SUNDAY 16 DECEMBER, 2018 – UWI TODAY
11
70
th
ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE
HISTORY
– ISSUE ARCHIVE SEPTEMBER 2010
The speech of the day was by Arthur Lewis, Principal of UCWI,
the future first Vice-Chancellor of UWI (1962) and Nobel Prize
winner. He described the ‘marriage’ being celebrated as one between
a mature lady of forty and a twelve-year-old boy, and advised that
the boy must be willing to learn and the lady to be tolerant.
by the Faculty of Agriculture, the new Dudley Huggins
Building (1969) provided more space for that Faculty.
In universities all over the world, the late 1960s
witnessed considerable political activism by students, and
St Augustine was no exception. Indeed, it can be said that
between 1968 and 1970, the campus was more at the centre
of national events, andmore intensely present in the public’s
consciousness, than ever before or since. The Rodney
Affair, the local repercussions from the Sir George William
University events in Montreal, the swiftly developing Black
Power Movement, largely led by St Augustine students or
recent graduates, the formation of NJAC—all placed the
campus at the centre of events. Student leaders like Geddes
Granger (Makandal Daaga), Dave D’Arbeau (Khafra
Kambon) and others became household names.
Several members of the academic staff were prominent
in the movement and two were detained during the State
of Emergency (1970), along with several students or recent
graduates. All in all, 1970 was a tense time for the campus,
whatever people’s individual opinions about Black Power.
Political activism on campus waned in the 1970s,
and the campus entered another period of expansion,
presided over by Lloyd Braithwaite, Principal 1969-84. The
College of Arts and Sciences was disbanded and replaced
with Faculties of Arts & General Studies, Social Sciences,
Natural Sciences, and Education, replicating the structure
at Mona, and joining the original Faculties of Agriculture
and Engineering. The oil boom (1973-81), coupled with the
determination of Prime Minister Eric Williams to create
a petrochemicals and heavy industry sector in Trinidad,
made possible a spectacular expansion of the Faculty of
Engineering, funded by the national government, in the late
1970s and early 1980s. This was the ‘Empire of Engineering’,
much envied by less fortunate sections of the campus.
The oil boom also funded the huge Mount Hope Medical
Complex, and drove the government’s decision to set up a
new Faculty of Medical Sciences in Trinidad which would
teach dentistry and veterinary science as well as medicine.
This was a painful and difficult process; but at last (long
after the end of the boom), in 1989, the new Faculty based
at Mount Hope opened its doors to students.
Just like the nation itself, St Augustine has suffered
from recurrent periods of ‘boom and bust’. After the heady
years of the oil boom, from which the campus benefitted
tremendously, a period of hard times set in from the
mid-1980s, which lasted more or less a decade. It fell to
Principal G.M. Richards (1985-96) to bring the campus
through these difficulties. Many new developments had
to be put on hold, but the growth in student numbers, and
in programme and course offerings, never stopped. By the
mid-1990s, the financial situation had improved, and a new
era of building and general expansion began, funded in part
by massive loans from the IDB, as well as subventions and
capital grants from the national government. Important new
structures went up in this period of renewed expansion,
presided over by Principals Compton Bourne (1996-2001)
and Bhoendradatt Tewarie (2001-07), such as the Learning
Resource Centre, the Student Activity Centre, the Sport
and Physical Education Centre (SPEC), the extensions to
the Natural Sciences and Chemistry blocks, the Centre for
Language Learning, the Joyce Gibson Innis Hall at Mount
Hope, and others. Student numbers increased steadily,
and dramatically from about 2001, when the national
government first pledged to pay half of all tuition fees for
undergraduates, then (2004) a hundred per cent (GATE).
Many new programmes, undergraduate and
postgraduate, were introduced in this period and some
departments or programmes were seriously stretched
to accommodate the rapidly rising enrolments. Some
developments were not universally welcomed, such as the
move to the two-semester system, carried out in the early
1990s; and the decision in 1996 to merge the Faculties of
Arts and Education to create the Faculty of Humanities &
Education, and the Faculties of Agriculture and Natural
Sciences to create what was eventually named the Faculty
of Science & Agriculture. This last merger, eliminating the
Bridget Brereton, Professor of
History at the History Department,
UWI, St. Augustine.
“ICTA’s weaknesses were that it never
offered degrees, its student body was
always small, its links to the country and
the region in which it was located were
weak, and it was a distinctly colonial
institution at a time when colonialism
was on its way out. Its strength lay in
its international reputation for highlevel
research and its impressive group of
research scientists at St Augustine.”
