December 2014


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Message from the Principal: Agile, responsive and ready

In the highly competitive globalized market for tertiary education, the challenge for every university is how best to strategically extend its international reach. The considerations are enormous – what partnerships will bring the greatest benefits to staff and students, what values do the disciplinary strengths of possible partners add to our core programmes, what benchmarks do we adopt to improve, how do we enhance and protect our brand even as we seek to partner with institutions of wider repute.

The UWI has been steadily working to achieve its strategic objectives against a mission which values global recognition, international competitiveness, Caribbean integration, innovation and excellence. At the St. Augustine campus, we are enhancing our competitiveness by improving our quality against global benchmarks and internationalizing our operations by engaging in a series of partnerships with other universities, such as in India, China, the Pacific, Europe and Brazil very recently. We have created new opportunities for students from the wider Caribbean (ACS) to access the regional UWI, bringing diversity into our student population. Language learning (which we offer) in several of the languages for widening business in this globalized world is also essential.

In global recognition terms, we have been benchmarking our key performance indicators, processes, services and programmes with globally ranked peer universities from among several world university rankings, leagues and indices. Through institutional and programme accreditation, we have been learning from the organisational excellence, quality assurance and institutional effectiveness processes and indicators of global peers to transform how we plan for and deliver continuous improvement. We have learnt considerably from our local and regional accreditation through the Accreditation Council of Trinidad and Tobago, the Barbados Accreditation Council, and the University Council of Jamaica and need to press ahead from here to steadily build our quality and reputation. This is a necessary precursor to doing even better in the global rankings of universities. Our successful international experiences in institutional accreditation in Engineering, Medical Sciences and Business Studies have strengthened our capacity and confidence here.

One of the hallmarks of today’s world is that it demands extreme agility – both minds and bodies have to be flexible and responsive to challenges, while constantly planning for the future. We are mindful that this is what, ultimately, we want to create in our graduates, because when they leave our campus, this is the world they will inhabit. But as an institution, we must demonstrate this ability to be agile and responsive, looking to the future.

EDITORIAL TEAM

Campus Principal: Professor Clement Sankat
Director of Marketing and Communications: Dr. Dawn-Marie De Four-Gill
Editor: Ms Vaneisa Baksh [vaneisa.baksh@sta.uwi.edu]

Contact us:
The UWI Marketing and Communications Office
Tel: (868) 662-2002 exts. 82013, 83997
Email: uwitoday@sta.uwi.edu