Berbice Campus… New Director promises revolutionary changes

Nov 18, 2008 News

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…proposes to reverse registration trends

 

The new Director of the University of Guyana’s Berbice Campus, Professor Daizal Samad, is promising revolutionary changes.
He not only wants to make the programmes offered on campus more relevant to the needs of the national economy and that of the country, he also wants Berbicians to benefit from the university. And among his plans is a plan to teach elderly Berbicians how to read and write.
The University of Guyana Council appointed Professor Samad as the new Director of the Berbice Campus on November 1. He was born in Berbice, and returned to the country after holding stints in Africa and the Middle East.
After successfully reading for a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Guyana, Samad received a full scholarship to the University of New Brunswick, Canada, where he successfully read for his Masters in English, and later his Ph.D. in English, also from the University of New Brunswick.
He went on to work as Associate Professor of English and Literature at St. Thomas University in Canada, and later took up an appointment as Associate Professor at the National University of Malaysia, where he taught for five years.
A new opportunity then took him to the Al Akhawayan University in Morocco, where he served as Professor of English Language and Literature Studies. Later, he worked as Senior Advisor and Educational Expert at the Ministry of Higher Education, Sultanate of Oman.
Professor Samad has five books and 22 published papers to his credit.
After his stint in the Middle East, Professor Samad said, he decided to heed the urgings of his relatives back home to do something for Guyana. So, after taking a two-year break from work, he decided to start looking up opportunities in Guyana. One of the persons he contacted was the Minister within the Ministry of Education, Dr Desrey Fox, with whom he had worked at the University of Guyana’s Amerindian Affairs Unit more than 30 years ago.
After discussions with other Government officials, Professor Samad decided to move to Guyana and join the University of Guyana. Since there was construction work ongoing onsite at the Turkeyen Campus, and with no teaching being done, he decided to use his time to design a strategic planning engine for the university.
He also compiled a student advisory handbook, something which was non-existent.
“Student advising has become one of the most important aspects of universities around the world,” he said, when he sat down for an interview with Kaieteur News last week.
Given the vacancy that existed at the Berbice Campus for a director, he was invited to take up the appointment, and he gladly accepted.

Revolutionary changes
Professor Samad wants to make the Berbice Campus completely functional, and to address the many challenges it faces.
Among his first priorities is to address what he deemed the “shocking decrease” in admissions.
“You should always see an increase in student enrollment, not a decrease,” he declared. With enrollment at the campus at just over 400, Professor Samad said, the situation is “nothing short of a disaster.”
He will, this month, set about meeting with head-teachers of schools in Regions Five and Six. He also wants to meet with fourth and fifth form students and provide them with information on the programmes the university offers.
One of the solutions he sees in making students more comfortable is for the campus to have an “Internet presence.” What he wants is for student assignments, lesson notes and other helpful information to be readily available online.
Also, Samad wants the university to offer programmes that the community demands, rather than the university determining what programmes the students should take up. What he means is that the university should be geared towards addressing the employment needs of Berbice and the country as a whole.
Towards this end, he wants to see many more students taking up Agriculture.
Samad said that, from initial discussions he has had with parents, they seem to balk at the idea of their children studying Agriculture, since there is a misguided notion that Agriculture means work in the fields.
His task is to change that perception and get more students to accept Agriculture as a scholarly area of study, given the mainstay role agriculture plays in the national economy and the drive now to expand agriculture to meet the food demands of the local and export markets, namely the Caribbean.
Samad has complaints, too, about the teaching staff. The campus has 30 lecturers on a full time basis. With some lecturers having to travel from outside of the country, he said, this proves inefficient, since many are tired before they get to the
classroom. Also, he said, the teaching staff is under-qualified, and he plans to fill the gaps by conducting workshop sessions with them and encourage them to do research in education teaching.
To address the need for more qualified lecturers, Samad is looking to introduce a consistent programme of inviting visiting lecturers from universities in the Diaspora to spend their sabbatical years on campus.
He also wants to hold workshops with fourth and fifth form students to better enable them to deliver their curriculum.
Samad is also looking at improving student life, by sprucing up the physical image of the campus and by enlisting the help of nearby community centres for recreational and sports activities.
“There is no need to use money to build facilities on campus when you have so many facilities close by,” he said.
In addition, Samad insists that with all the goodwill from the private sector, there can be a robust internship pogramme implemented to provide students with opportunities for work.
The new Director of the Berbice Campus also wants the communities surrounding the campus to benefit from its existence.
“There are some bright people cutting cane,” he declared, making the point for classes for adults at the campus.
His objective also is to bring in for literacy classes adults who cannot read and write, even is they might shy away from the thought of, “…dah university, me can’t guh deh!”
Who will teach them? Samad sees a role in this for the students of the university. He said this will accrue to their own benefit, since they will have a solid record of community service.
With these plans, Samad hopes to renew enthusiasm in Berbice about the university campus there, the same enthusiasm that greeted its establishment eight years ago.

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