June 2018


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John Agard is a man in a hurry; he speaks quickly about the multitude of committees and projects he’s involved in. But he slows down with his students; he makes sure he has time for them. He is enlisting them to his cause: knowledge and proficiency and activism for a purposeful life.

Agard’s career started simply, growing out of his love for science and for teaching; science reflecting his sensitivity not only to living creatures but the web of life itself; and teaching from his desire to engage with youth – students or his own children – to make sure they know “everything that I know as their starting point.” Today, he is more succinct: “it must be about building a better society.”

We catch up with him at a 70-year-old house-turned-office: in his capacity as the Director of the Office of Research Development and Knowledge Transfer. He greets you warmly, apologizing for the delay; he was speaking with students that he had arranged to meet in his other office, in Life Sciences (his substantive post is Professor of Tropical Island Ecology), but he was delayed so they trekked across the campus to find him.

Here, he carries out his second job: seeking out grants and contracts to bring in money, working to help “commercialize UWI’s intellectual property.”

He says, “So, the Pro Vice Chancellor has seen me operating globally, successfully, and enlisted me to help change the UWI to an entrepreneurial campus.” In 2016, Chancellor Sir Hillary Beckles introduced The UWI’s Triple-A-Vision strategy which “focuses on alignment of industry and academia, expansion of access to tertiary education and agility to global opportunities.”

“We can no longer rely on governments. We have to leverage the intellectual capital here in practical ways. There’s now an Invention Disclosure Process in which if you have an innovation or invention while employed at the UWI, there is a basic procedure to assess and patent your work. Principal Brian Copeland has several patents. We have not in the past been business oriented; look at our poor record in profiting off our world class cocoa germplasm and research as a typical example.

“In our Team which assists Departments at UWI in project development and funding, we have business managers, Indira Jagassar and Cheryl Dubay-Tewarie, and an intellectual property lawyer –Lauren Boodhoo, We also have project specialist experts like Angela Escalante and Lois St. Brice, supported by Damian Ali, Shomari Smith and Ena Siew Persad. The intention is to be an entrepreneurial campus and to work with the IP Office of the Attorney General, to establish at UWI an IP Academy as core to the university; to provide training and workshops delivered by world experts; and to have all students doing courses on intellectual property rights. We want to create spin-off companies, and to foster social change in which every graduate becomes an entrepreneur rather than graduate and seek a job position.

“Because I operate globally, as one of five members of the Independent Advisory Group to the board of the IDB in Washington; as a Review Editor on Small Islands in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); as a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel on the Global Environment Outlook for UNEP and as a Coordinating Lead Author in the Inter-Governmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, I have access to a network of expertise and funding. We have raised substantial donor support from the European Union, Inter-American Development Bank, UN Global Environment Facility. This departure towards commercializing UWI’s vast knowledge base is both about funding and upping our game to a global platform as UWI develops an alternative funding model to reliance on the government.”

“With all that I am doing, I continue to teach in order to pass on what I have learnt to young people, with the expectation that they will do better than my generation. We need the optimism of youth to move our society forward. We need young people to professionalize politics. We need young people in government before society breaks their enthusiasm. They must understand that a university education is not about certification to get a job. We have to awaken that passion and purpose to make society better; we need active leaders.

“I know that it’s not about me. It’s about a contribution. The values associated with biodiversity are about more than money; it’s about life and the services it provides. Our oxygen is produced by plants. We produce carbon dioxide. At the level of the IPCC, we consider what is happening in the whole world; what humans are doing to the planet. At the personal level, I have to be concerned about a big carbon footprint: when there are conferences in China and Cairo and everywhere else; how to balance videoconferencing with personal contact? How many trees do I have to plant?

“The planet is a living thing; it could support us forever if we allow it to continually restore itself. We need to find the right balance for our own survival. The challenge now is to go beyond what we know must be done, beyond what we have committed to paper, to act, to do what we have put on paper. We now have to operationalize pathways to a sustainable future.”

Agard has recently been listed as Judge on the MIT CoLab Centre for Collective Intelligence. At the Climate CoLab, an on-line community hosted by MIT “to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people from all around the world to address complex societal problems, starting with global climate change,” Agard is a Judge for projects of the open community: “over 90,000 people – including hundreds of the world’s leading experts on climate change and related fields – with plans to reach global climate change goals.”

This new global approach will synthesize knowledge across many platforms. It will be integrative and collaborative, meshing information and processes stored in computers with creative collective human intelligence, logical and rational, and also capable of emotional and intuitive breadth. And Agard expects to be there on the leading edge of change; gathering knowledge so he can pass it on… and with urgency.