UG needs a management specialist

Aug 03, 2016 Peeping Tom

The University of Guyana has great plans for the future, on paper. Translating those plans into results requires good management and good money.
The Government of Guyana cannot raise the resources necessary to fully fund the university. The government has been compensating for this by offering to students a loan facility. The monies for loans are channeled back to the university to finance its operations.
The student loan facility is reportedly owed billions by students who have graduated from the institution but who have not repaid the loans. The government is contemplating stern action as means of ensuring that those who owe pay up.
The government must be commended for addressing this issue. The PPPC had no interest in ensuring that students paid up their fees. As far as they were concerned, cost recovery at the University of Guyana was a product of the negotiations under the Economic Recovery Programme. The international institutions wanted a commitment from Hoyte that cost recovery would have been implemented. They got that commitment and the PPPC was burdened with the measure.
The Student Loan Facility ensured that students got access without having to find the money and the IMF and World Bank got what they wanted.
The PPPC never pursued, with any vigour, the recovery of the monies loaned, because they were not interested in collecting it. They saw the student loan facility as a means of circumventing the demands of the IMF and World Bank, while saying that they have implemented cost recovery.
The PPPC’s working class orientation has always led to the belief that education should be free, and it merely went along with the cost recovery mechanism to satisfy the IMF and World Bank. The PPPC government effectively left this as a UG problem. They even bailed out the facility by approving close to half of a billion dollars in 2014 to ensure students had access to loans
The only time that the PPPC government took direct action to collect monies owed to it was in the case of a former Cricket Board official who was prevented from leaving the country unless he paid off his indebtedness in full. This was despite the fact that the official had, contractually, seven years to pay it off. The PPPC had a problem with the Cricket Board official and demanded that he pay all at once before being given permission to leave.
The poor guy wanted to save his job overseas and borrowed the money to pay. But if he did not have to leave hurriedly he may have filed a constitutional motion against the government, and then it would have been decided whether the PPPC was trying to bully him and restrict his freedom of movement.
The present government inherited the student loan mess. The problem it faces is that any recovered funds cannot be channeled to the administration of the university. The recoveries have to be placed back into the revolving student loan facility to help other students, and to ensure that government does not have to fork out another half of a million dollars to finance student loans.
Where then will UG get the funds that it desperately needs to turn around the institution? Unless the university can fix its financing problem, it makes no sense announcing all those fancy plans that it says it will be doing, such as establishing a school of business.
The first business of the present administration of the University is to put the financing of the University in order. All the previous Vice Chancellors, dating back to Dennis Irvine, were faced with this challenge. It overcame all of them.
The University of Guyana – indeed almost all universities worldwide – has a tradition of giving the Vice Chancellor to an academic. But it is time they tried giving it to a management specialist. This is not a criticism against anyone. It is not intended to say that academics cannot make good administrators. But all the previous Vice Chancellors who were academics were not able to solve the financial woes of the university.
When there is a crisis, and that crisis is financial, you have to hedge your bets on a financial or management expert. This is what the University of Guyana needs. It is time it breaks with tradition.
If the present Vice Chancellor can come up with a plan to make UG financially sustainable, it would be a wonderful thing. It is not going to easy, but the present Vice Chancellor should be supported in making an attempt to achieve this goal.

1 thoughts on “UG needs a management specialist”

19CAGriffith48 August 3, 2016 at 10:51 pm

“The Government of Guyana cannot raise the resources necessary to fully fund the university.”

They could if they raise TAXES on cigarettes and liquors which is burdening the Health Care System just as petrol did in smelting Bauxite in McKenzie since the 1960’s.