The Faculty of Engineering

West Indian Journal of Engineering

Latest Issue

Volume 23: Number 2 - Jan 2001

Contents

Editorial

When I assumed the  position of  Dean  of  the  Faculty in August of  this  year,  I indicated to  you  that  in  the  weeks ahead, I would like to meet  with  all  of  the staff  to get  a sense of  your  expectations, your  goals  and  targets, your thoughts and  views  on how  we can build a better Faculty. Since assuming office however, I have found that the rigours of  the daily  tasks  have  made it not  as easy  to remove oneself  from the office and meet and  talk to staff. I  wish  to assure you  however that  I will find  the time  to meet  with  all of you, formally and infonna!Iy and  also  in discrete groups. I felt however that I should meet with the entire group, the entire Faculty, one which continues to earn the respect and admiration of all our stakeholders, i.e., the rest of the university conuimuity, our students and graduates, industry, government, parents and the society as a whole. I wish to eiJlphasise from the start, that we can only build a better Faculty if we work as a united team, with each of us having a clear sense of purpose and responsibility as we strive together in meeting the Faculty's goals and objectives. I have been in and around the Faculty for a long time, in fact for 31 years, first entering here in 1969 as an undergraduate student moving to postgraduate studies in 1973, being away on PhD studies from 1975 to 1978, and being on the full-time academic staff since then.  I have therefore grown up with many of yon and also gotten older with many of you. I have seen the Faculty grow, in terms of physical facilities, staffing and student numbers. However, as I get older and many of us are getting older, I ask you as I often ask myself, "What kind of Faculty do we wish to leave behind?" The answer for me is quite simple.

I would like to leave a Faculty to which! Would be proud to send my children, as I hope other parents including you would be so inclined, to pursue an undergraduate or even a postgraduate degree by teaching and research in any of the principal fields of engineering. I would like to leave a Faculty that, if it was at all possible to restart  my  working life  and  I had  such  an opportunity, I would return, right here. Put simply, I think  all of us would  like  to build  and leave behind such  a Faculty when  we retire, one  which  is "first-class.. And World-class" and one which is providing teaching, research, development, outreach and service to the community of quality, relevance and respect.

I sincerely hope all of us can share in this vision, as we are not only staff members, but we are also parents and members of the society. We must be proud to send our children here for their university education, and proud of the work the Faculty and university are doing, through its training, research, development and innovation to enhance the quality of our country and the region as a whole.  We must he proud to work here and enjoy working here. It is important that we create such an environment here.

Achieving the above is by no means a simple task, especially in today's shrinking world, a world where there are alternatives and choices developing for prospective students and their parents. In our own country, parents will soon have a choice on where they can send their children for an undergraduate university education in Engineering or Technology. We may also have a choice of where we can work. The Faculty is in a different, competitive environment today. Far different from the 60's, 70's and 80's, when we had a position of pre-eminence, and were unchallenged, umivalled.Again, this is a sign of the changing world around us, competitive and sometimes acutely so.  We must recognize this and do not feel all is as secure as in our early years.  It is up to us to make our environment secure by staying far ahead of any competition.

We need to get back where we were, to re-stake our pre-eminence. How can we do it? We must build upon our strength, which is the ability to provide the educational. Training of engineers at internationally, benchmarked levels. This is why the continuing international accreditation of our Engineering and Surveying Degrees is so vital to our well­ being.  This achievement, together with our Faculty's near40-year history, and a university more than 50 years old are our defining standards. We cannot be complacent about international accreditation of our Degrees. The quality standards we have to achieve in the future will not go lower, but higher and higher. We live in a real world, of ever increasing quality and demands for the same, and we must ourselves rise to this challenge. I wish  to assure all of my commitment to  the  accreditation and  quality of  our undergraduate programmes, and  urge  all  academic staff, technical staff and our  service and  support staff  to work  to continue to achieve this  and  the quality needed through a focused team effort.

If we are going to stay unchallenged, unrivalled and are going to continue to support the development of our country and the region, we must also think about increasing our undergraduate   enrolment.   Today  we    accept approximately 275  new  Undergraduate students into  the Faculty of Engineering but  we know  there are many  more who meet  our minimum entrance  requirements but whom we cannot accept for reasons associated simply! With limited capacity- physical space, staff and labs, workshop resources, etc.  There is also the issue of the· input quality of such additional intake. However, we need as engineers to be creative and innovative and develop opportunities for such potential students. Hence the proposal to my colleagues for the need for streams, in our training portfolio for example, MEng, BEng (Hons) and possibly BTech programmes, with common elements wherever allowable. We may   also consider developing alliances with other tertiary level institutions of engineering and technology and with industry to help us provide this capacity for training more. We do not have to do it all alone but to my mind, it must be done if we are to provide a sustainable future for the Faculty. Your Dean is committed to providing creativity, leadership and energy in this effort but we must work together to achieve such goals. We must be committed to the effort.

I have emphasized the building upon our strength, which is our undergraduate teaching. If we are going to build a strong, robust and  respected Faculty, it is important that we  take corrective steps  to deal  with our  own  areas  of weakness, which I think  is in  the  area  of  our  research, development and technology transfer. However, we can only

Correct such a weakness if we accept that this is an area of weakness. I ask of you, our academic and technical support staff to reflect on this.  Are we doing enough here, in research and development? Are we making a real mark in this sphere of university activity? If we are not, I think we will be on the path of reducing ourselves to a technical institution rather than a respected Faculty of Engineering in a reputable university.  Our research, our development work, our design work and our ability to be innovative and creative and to provide value to our community particularly business and industry are outputs which are going to define us and separate us from others, apart from teaching. Iurge you my colleagues to think about the kind of Faculty we will leave behind, if the output and quality of our research and development, innovation and outreach efforts continue to decline. Into such a Faculty, I may not wish to send my children. Therefore, I am committed ·to rebuilding our efforts at academic scholarship, research, development and innovation. In doing this, we must attract and support the work of more postgraduate research students - MPhils and PhDs. This is a key component of pushing our research and development efforts. Our postgraduate students and our research assistants need the continued guidance, support and encouragement of their academic supervisors, Heads of Departments and technicians. We must see such postgraduate students as critical to our current and future well-being and support and nurture them. Our   technicians in the laboratories and workshops must recognize this, and I know many of you do. It was in such an enabling environment that I was in at UWI in 1973 - 1975 when I did my Masters degree here. We were small then; the Department of Mechanical Engineering had no more than five or six members of staff, but felt at that time that we were in a productive, supportive and exciting research and development environment. I am sure there are colleagues, both academic staff and technicians and from other Departments, who will bear this out.  We must get back there, and bring this research and development culture back into the Faculty. Again, I am committed to this task. Whatever support I can lend, ask of me. I wish to add, that I would like to see our laboratories once more become places of intense research and development activity, not locked, not deserted, not lonely or "run-down" places but areas where academic staff, technical staff and students meet and work in an equipped, impressive environment. 1bis is how it used to be, this is how it is in parts, and this is how it should be, day and night. I again urge,  that the success of our  efforts and  doing  meaningful, quality research and developmental work  of  a kind expected of  a  reputable Faculty of Engineering depends upon a partnership between  academic staff, technical staff,  graduate research students and support services staff. We must forge this team.

I am committed to this effort, rebuilding/refurbishing the laboratories where necessary, retraining the technicians where needed and upgrading our workshops as demanded. This must be a steady, continuous effort, to build research and development capacity. Academic staff members, working with their technicians and graduate students must be intimately involved in the maintenance and development of the laboratories. I am interested in all staff, but particularly the younger members of staff "getting on" with their research and development work.

With respect to outreach, I think the Faculty created five years ago an appropriate vehicle for assisting in this effort- The Engineering Institute.  However, its fortunes are declining and we must arrest this. I urge members of staff, both academic and technical staff to support the work of the Engineering Institute and to get involved. As a Faculty more of us need to be involved in its work, and in fact, collectively, we need to take ownership of its management and operations. With the  help of  my  senior colleagues, I have begun the task  of  reviewing the  management and  operations of  the Engineering Institute with the objective of strengthening its capabilities. However, the Engineering Institute will only have meaningful work to do if we ourselves are engaged in teaching, research, developmental and professional work at the leading edge of management and technology. The Institute is a real vehicle for us to penetrate government, business and the industrial sector, something that is bound to pay dividends in terms of our teaching, research and development and the acceptance of our graduates.

Again with respect to outreach and particularly publication of our research and development efforts, the existence of our West Indian Journal of Engineering (WIJE) must be noted. In the early years -the 70's, it was a humble Journal of research papers essentially authored by members of the Faculty. Today, while one sees progress in terms of format and style of the Journal, the number of papers authored by our Faculty appears relatively small. Again I urge members of staff, publish your research work in reputable, refereed journals including WIJE. I am committed to supporting and recognizing the work of the Journal.

We need to put quality in all we do in the training and curriculum of our undergraduate and postgraduate students, in our outreach and professional work done through the Engineering Institute, in our research and development activities and its ensuing publications. We also need to put quality in the service we provide, to our undergraduate and postgraduate students, in our supervisory and teaching responsibilities and in our availability to guide and counsel students. Quality must be felt in the classrooms, through space availability, seating, cleanliness, air-conditioning, audio-visual support, etc. The same issue of quality of service applies to our laboratories, workshops and engineering stores.  Our entire environment, classrooms, washrooms, lawns, etc. must reflect quality. We need to ensure that  our students get a quality experience while they are here, as that is the only way it is likely that  they  will send their sons and Daughters here or even return for postgraduate training. This is the way we will provide for a sustainable future. In all of this, there is a special role for our technical and service staff. It is essentially your work and efforts which will reflect such a quality environment, and I wish to assure you of my support in the creation of this. As a Faculty, we must forge a team, one which recognizes that our first responsibility is to our students, undergraduates and postgraduates, many of whom are here with us in the evenings, and have special needs.  We need to provide for them. Our second responsibility is to our society by pursuing relevant training, research, development and technology transfer so as to enhance the quality of life of our citizens. These two responsibilities must be our guiding lights. I urge all, to work as a united team to deliver these products and services.

As your new Dean, I am committed to breaking down, not creating barriers, and to encouraging dialogue, discourse and harmony. While we must be able to disagree, to see things from different viewpoints, we must not divide. I am committed to honesty, integrity and transparency in the things we do and to fair and equitable treatment of all staff and students. I need your support in the discharge of these obligations. I am here to provide direction, to lead and by example, to serve, and I seek no more. As indicated before, I intend to work towards leaving a Faculty of which we can all be proud. Again let us  all   -  the  Dean, the Professors, the  Deputy Deans, the  Heads of  Departments, the  Engineering Institute, the  Academic, Administrative, Technical and Support staff, let us  all  unite and  build a winning team, build a vibrant Faculty for ourselves, for our university, for our children and for the country and the region.

My experience is that there is no substitute for hard, honest work. We all need to put our shoulders to this wheel to turn it over and bring a new   level of prosperity and collectivity to the Faculty. There is much to be done but the rewards will come.  We must stay on course.

I wish to thank you for your attention and look forward to your support.

Professor Clement K. Sankat

Guest Editor
(Dean, Faculty of Engineering)