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February 2012
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The first WI Dean of EngineeringBy Professor Bridget Brereton
It’s well known that St. Augustine began as a campus of the regional University with a Faculty of Agriculture (1960). This wasn’t because either the University (then still UCWI) or the Eric Williams Government in Port of Spain was especially keen on agriculture; it was simply because the merger with ICTA provided a ready-made Faculty with staff, students, research programmes and facilities already there. But Williams was determined to begin teaching engineering – and at St. Augustine, not at Mona. This was the deal between Arthur Lewis, UCWI Principal, and Williams: the new Faculty would be here, not in Jamaica, as Mona’s scientists and Jamaica’s engineers wanted. Using funding from the Ford Foundation, UNESCO and the British Government, the Faculty of Engineering opened its doors to 28 students in October 1961. In the early days, most of the staff were British, recruited through UNESCO; the founding Dean was Peter Whitton, from Imperial College, London University. But West Indians began to be appointed too: in 1962, Ken Julien joined the Faculty as a lecturer in electrical engineering, just one year after it first took in students. Julien had worked in the oilfields in the 1950s, went abroad to study, and had gained a PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1961. He was recruited for the Faculty by John Carpenter, the first Head of Electrical Engineering (and an Imperial man like Whitton). Julien, Harry Phelps and Compton Deane were the first West Indians in the Faculty. The academic and administrative structure of the new Faculty was closely modelled on British practice, especially that of Imperial College, with departments of mechanical, civil, chemical and electrical engineering, and most of the teaching staff were British at first. But in 1964 a staffing crisis took place: several senior academics left over just a few months, including the founding Dean, Whitton. Some departments were left with only three teachers and some courses couldn’t be offered in 1964/65. On the timely advice of the Engineering Dean at McGill, the UWI authorities agreed to appoint a new Dean for three years, to give him considerable authority, and to choose a younger West Indian rather than a senior foreign academic. Julien, still a lecturer, on staff for just over two years, was appointed Dean (he was the only West Indian staff member with a PhD). He served as Dean for ten years (1964-74). As Julien remembered in an interview over 40 years later, he and his equally young West Indian colleagues had been suddenly thrown into the deep end with little preparation or experience of academic leadership. But with Phelps, Deane, Desmond Imbert, G. M. Richards and others, he built up a closely knit, dynamic leadership team which took their Faculty forward into an era of relentless expansion. The years between 1964 and 1969 were ‘very hard’, Julien remembered, with staff shortages and few foreign academics willing to come; but the hard work paid off and – in Julien’s words – ‘the thing took off!’ Take off it certainly did: the 1970s and 1980s were years of tremendous expansion for Engineering, envied by everyone else on campus who watched the splendid new buildings go up. Julien demitted office as Dean in 1974, but he remained an active Faculty and campus heavyweight, despite his enormous involvement in the nation’s thrust into heavy industry, especially petrochemicals, in these decades. In the years before his retirement from UWI, he served as a much respected Head of Electrical Engineering and was a mentor of many young academics in that department and in the Faculty. After he left UWI, of course, he became the founding Chairman and President of our sister university, UTT. But that’s another story… |
On November 29, 2011, a ceremony was held to rename four buildings of the Faculty of Engineering after some of its pioneers and stalwarts. One, the Faculty of Engineering Block 1, was renamed in honour of Professor Ken Julien, who played a critical role in the Faculty’s early history.