Transformation: An insider’s perspective on how UWI is adapting to support its new strategic objectives

by Gerard Best

Graduate Studies: Faster, Stronger, Stickier
Given the University’s success in rapidly increasing the size and diversity of its undergraduate student population, the Strategic Plan’s focus on its undergraduate recruits is not misplaced. But, as PVC Young observed, the Plan has not overlooked the University’s postgraduate and research programmes. Indeed, this is the area targeted for significant growth over the life of the plan so that the ratio of undergraduates to graduate students will be effectively altered by 2012-13.

“It is becoming increasingly evident that the comparative advantage of the UWI over other competing institutions in the region will be in relation to its ability to deliver strong and relevant graduate programmes aimed at meeting national and regional needs in our increasingly knowledge-based economies. Unfortunately, surveys over the three traditional Campuses have shown that attrition rate is high and throughput times prolonged, particularly in the MPhil graduate research programmes,” said Professor Young, identifying insufficient funding, sub-optimal supervision and slow feedback on submitted work as some of the roots of the problem.

The University’s five-year Plan recommends specific actions for each of these problems, and aims to improve the graduate student experience and accelerate throughput in the University’s graduate programmes. It addresses the issues of attrition and throughput directly through the development of a quality assurance system, aligned to the established undergraduate quality assurance system, for ensuring best practice in the conduct of graduate programmes. The quality issue is a dominant concern at UWI, says PVC Young.

“One Senior Programme Officer, devoted to Quality Assurance in the Graduate programme and in the Research programme, has already been appointed,” noted Professor Wint. “And that Officer is already linked in with the Board for Undergraduate Studies because we have such a well-established culture of Quality Assurance at the undergraduate level.

In fact, all three of us [Wint, Young and Hunte] are responsible for supervising the Officer, which demonstrates the integrated nature of our roles in the Strategic Plan.”

Building a Research Enterprise
“We’re building a Research Enterprise,” volunteered Professor Hunte, “and one of our biggest challenges is to ensure that there is an environment supportive of research in the University, an environment in which we carve out the time for people to think, to be creative, to be analytical. Even more than in the past, we’re working to nurture an undergraduate culture that produces critical thinkers who are introspective, who are problem-solvers, who haven’t been simply engulfed in information but who have been taught to reason, to question, to challenge, to innovate.”

The vision of the Strategic Plan is not limited to the way that the university deals with its students, but extends to areas of cross-campus collaboration and inter-university partnerships. As Hunte remarked, “We have a number of faculty members on all our campuses who are doing internationally competitive research of regional relevance. We actually have many members of Faculty who are well known internationally and who have people writing to them and asking to come to our University and work with them. The opportunities for bringing young, bright talent into the University are there.”

For Hunte, international collaboration also brings the opportunity for institutional capacity-development: “We need to establish several carefully worded, functional MOUs with international universities of high research repute, which would encourage staff and student exchanges, and encourage external co-supervision of our research students so that some of the pressure on our staff to supervise is relieved.”

Monolithic Movement, Monumental Management
PVC Tewarie described the Plan as “ambitious”, an assessment justified by statements like this extract from the Plan: “By 2012, the UWI will be an innovative, internationally competitive, contemporary university, deeply rooted in the Caribbean, committed to creating the best possible future for all our stakeholders. It will be the university of first choice for the region’s students and talented academics. It will provide a truly supportive environment that rewards excellence and it will be agile enough to thrive in a dynamic global environment.”

The new Plan certainly demands a leap in performance standards for the University within the five-year timeframe. And in my interaction with PVCs Tewarie, Wint, Young and Hunte, I’ve found strong evidence of a corporate culture of intense collaboration among the highest levels of leadership, precisely the kind of institutional culture that augurs well for the successful implementation of the Strategic Plan.

“At the heart of the Strategic Plan is transformation of the monolith that is UWI and transformation on that scale will only take place with a shift in thinking which leads to culture change,” said PVC Tewarie. “So in a fundamental sense institutional transformation requires individual transformation on a pretty massive scale. I am hopeful that we are getting there. But I know that we are not there yet.”

[Download a PDF copy of the strategic plan -1.4 MB]
For reports and presentations on the plan’s implementation to date, visit the Office of Planning and development website

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