UG’s archaic governance structure must be replaced

Jan 28, 2012 News

– low salaries also a major issue, says outgoing Vice Chancellor

The problem of underpaid staff is a major issue facing the University of Guyana, but its archaic

Professor Lawrence Carrington

governance structure must also be replaced, Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Professor Lawrence Carrington said yesterday.
“The archaic governance and management and administrative structures of the university must no longer be allowed to provide an excuse or a shelter for inefficiency and incompetence,” Carrington declared at a staff meeting.
His comments came as students and workers continued a protest to reinstate political science lecturer Freddie Kissoon and to call for other vexing issues to be addressed.
Carrington is ending a three-year stint at the University which is characterized by poor physical infrastructure, low salaries, an outdated operational structure and a curriculum that is in need of revamping.
Kissoon, who had his contract terminated Wednesday, stood up to loud cheers from the University staff, and asked Carrington to point out where else he could find that a University is tied to the political leaders of the day.
Carrington avoided Kissoon’s question directly, but later, in contrasting what happens at the University of the West Indies, Carrington said that political appointees are not placed on the University’s governing Council. This was greeted by loud applause from the workers, who cheered even further when he argued against political interference in the running of the university.
“Our statutes, rules, regulations, procedures and policies belong to an era long past and cannot be left to clutter the 21st century,” Carrington declared in a prepared statement he read to workers.
He said that the University needs to be brought in line with what obtains at other universities around the world.
To this end, he noted that the University has obtained funding from the Caribbean Development Bank to engage a consulting firm to review the University’s regulatory framework.
He said the review of the regulatory framework of the University is, not a matter exclusively for the administration of the institution, but for all University workers.
“All of the grouses and mutterings about ‘the system’, all of the experiences that have led you to perceive some of your colleagues as

UG staff members at the meeting

‘ogres’ or even more uncomplimentary labels, all of the practices that wear down your morale can be exposed in the review process,” Carrington told workers.
He said the outcome of the project must not be another shelf report but has to be an active engagement in change of the many oppressive and inhibiting features of the University that have prevented it for many decades from fulfilling the potential it was expected to mobilise.
Meanwhile, Carrington delved into concerns regarding the University’s staffing policy, with “the elephant in the room” being the matter of staff salaries.
He said the quality of staff and how they are provided for them to be effective and efficient are matters that need to be addressed.
He said that involves interlocking factors such as the competitiveness of the university’s salaries and benefits, the terms and conditions of service, the confidence that staff can have in the fairness of appraisal, the systems of incentives, rewards and recognition.”
“We will not justify the label of university if all we can show in a teaching and research staff of 359 academics are nine professors and 17 senior lecturers,” Carrington declared.
He said that only two departments are headed by professors, both temporary and only four by senior lecturers, one temporary.
“If all we can offer a professor at the top of our scales is the equivalent of US$1,725, we will not be able to compete with a Caribbean competitor offering the equivalent of US$8,429 at a comparable level.”
As a result, he said the planning has to shift the matter of emoluments to the top of the agenda.
Most recently, he said that the administration has drafted proposals for improving the University’s policy on staffing and staff recruitment and it has already been discussed at the level of the University Council.
Carrington said that for several years, the University has functioned with an academic staffing policy that is based on the calculation of full-time equivalent staffing.
He said the policy is accompanied by a recruitment practice in which the University advertises for recruits in the subject areas in which it anticipates need for teachers but the level of appointment is not specified.
An unintended consequence of the University recruitment policy and practice has been that the recruitment is biased towards lower level appointments in the academic hierarchy.
“That bias reduces the mentoring capacity of the faculty and mentoring opportunities for faculty members.
That in turn compromises the development of excellence and special competences because it tends to favour general proficiency at the expense of specialisation.”
Carrington has recommended instead, that the University should determine an establishment of full-time core staff for each of its units, departments, faculties and schools and then the University would then advertise vacancies against that establishment and seek to fill them at the level advertised.
The approach should have the effect of increasing the University’s capacity for postgraduate offerings, increase the capability for faculties to develop specialisations that are pertinent to the national agenda, enhance the probability of experienced senior leadership within departments, and avoid the negative aspects of recruitment based on the existing policy.
“The University’s Council is very well disposed towards the idea and wants to have fuller propositions including details on the structure of the core staffing for our departments,” Carrington stated, but said the onus should now be on the staff to follow up this initiative.
“We must be aware though that a policy of that nature cannot work in isolation from more attractive terms and conditions of work and sensibly competitive emoluments and rewards,” he, however, warned.