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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 14 MAY, 2017
Sir Alister McIntyre’s memoir,
The Caribbean and the
Wider World: Commentaries on My Life and Career, is the
autobiography of an outstanding academic leader, diplomat,
Caribbean regionalist and international public servant. It’s
always cause for celebration when people likeMcIntyre—or
Sir Shridath Ramphal, whose Glimpses of a Global Life
appeared in 2014—publish their memoirs and reflections
on their life experiences.
Formany readers, the central part of this book (chapters
8 to 14), which deal with McIntyre’s many and varied
assignments in regional and international organizations
and negotiations, as well as his advisory work for Caribbean
governments, will be of most interest. While I fully agree
with Compton Bourne, who said in his comprehensive
review, delivered at the book launch at St. Augustine in
March, that all students of Caribbean integration and
international relations would benefit from reading these
chapters very carefully, I plan to focus here on Sections 1
and 2 (chapters 1 to 7) and Section 5 (15 and 16).
As a social historian, I found McIntyre’s account of
growing up in Grenada in the 1930s-50s (chapters 1 and 2)
very illuminating. He was born into Grenada’s mixed-race
(“coloured”) upper middle class. On his father’s side, there
was a Scottish forbear (hence the surname) who came to
Grenada in the 1800s, part of the great wave of Scots who left
their impoverished homeland to seek their fortunes in the
Empire. The McIntyres were businessmen in Gouyave. His
mother’s family, who owned land, had roots in Martinique.
Grenada, like Dominica, didn’t have a large, powerful white
elite in the post-slavery period, so itsmixed-race landowners
and businessmen enjoyed more social status and economic
clout than, say, their counterparts in Barbados.
McIntyre’s father owned a pharmacy in Gouyave
which did very well at first, but it was hard hit by the Great
Depression of the 1930s; and later, when he re-established a
successful business in St George’s duringWorldWar II, this
was again almost destroyed when Britain allowed Canadian
imports to flood into the West Indies after the war. It was
an early lesson for the young boy of the impact that trade
policies, and international economic shifts, could have on
colonial livelihoods.
So McIntyre came from an established family and
grew up in relative privilege; but, because of his father’s
business reversals, and his death when McIntyre was just
20, the family was cash-poor and, in fact, downwardly
mobile during his youth. It took all his determination, his
precocious sense of his own worth, and his intellectual
brilliance, to secure the kind of education he wanted and
needed.
His school performance was remarkable—he entered
Sixth Form at the Grenada Boys’ Secondary School aged 13,
and got the equivalent of A-Levels at just 16. But there was
no easy path to university in Britain. At this time the very
new UCWI at Mona didn’t offer economics, which he was
Sir Alister McIntyre
The Caribbean and the Wider World: Commentaries on My Life and Career
A Vice-Chancellor’s Journey
B Y B R I D G E T B R E R E T O N
BOOK REVIEW
determined to study because of the inspiration of Arthur
Lewis. He worked at various jobs in Grenada for six years,
helping to support the family and trying to save money.
It was the governor, Edward Beetham—who would soon
become T&T’s last British governor and the person who
enabled EricWilliams and the PNMto form the government
in 1956—who secured him a scholarship from the Colonial
Office to study at LSE and an interest-free loan to help meet
his expenses.
Chapter 3 recounts his years at LSE and then at Oxford
(1954-60). He did brilliantly at LSE (where his personal tutor
was Ralph Miliband, famous socialist thinker and father of
David and Ed) but problems with his second supervisor
at Oxford, where he did graduate work towards a DPhil,
prevented him from actually receiving this degree. Like so
many youngWest Indians at British universities in the 1950s,
McIntyre became a devoted regionalist and supporter of the
Federation of the West Indies, reinforced by his leadership
role with the West Indian Students Union.
As someone who’s written on aspects of UWI’s history,
as well as a graduate of Mona and St. Augustine, I was very
interested in Sections 2 and 5, which deal with McIntyre’s
years at the University. At Mona as a young lecturer in the
early 1960s, McIntyre clashed with more senior academics,
especially the British professor, Charles Kennedy, over his
determination to introduce Caribbean materials to the
economics curriculum and to insist that teaching in the
discipline must have a “real world” grounding. (Lloyd Best
has also written about this.) But he was a favourite of the
Principal/Vice-Chancellor, none other than Arthur Lewis,
which of course didn’t endear him to his colleagues.
McIntyre spent three astonishingly productive years
(1964-67) at St. Augustine. Here he led the development of
the BSc (Econ) courses, helped to establish the Institute of
International Relations, and (with support from Cornell)
pioneered teaching in Management Studies, making
the upstart St. Augustine the first campus to deliver a
comprehensive programme in that discipline. This chapter
(6) is a valuable addition to the history of this Campus.
Back at Mona as Director of the ISER (1967-74),
McIntyre found himself sometimes at odds, not now with
expat seniors, but with his fellowWest Indians in the Faculty
of Social Sciences. As befits a diplomat, he is discreet on this,
not “naming names”; but it’s clear that the Marxist/Black
Power people who dominated the Faculty in this period
(or at least made the most noise) were suspicious if not
hostile to him. McIntyre believed in keeping his personal
political views to himself, something he said he learned from
Miliband at LSE, and he was certainly neither a socialist
nor a Black Power man. He believed that ISER’s mandate
required him to work closely with regional governments
whatever their politics, and again this was objected to by
the more ideological radicals. By 1974 McIntyre was ready
to leave Mona (to become CARICOM Secretary-General).
I don’t have the space to do justice to chapter 15, which
covers McIntyre’s years as Vice-Chancellor (1988-1998).
In Rex Nettleford’s memorable phrase, he “blew in with
Gilbert,” taking up the post in September 1988 just days
before that dangerous hurricane did substantial damage to
Mona. It was the start of a whirlwind of activity over the
next decade. Much of his time and energy, to judge from
this account, was devoted to fund-raising initiatives and
international networking, aiming both at shoring up UWI’s
financial viability, and making it a more global university.
McIntyre is again discreet, but it’s clear that he was
frequently disappointed by his academic colleagues, who
often resisted his initiatives, or simply failed to followup—he
singles out the (Mona) Faculty of Medical Sciences in this
regard. He also admits that he didn’t make much progress
on enhancing UW’s regional character, granted the strong
campus/national loyalties that had developed among staff.
(He says the senior administration at Cave Hill, under Keith
Hunte, was an exception but is discreetly silent about St.
Augustine!)
In fact, McIntyre says he is “more inclined to focus on
my failures than on my successes” as VC. This no doubt
reflects his sense of frustration at what he saw as UWI’s
resistance to change, as well as a becoming modesty. But I
don’t think there’s much doubt that he left the University
a stronger institution, in many different ways, when he
demitted office.
Bridget Brereton is Professor Emerita of Caribbean History at The UWI.
