Self preservation forces UG graduates to look for and stay in greener pastures

Feb 08, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Mr. Frank Fyffe seems troubled UG graduates are not contributing to the welfare of Guyana as he would like them to do, and that they are basically selfish (“How can this Desirable Change be Made” Kaieteur News, January 26).

He focused on last year’s valedictorian and her “batch mates”. I am one of her “batch mates” who has tried to understand and evaluate Mr. Fyffe’s arguments hoping to learn where we went wrong and maybe how we can improve our contributions to the welfare of Guyana.

Unfortunately, I was not successful in understanding some of his arguments. For example, he refers to the “thoughts expressed by profound Barbadian writer George Lamming on the question of education and the intellectual” but does not tell us what these thoughts are.

To find out what these “thoughts” are I surfed the internet but was not successful. I then assumed Mr. Fyffe may want us to use Mr. Lamming as a role model to guide us on how we can make our contributions to the welfare of Guyana.

I will like to share with readers a very short biography of Mr. Lamming, to make a point later. He was born in 1927 in Barbados, worked in Trinidad and Tobago between 1946 and 1950, and then migrated to the UK in 1950. “He made his home in London for 25 years” returning to Barbados to teach at the University of the West Indies.

He has also been a professor at the University of Texas and “teaches at Brown University”. Is this the role model Mr. Fyffe is recommending for us to follow? I am certain UG graduates will not object to using Mr. Lamming as a role model. The problem I have is Mr. Fyffe’s criticism of the valedictorian prediction that graduates might “emigrate to green pastures to make a decent living” because, as he puts it, “dear sister they were/are preoccupied with self, first, second, and third”. I do not see any major differences between what the valedictorian said and what Mr. Lamming did. A slight difference might be the valedictorian “suggested” UG graduates “may” leave Guyana for greener pastures, while Mr. Lamming actually left Barbados returning after about 30 years to a job at UWI and other universities.

Also, Mr. Fyffe raised the question “shouldn’t the coveted intellect of our men/women …be expanded towards the services, protection and upliftment of the people” and answers “most certainly”. On the other hand our experiences at UG make us extremely cautious. For example, several Guyanese PhD’s who returned to UG to provide “services … and upliftment of the people” in Guyana and UG were forced out of UG.

Two have been hired since by the University of the West Indies which has provided them an income so they can provide food and shelter for their families in Guyana and which is near enough to allow these lecturers to visit Guyana to see them on a monthly basis. A third has been waiting six months now for the UG Council to make a decision on his appeal. Yet some departments do not have any lecturers with a PhD, for example the Department of Business Management and a few has one like the Department of Sociology.

In addition, loyalty has no place at UG. Several of these lecturers demonstrated their loyalty to UG during times of crisis as for example cleaning up UG after the major flood, continuing to teach at UG during the asbestos scare, and helping to teach at the Tain campus when there was a shortage of lecturers, travelling there every week.

It is ironic that some of these lecturers were pushed out by UG administrators who had and have no loyalty to UG; in the past they had no desire to be associated with UG, one way or another, and contributed nothing to UG, and will be gone before the next two years to their greener pastures.

I am not complaining; just stating the facts. One of the reasons for the high turn over rate of lecturers at UG is that lecturers’ are not going to put their necks in the hands of an institution which is cavalier with their lives. Lectures have children and babies to feed and when given the opportunity will “run like hell”.

We graduates have witnessed these horrific decisions on the part of the UG administration and if we can help it will “most certainly” not willing stick our head in a noose.

The point here is that the “coveted intellect [former students have] tried to provide the services and upliftment of the people” but they have been prevented from doing so. “Self preservation” will force us to look for and stay in greener pastures, hoping one day, when the time is ripe, to return and provide those “services, protection, and upliftment of the people”. Having our heads chopped off now, to appease critics, makes no sense to us.

In the end blaming us for things outside our control only reinforces our opinion that Mr. Fyffe and others do not understand our problems and dreams so we will continue to make decisions which are in our interests; we call this “self preservation”. They, of course, are free to call it what they want.

Stanley Wong

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