UG and rum; UG and the death of the soul

Oct 05, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Each day this country brings psychological weirdness that if you didn’t know this society, you would endure serious mental breakdown trying to understand it.

Thousands of years ago, in the western world in Athens in ancient Greece, academia was in the forefront to change of how people think. Athens gave us three formidable thinkers – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle – the depth of whose thoughts can match any modern philosopher today.

I am assuming that in ancient Egypt, India and China, academia played the same priceless role in society. Academia from ancient times right up to 2022, serves the purpose of creating polemics, debates, narratives and discourses that facilitates the passage of knowledge.

From time immemorial, academia has created the environment for the exchange of ideas which have led to both disaster and freedom. The generation of ideas does not necessarily bring out positive changes.

It can also give birth to values that threaten the stability of civilisation. For example, the justification of racial superiority that led to genocidal acts has mostly been pioneered by scholars.

Nevertheless, academics are free thinking people, people who lack the psychological of regimentation that you find in all other professions in the world. Academia is to discourse and criticism what fire is to a cigarette.

If you examine the world’s countries, there is hardly a nation where the country’s scholars are not involved in the birth of critique whether in the natural sciences or the social sciences. Once a national crisis breaks out, you expect academics to offer their two cents.

Guyana is a morbid and degenerate example of the failure of the purpose of academia. Against this horrific deterioration in the purpose of academia, one opens the newspapers to read people carping about UG’s association with the rum industry.

I don’t like rum, never drank it in any conceivable form but I know and assert with enormous conviction, give me the rum industry any day rather than an industry where academia becomes a pool of fools, sheep, cowards and lost souls.

I ask the question with deep sincerity, how can any Guyanese castigate UG for its association with the rum industry rather than focusing their thoughts on the failure at UG of the very purpose of academia?

Nothing moves the academics at UG. These people are thoughtless souls whose existence consists of ephemeral moments of nothingness. There isn’t a university in another country that is as dead in the context of the role and purpose of critique as UG.

As I write, the academics in Iran have participated in the ongoing protest in that country. In Cuba, the fiercest resistance to governmental impositions can be found among Cuban scholars. The scholars in totalitarian states like China and Russia are not sheep and despite the risk of jail and death, they continue to offer opinions; this is what academics are born to do.

I ask once again; how can any Guyanese who live in this country and see the absence of discourse and debate and critiques at UG, talk about rum and not the breakdown and disappearance of thought and spirit at UG? Who cares if UG takes money from the rum industry?

I certainly don’t and I offer absolutely no apology for that statement contextually. By context, I mean why should I care about UG’s rum association when there is no association at UG with the purpose of academia?

People in this country, a majority of which are very young folks, want to see a body of knowledge from the country’s scholars from which they can learn. That is what universities do. Their scholars make pronouncements in the public arena that generate ideas that can lead to changes.

I have been asked by two powerfully placed actors in the corridors of power on separate occasions to serve on the Council of the University. I declined in 2021 and recently in 2022.

My answer was the same on both occasions. I would be a disruptive voice. There will be constant exchanges out of which only rancor will result. UG is an immensely backward place with an unbelievably anachronistic bureaucracy, undemocratic administrators and its academia is unacceptable.

I was with my dog on the seawall Monday evening. It was getting late and I had to be at the studio to do the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show. One of the most senior academics at UG was with his family and he engaged me. I had to leave but I couldn’t take more of the description of the death of UG.

There is a popular soca song, “Rum till I die.” I guess those misplaced souls that don’t want UG to take rum money need to drink some rum; maybe drink until they die.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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