sector.
However, Professor Obadeyi has signaled his intention of moving towards increased tuition fees which, according to him, is the only way of paying higher salaries. According to him the current fees are “ridiculously low.”
The good Professor should be cautioned that in the context of Guyana this is a very delicate and worrisome issue and therefore he should tread carefully on it.
His rationale for increasing tuition fees is indeed a sound one but he must understand that most Guyanese families are struggling to meet the current “ridiculously low” fees, and had it not been for the loan system instituted by the government, the intake of students may not have been even half of what it is today.
One would hope that the intention of the Vice-Chancellor is not to make UG exclusively one for the elite for it would run counter to the intention of its founder and would deprive a large section of the Guyanese population from receiving a higher education.
If fees have to be increased then it would have to be done in such a manner that it would not prevent the poorer sections of the population from entering the institution, even though they may have the requisite qualification and ambition and desire to do so.
At the same time, the burden of financing the institution should not be left only on the parents/guardians of the students. Instead, the administration of the university should devise innovative and creative income-generation means to help offset its financial obligations.
