UG continues to make a mess of itself

Mar 31, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In a column of October 10, last year, in response to an interview with the Kaieteur News and other media houses on the Vice-Chancellor’s use of enormous funds for a particular trip, and the enormous increase in senior staff, I wrote the following; “Why then would such a small university have the following; a Vice-Chancellor and three Deputy Vice-Chancellors; Officer for Strategic Initiatives; Chief of Staff in the Office of the Vice-Chancellor; Registrar, Deputy Registrar; four Assistant Registrars?
“In addition to this, each Faculty has its own Dean and Deputy Dean, then, there is the Committee of Deans. The question that needs to be asked is what volume of work UG endures on a daily basis to have such a large administrative structure?”
As you can see from the above, there are three Vice-Chancellors; the mandate of one is international outreach. Yet last January, UG advertised for an International Engagement Officer. This is yet another high-priced senior officer. But the question that is poignantly relevant is: if you have a Deputy Vice Chancellor to liaise with the wider world, why then would you need an International Engagement Officer?
But this is the style of the new Vice-Chancellor who worked at several American universities that have huge staff and large student populations, with budgets running into hundreds of billions of American dollars. The current Vice-Chancellor may mean well, but the taxpayers have to step in and tell him he is operating in Guyana and not in super-rich China.
When Kaieteur News interviewed me on the super layers of senior staff the Vice Chancellor was employing, the paper put the same question to the Government’s advisor on tertiary education, Vincent Alexander.
I have known Vincent all my life; we were born one block from each other in Wortmanville. Vincent is your consummate, diplomatic respondent. But at his age, he should know that there will always be circumstances where diplomacy has to give way to brutal reality. His answer to Kaieteur News was the opposite of mine (my response was the quote above). He said he prefers to give the new Vice Chancellor a chance.
I have deep problems with such an answer in the context of performance of a person. I am married for 38 years now and I have known Adam Harris, the editor of this paper, for a longer period. I have been with the Kaieteur News for 22 years; since day one. I have known its owner, Glenn Lall, for longer than that. If a journalist is employed by Kaieteur News and for the first week on the job that person is four hours late daily, there will be no giving of a chance. How can you give a person a chance when he/she made an essentially counter-productive policy?
UG has a staff structure that per capita is the most extensive and expanding in the world. Please bear in mind this university has fewer than 5,000 students and six hundred employees. Surely, the Vice Chancellor should offer an explanation. But more than this, what has been the balance sheet of achievements since the new guy took over?
UG continues to be in the news for the wrong reasons. There is a monthly Renaissance Lecture; a monthly Renaissance Magazine; a printing press is coming on stream; UG plans to rent a majestic building at the junction of Lamaha and Camp Streets for classrooms; and all of this is coming from taxpayers’ money. But this is only half of the story.
The university continues its failure to attract outside scholars with doctorates; the pay for the present academic and non-academic staff is pathetic; the science and technology labs are still primitive; modern facilities are still non-existent; the Caribbean Research Library went out of existence twenty years ago; and the central library still looks like a closed-down supermarket. Now we have the climax of the absurdity – fees will be raised by thirty-five percent. It will happen. Why?
Any schoolboy who doesn’t know why the students will be made to pay that thirty-five percent tuition increase should go back to nursery school to learn a few things. Because this land is a dead zone resembling life in the movie, Soylent Green. Fear and primitive thinking have overtaken the collective psyche of this nation.
The joke in this tragedy is that the advisor on tertiary education is an admirer of Forbes Burnham, and the Minister of Education is an admirer of Walter Rodney. Well, if they are admirers, they should have learnt a thing or two from these two historical Guyanese. But then again….

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