SUNDAY 3 JUNE, 2018 – UWI TODAY
15
PROFILES
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 Campus Principal has seen me
operating globally, successfully, and enlisted me to
help change the UWI to an entrepreneurial campus.”
In 2016, Vice-Chancellor Sir Hilary 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 fivemembers
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 amember 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, UNGlobal 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? Howmany
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 knowmust
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 byMIT
“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.
PROFESSOR
JOHNAGARD
IslandMan,
Global Mind
B Y P A T G A N A S E
Professor John Agard has recently been listed as Judge on the MIT CoLab Centre for Collective Intelligence.
PHOTO: ATIBA CUDJOE
