Vice Chancellor’s bonus: Guyana’s lack of vision

Oct 18, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

On the night of Wednesday, October 3, 2018, an item on the agenda of the Council of the University of Guyana’s statutory meeting occurred, and it showed how intellectually bankrupt this country has become, despite the fact that from the forties onwards, this country produced top brains that in turn gave top class output wherever they went to work.
The intellectual drought has spread vastly over this country the past forty years. We are at a stage where the colossal numbers of young people in the country’s population are in need of post-colonial vision, but each day mediocrity gets deeper, and innovation and transformation recede.
The item that caused a furor at that meeting was the Vice Chancellor’s bonus. Much to the surprise of the Vice-Chancellor, the meeting agreed to postpone the item because of an intellectual confusion, a quagmire that when you read on shows how unthinking the educated people of this nation have become.
The Vice Chancellor (VC) naturally thought his bonus would have been approved. But it was postponed because certain council members persuasively argued that there has to be a context in which a bonus is awarded.
I have long regarded Vincent Alexander as a persuasive polemicist. Alexander’s intervention was well received and no doubt was influential. He submitted that the bonus has to be canopied within the process of appraisal. This is when the mediocrity of a nation was laid bare for the world to see. There is no laid down rule as to who is to do the appraisal and in terms of management science, there is no one at the university who can do the appraisal, because it is a contradiction for the CEO’s juniors to assess him. Why are they going to assess their boss negatively when their boss has the power to retaliate with immunity and impunity?
I am being theoretical here. I am not suggesting for a moment that the current VC, Professor Ivelaw Griffith, will pursue a vendetta if he is unsuccessfully evaluated. My point is that in management science, there should not be the ugly situation where a CEO’s bonus is decided by the CEO’s subordinates.
What is taking place at UG with the VC’s bonus has nothing to do with the VC himself. The gentleman was right to ask for his bonus. The council was right to decide that he should be assessed. The fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. The fault lies in the banality that has overcome this nation’s ability to think.
As it stands at UG, a place I knew deeply, there is no office or office-holder that – in terms of the statues – can overrule the Office of the Vice Chancellor. UG has only one source of power that can reject a decision of the Office of the Vice Chancellor – the Council of the University. Only the Council then, as a higher body than the Office of the Vice Chancellor, can safely evaluate the performance of the VC. I emphasize the adverb, ‘safely.”
But in objective reality, the Council is in no position to determine whether the VC should get or not receive a bonus. The council meets every three months, and a majority of them do not work at UG, so how can they assess his output? The academics who sit on the Council are employees that the VC has jurisdiction over. So if the Council cannot objectively judge the VC’s productivity, and it is not proper for his subordinates to do so, then by what route do you arrive at whether to give or not give him his bonus?
This impasse is holding up the VC’s bonus. One of two scenarios will emerge, and in my opinion both are extensively flawed. The Council will decide on the bonus or the Council will birth a sub-committee which will consist of persons who actually work under the VC. Both of them will agree to offer the bonus. In the case of the Council, many members will ask why they should hold up the payment when they do not know if the man is not entitled to it. The sub-committee for obvious reasons will recommend the bonus.
UG has sent to the Ministry of Education a blueprint for changing the University of Guyana Act. Its main objective is to clearly limit the Council to policy-making and to ensure Council’s decisions do not intrude on the Office of the Vice Chancellor’s administrative armoury.
In my column of Friday, August 15, 2018, I argued that you also have to provide mechanisms in the amendment to the Act to make the VC’s power accountable. I doubt that will be done. Why? Where is the vision that drives thinking?

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Vice Chancellor’s bonus: Guyana’s lack of vision

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