History

Oriens Ex Occidente Lux – A Light Rising From The West

Originally started as an independent offshoot of the University of London, The University of the West Indies currently serves 17 English-speaking regional territories, offering undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in numerous fields of study: the arts, sciences, business, law, the humanities.

Although St. Augustine is the main campus in Trinidad and Tobago, there is also a satellite campus in nearby Mount Hope that houses the Faculty of Medical Sciences. The university was founded in 1948 in Mona, Jamaica, as The University College of the West Indies, based on a recommendation by the Asquith Commission, which had been established five years prior to review the state of higher education in the then-British colonies. Fourteen years after the Mona campus opened, in 1962, the college received independent university status, in the same year that Jamaica itself received independence from Great Britain.

The Trinidad campus of the regional university, which began in 1960, was borne out of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture; Barbados’ Cave Hill campus came on stream three years after. In 2008, the Open Campus was opened – the culmination of previous iterations of UWI extra-mural and distance-learning institutions. In 2019, the Five Islands campus in Antigua and Barbuda was added. The four locations have key faculties that are common to all the territories – Humanities and Education, for instance, and Social Sciences, all mainstream disciplines. St. Augustine, however, is the only campus that boasts a Faculty of Food and Agriculture, an area of expertise that has long been interwoven into the history of the Caribbean islands.