My colleagues and I welcome you most warmly to this 2015 graduation ceremony of the St. Augustine Campus of The University of the West Indies. It is a pleasure to see so many friends and well-wishers at this major event in our University’s academic calendar. This year this Campus celebrates its 55th anniversary, as it was on October 12th, 1960 that with 67 students, the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture became the Faculty of Agriculture for an institution that was a mere 12 years old and was still a University College in special relationship with London University. Professor Bridget Brereton, in recounting the formal ceremony of handing over, notes that Arthur Lewis, who was then Principal of UCWI, described the merger as a “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.”
History has shown that age disparity has been no impediment to marital bliss.
I wish to extend a special welcome to Sir Hilary Beckles who is attending this ceremony in his capacity as Vice-Chancellor for the first time. Sir Hilary is no stranger to you but I’m sure you would like to wish him well in this new role. We are confident in Sir Hilary’s capacity to guide the institution aright during his term of office. I also wish to recognize Professor Eudine Barriteau, Principal of the Cave Hill Campus and Dr. Luz Longsworth, the acting Principal of the Open Campus, who are here in those capacities for the first time.
We are here to celebrate the achievements of these students who have satisfied the requirements of the University and will be recognized as graduates by the award of a degree or diploma. Graduation is a happy occasion for everyone. For the graduand there is the joy, the exaltation, the expectation of the profuse and warm congratulations, the thought, erroneous though it may be, that the long days of study and the penury typical of the undergraduate days are over. For most of you there is the nostalgia that comes from leaving the friends made, the moments shared and the memories of the physical beauty of this place below the hills. For those with graduate degrees, the accolades that fittingly recognize the additional time and effort will be even sweeter.
For the friends and loved ones there is the pleasure at seeing the completion of one phase of a young person’s life. Parents will often shed a silent tear at the realization that the child has indeed become an adult – not that an undergraduate degree is the only mark of the passage to adulthood – but there is no doubt that it is a significant one. In the moments of celebration let us not forget the University staff – all of them. There is the Faculty which has been responsible for transmitting the relevant information or showing you how to access it and internalize it to become the knowledge and wisdom necessary for action. We must also recognize the administrative and other staff; who share in this wonderful moment of feeling that yet another job has been well done and another class has run the course.
There is also the satisfaction of the governments of the region which have invested heavily in you because of their commitment to higher education as one means of procuring just and progressive societies. It is right and proper that in these ceremonies we always recognize the contribution of the people of the CARICOM region through their respective governments which, over the years have kept faith with the original promise they made to create and maintain a place of light and learning that would contribute to their betterment. Here especially we must thank the Government of Trinidad and Tobago for its unswerving commitment to and support of The University of the West Indies and particularly the St. Augustine Campus in its several parts such as the new South Campus at Penal-Debe, as well as the facilities of the Open Campus in this country.
The University of the West Indies is supported by almost all of the CARICOM countries and their recurring discussion as to the nature and size of that funding support. I wish to return here to a position on this that I have adopted in addresses I have given to other graduating classes elsewhere. I take the view that to the extent that a university has a positive impact on a society in many and varied ways, there should be public funding, although we have seen here and in other places the remarkable growth in for-profit tertiary institutions which treat students as customers rather than as young minds to be educated..
I have also expressed the view that part of university funding should come from student fees. I contend that tertiary education provides both public and private or positional goods. I am sure you social scientists know that a private good is an item of consumption that, if used by one, may not be available for others. The graduate benefits significantly from enjoyment of the private good and thus should contribute to the cost of that education which confers the private good. There is good economic evidence of the considerable private returns to university education. The difficulty arises in establishing the relative weights of the private and public goods, but to the extent that the University has capped the student contribution at 20% of the economic costs, that aspect of the debate has been settled at least for now.
This position must overlay a basic thesis that no student who is qualified and wishes to benefit from university education should be denied the opportunity to do so. It devolves upon the State to find the mechanism to identify those students who genuinely lack the material resources to benefit from university education and provide those resources in one or other form. No one must be left behind. I have also proposed that in the Caribbean as is the practice elsewhere, there is need to foster the culture of families which can do so saving for the education of their children in the same manner as they make provision for acquiring other private goods. In addition, there the issue of equity which is one of my most sacred value principles. In this context, I often quote Aristotle who in affirming proportionality in his Politics states that “the worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”
However, I must be fair and point out that there is another position to which I do not subscribe. It is posited that the social benefits of university education are so great that it is incumbent on the State to provide all the resources needed.
There is no doubt about the appetite of Caribbean students and particularly those of this country for tertiary education. Enrollment at St. Augustine this year has increased by 10.6 % and there are now over 17,000 students at all levels on this campus which I am told is almost bursting at the seams. These students come from all the contributing countries and from other countries as well. For example we have 150 from Guyana, 50 from the USA and 23 from Nigeria. The management of this Campus represents an enormous challenge, and I must thank Pro Vice-Chancellor Clement Sankat and his colleagues for their administration of this enterprise which is surely one of the largest businesses in this country, with obvious ramifications for its social and economic life.
My warmest congratulations to this year’s graduating class! There are 3,658 of you with 2,576 first degrees and 1,052 at the graduate level. 271 of you are graduating with First Class honors, 10 with Distinctions and 250 of the postgraduates achieved distinction level. We have special congratulations for those students who have excelled. The majority of students and graduates are in the social sciences and they are predominantly female except in the Faculty of Engineering, where males outnumber females almost two to one. I must point out that over the past five years this campus has graduated 23,500 students. That is no mean achievement and we should thank and congratulate the present and past staff on it.
I wish to refer to an aspect of our Academy which I have dealt with before here and on other campuses. There is no doubt that one of the functions of our University is to contribute to the human development of the CARICOM Caribbean countries in its basic social, economic and environmental dimensions and we can use various metrics to assess that contribution. I am confident that the University’s contribution has been positive whatever metric is used. On occasion I have referred to the work of the University in fostering entrepreneurship and innovation and cited examples of the innovation which have been of direct benefit. I have spoken of the triple helix of innovation representing the intertwining of the interests and resources of the University, the Government and the business sector. We pride ourselves as being a research university with the ability to play our role in that helix. We claim to fit the definition of a research university as “an academic institution committed to the creation and dissemination of knowledge in a range of disciplines and fields and featuring the appropriate laboratories, libraries and other infrastructure that permit teaching and research at the highest possible level.”
In that context I, like others, have emphasized the need for the so-called STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – as central to the thrust for the economic aspect of development. It has been universally accepted that there is almost immediate job value for those disciplines and countries claim that their projected economic growth will need increased numbers of STEM jobs. It does appear however that the call for increases in these disciplines seems to be loudest when countries are in economic recession, given the belief that it is mainly expertise in these fields that can provide a lever for economic growth.
However, we must never forget that there are other essential disciplines in a good University and we must give proper weight also to training in the humanities and social disciplines. I was intrigued recently to review research which showed that enrollment in the STEM disciplines was not statistically correlated with the recent economic growth of the OECD countries and the major contribution to growth was the total number of students rather than those in any particular discipline. There was significant correlation between the total student enrollment and increase in GDP as a measure of economic growth.
I found this interesting, as I have often been concerned by attempts to minimize the value of education in the humanities and liberal arts, pointing out a value-gap in knowledge and understanding between the sciences and the liberal arts. This in a sense is a refashioning of CP Snow’s depiction of the two cultures and the difficulties they have in understanding one another. But we know that every good society needs both the sciences and the humanities and research universities must concern themselves with creation and dissemination of knowledge in a range of fields. It is predominantly, although not exclusively through the humanities and the social sciences that universities stimulate the cultivation of curiosity and imagination of thought that are necessary for the long-term human development. It is trite but true that the world is flatter and as a consequence there is more inter-dependence, diffusion of information and technology and more need for communication. The need for imagination and creativity needed especially by small states is very real and these are attributes which fall predominantly within the purview of the humanities and social sciences. The core of liberal arts education embraces the critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy and strong communication skills which are necessary not only today, but in the future in this flatter world.
In sum, it is erroneous to pit the humanities and liberal arts against the STEM fields. There will be differences in aptitude for one or the other but we need the skills and abilities in both. At its inception, this Campus focused on engineering and agriculture, but now we find that over the past five years of the 20,000 undergraduate degrees, 29% have been in the STEM disciplines while 55% have been in the humanities and social sciences. Let me be clear, I appreciate the inestimable worth of the STEM disciplines, but a complete university must not be reticent about recognizing the societal value of the humanities and social sciences, and I wish each one of you, regardless of your initial discipline, to recognize and celebrate the fact that you have a role in the quest of our West Indian people for a better life for themselves and their children.
The joint contribution of the STEM disciplines and the Social Sciences to the kind of entrepreneurial activity our region needs was seen here recently in the enormously successful international conference on the Breadfruit convened by the Faculty of Food and Agriculture and supported by PSC Nitrogen. This development is especially relevant, given the increasing food import bill and the evident food insecurity in the region. The conference attracted participants from as far afield as the Pacific Islands and its basic goal was to realize the potential of breadfruit to contribute to food and nutrition security through promoting entrepreneurial efforts and development of related industries. The scope of topics covered showed clearly the wide range of disciplines needed to address the problem comprehensively. The conference also saw the launch of “Breadfruit Flavors: The ultimate breadfruit cookbook” compiled by nutritionist Chanelle Joseph which contains over 100 recipes for this fruit which was once regarded as fit only for the poor or perhaps the animals.
Dr. Laura Roberts-Nkrumah from the Faculty of Food and Agriculture describes a fascinating line of problem-based multidisciplinary research on breadfruit that includes the best methods of propagation as well as the assessment of the status of industry, the economics of production and the development of stakeholder linkages. I wish to congratulate those involved in this line of research and product development which clearly has enormous practical significance for the Caribbean and wider afield, if the geographical distribution of the attendees at the Breadfruit Conference is any indication.
This is also an outstanding example of the products of the UWI-Trinidad and Tobago Research and Development Impact Fund. This fund which was established three years ago, brought together the various University funding platforms and supports and promotes multi-disciplinary research projects that address pressing issues in six thematic areas that are directly related to national and regional development. The RDI Fund projects have led to new or strengthened collaborations with more than 56 local, regional and international partners. I thank the Government of Trinidad and Tobago for the generosity with which it has supported this fund.
The research being carried out in this Campus which has mobilized some $TT 18 million for projects in the past year, is highlighted in a beautiful publication edited by Professor Patricia Mohammed entitled “Advancing Knowledge, Impacting Lives” to mark the 55th anniversary of the establishment of the Campus. I would recommend it to you. In it, PVC Wayne Hunte, in charge of the Office of Research comments on the competitiveness of the University in research. The University has moved from winning about TT$ 60 million in research grants five years ago to about TT$ 330 million new grants per year from a wide variety of sources. He points out that the University is currently conducting collaborative research projects with about 120 different partner universities from 50 different countries.
I wish to thank all those individuals and institutions which have supported the Campus during the year and would make special mention of ANSA McAL and Republic Bank. ANSA McAL has promised a significant grant to erect a building on the Campus to house the Guardian Media School of Journalism, the Anthony N. Sabga School of Entrepreneurship, the ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre and the proposed Department of Psychology. The architectural works for this building are progressing.
Republic Bank has made a contribution of nearly TT$50 million for the construction of a new Republic Bank Building at the entrance of the Campus and an additional TT$30 million for two buildings: one for the Department of Creative and Festival Arts and the other for a Northern Students’ Plaza. The latter is a gift to the Campus while the Republic Bank building will be given to the Campus after 25 years.
The Campus continues to be supported by the private sector with grants from Methanol Holdings for the Chair in Petroleum Engineering, from bpTT for support of the Petroleum GeoScience Programme, and from the National Gas Company for our Research Awards, Research Expo and a Professor in Entrepreneurship. The Campus has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Lake Asphalt T&T (1978) Limited to collaborate on research, development and commercialization related to asphalt and asphalt-based products.
I also wish to thank Mr. Ronald Harford, Chair of Republic Bank for his sterling leadership of the University of the West Indies Development and Endowment Fund (UWIDEF) at St. Augustine. Mr. Harford has now retired from this position.
I referred to library services as being part of the infrastructure of any good research University and our library services represent one of the areas of which we must be particularly proud. In this context let me pay tribute to and thank Miss Jennifer Joseph who retired recently as our University librarian after six years in that position, having been a senior member of our library system for 17 years. The developments in this area over the years have been remarkable and we should be grateful to a long line of distinguished librarians who have overseen the movement from print to digital resources. We now have at our disposal hundreds of online databases and thousands of e-books which students can access from anywhere. In 2011 the University undertook a major development of a virtual library space and initiated its Libraries Information Connection so that students from any campus can have access to the information in any one of the University’s libraries through this cross campus electronic gateway. Our Caribbean specialties are a jewel. In the Alma Jordan Library alone there are over 100 priceless items in this collection, including the impressive Eric Williams and Derek Walcott collections which have been included in the prestigious UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
Let me wish you graduands well. You will do well, regardless of your initial discipline as those who have preceded you have done well in a myriad of spaces and places. You have received or will receive lots of advice. There will be those who will scare you by telling you that the current situation in the Caribbean the world is not propitious for young graduates. There will be those who will excite you with the endless possibilities for immediate life-long employment for persons of your talents. Obviously the truth lies somewhere in between. But I would like to emphasize one fact that has become clearer to me as the years go by. None or very, very few of you will be working in your first job ten years from the start of it. You will certainly experience the effects of Schumpeter’s disruptive innovation. Thus, it is far better to be job prepared than to be job ready and I trust our University in the short time you have spent with us has equipped you with the knowledge for the former. I also trust that you will steadily and surely acquire the wisdom to use that knowledge appropriately, as there is no wisdom without knowledge and the world has witnessed the horrors of the application of mankind’s knowledge without the benefit of mankind’s wisdom.
It is in this creation of information leading to knowledge that every good research university like ours finds a critical place and we are catholic in our approach to research. We engage in research not only in the physical sciences but also in the humanities. As it is teaching and research in the humanities and their application that can provide the information that should put brakes on the improper use of knowledge to which I referred. This why you will find us promoting the study of human culture, the exploration of ethical issues and in the 55th Anniversary publication to which I referred earlier and elsewhere you will find references to research on the constructs of gender, race and class that are of seminal importance for our societies. My own background is in the physical sciences, but I have always believed in the utilitarian value of research in the humanities. I like the definition from the American Academy of Arts and Science as “the disciplines of memory and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us to envision where we are going.” The research in this area that our University supports and its teaching hopefully help our societies frame the issues related to where we are going especially with relation to the issues such as the uncritical adoption of the science and technologies that invade us.
I ask you to remember that whether you regard yourselves as such, you are ambassadors for our University. I urge you to be good alumni – never being reticent about showing your Pelican Pride, maintaining contact with the institution and consciously thinking of how you can contribute to the development of those coming behind you. I know your loved ones are proud of you and I hope they are equally proud of and pleased with the institution that has brought you to this stage.
George A. O. Alleyne
Chancellor
The University of the West Indies
October 22-24, 2015
St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago
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