On New Year’s Day in 2008, Clement Krishnanand Sankat was officially appointed Principal of the St. Augustine Campus of The UWI. It had been nearly fifty years since he had left Queen’s College in Guyana on a government scholarship to the Faculty of Engineering. He got his BSc in 1972, receiving the Sir Solomon Hochoy Award for best Mechanical Engineering student before returning to the University of Guyana to lecture for a while and then picking up a post-graduate scholarship to do a Master’s degree back at St. Augustine. A PhD at the University of Guelph in Canada followed and by 1978 he was back at St. Augustine for good.
As he reflects on how the time has passed, Professor Sankat reckons that since leaving his family in Berbice as a teenager he has spent practically his entire life living in Trinidad.
“This is my home,” he says. “Where else?”
It is a couple of weeks before Professor Sankat hands over the Principal’s mantle to his successor, Professor Brian Copeland on July 1. He has been discussing his two terms in that office: eight years of his accomplishments, challenges and the things he feels proud about leaving behind.
But he has reached a moment of nostalgia. It comes when he speaks about his years at The UWI and how much a part of his life it has been. People ask him if he is sad about leaving the office of the Principal but it isn’t about that at all.
People have to understand that when I left Guyana, I was very young, he said. Once he came to Trinidad, first as a student in 1969, then as a lecturer, he never lived in Guyana again. His wife, Dr. Rohanie Maharaj, is Trinidadian and he has five children, Sarisha, Nishal and Katyana; two daughters, Olivia and Cecilia, live in Canada. The UWI and Trinidad and Tobago, he says, shaped him intellectually, morally and professionally. It is the place he considers home. And if T&T is the place he considers home, then UWI must be his favourite room in that house.
For it was at the St. Augustine Campus that he made his way through the academic world of engineering. He was Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Assistant Dean and then Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, and was the Campus Coordinator, then Pro Vice-Chancellor for Graduate Studies before taking over as PVC and Campus Principal from Acting Principal, Professor Bridget Brereton, who had been the bridge when Dr Bhoendradatt Tewarie left.
It has been decades entrenched at the St. Augustine Campus for him, forming bonds in all its nooks and crannies as he navigated his way to the helm.
I asked him what he felt were the personal highlights of his career.
“I think the highlight of my career is contributing to development in my area of research; my contribution to university, country and region. While I have served at every level of this campus in administration, that was not my calling. The highlights of my career, the things that gave me the most pleasure, were associated with my research in food, in agriculture, and to see my research come into action. That’s what I did for 30 years,” he said. “I did it with a lot of passion.”
Next on the list was “becoming a Reader, which was a mark of distinction, the first Reader in Engineering, becoming a Professor of Engineering, those are accomplishments I value. I think when you come into the University as an academic that is what really you should aspire to – to be a professor, to be the best in the profession.”
But there is always the administrative side, he said. “I always had a foot in administration, simply because I wanted to give service to my Faculty, Campus and University and also to contribute on State Boards, etc. I hope that when others look back at my accomplishments they will see that in every sphere where I served as an administrator, I left some distinctive mark.”
He said that the Mechanical Engineering programmes were internationally accredited under his watch by the IMechE (UK) for the very first time and that he and a couple of others pioneered the BSc programme in Agricultural Engineering at UWI when he returned from Guelph. He talks too about how many graduate students/engineers he trained.
“My graduates have given me immense pleasure,” he said proudly.
“So both in the graduates we produced, our research, whether it is work we did in the diversification of the sugarcane industry, like the sugarcane bagasse for animal feeds; mechanical equipment for nutmegs; nutmeg processing in Grenada; the drying of fruits and herbs and spices for the Eastern Caribbean islands; mechanization in agriculture; storage of the breadfruit, pommerac, you name them, shadon beni, these things have brought me immense pleasure, because I was always curious. I always wanted to solve problems. I’ve always been very focused on problem-solving and creativity as a researcher, as an engineer, creating a better world around us. These things have brought me a lot of pleasure.”
He refers to a University-wide report he did on graduate education at The UWI. “That report I think stands out. I have always felt the university should be a standout in terms of graduate training and research. I am leaving this Campus very proud of our graduate students. One in every three students at St. Augustine is a graduate student. We have the biggest graduate student numbers across the whole university. I leave the university with St. Augustine being the biggest Campus in the university system.”
Relevance, Responsiveness, Reach, Regionality and Research. These were the watchwords that guided his tenure, he said, as he reached into a dossier on the table to extract a Powerpoint presentation from when he first became Principal. He talks about reaching out, like to Tobago, like to San Fernando where a satellite campus – the South Campus at Penal-Debe – has been under construction for a few years.
“In an environment where the Campus was pressed for space we didn’t want to touch our green spaces. The space at St. Augustine was already overloaded. Setting up another space was important, as was trying to acquire new spaces on the outskirts of our Campus right here. We’ve been doing that too. We’ve been buying up lands on the eastern side and putting up buildings. That is where our new Teaching and Learning Centre is; it’s on a new space that the Campus bought. Trinity House, the Film Building, the Library Building, all these are buildings on new lands purchased, because we didn’t want to overcrowd this lovely St. Augustine Campus and its ancestral greenery from the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture. I wouldn’t do it and I hope those coming after me do not do it also, because I would be the first to protest,” he said.
He is particularly proud of the acquisition of the lands at Orange Grove which is the site of the planned Agricultural Innovation Park. “Remember Orange Grove was land in exchange for the Mt Hope Campus that was promised by former Prime Minister Dr. Eric Williams, but was never achieved. This principal worked steadily to achieve this with the support of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and that has been one of my significant contributions.”
He is also proud of the 150 acres of land at the South Campus and its “physical structure of 11 buildings, including residences, sporting facilities, a state of the art cricket ground, football field, pavilion, swimming pool, and student facilities that would be the envy of the students at St. Augustine or any Campus around the world. Rolling, green landscape with 10 acres of citrus already planted!”
I ask him if physical expansion would summarize his legacy. He says it is a part of what was a bigger vision. “The campus I inherited was a growing environment. We had to create new spaces.”
He talks about Faculties created – Law, Science and Technology, and Food and Agriculture – and he says the latter is also one of his legacies. “I worked with my colleagues to recreate this thing because there was a crying out from our stakeholders to bring back agriculture to the top of the university’s agenda and there is good reason for it, we are importing $4 billion in food, and the university came out of a legacy in agriculture. That is why Orange Grove, our East Campus with the Agricultural Innovation Park is now going to be the centerpiece of what is going to happen in agriculture on this Campus.”
The Faculty of Law came about by the University taking that decision because the demand was overwhelming, he said.
“When I came in as Principal more than 1,500 students were applying to do Law, they would have had to do their first year in Trinidad and the next two years at Cave Hill. You know how many were getting places? Fifty. And that was repeated in Jamaica. So it was not like the University wanted to destroy the Faculty at Cave Hill. The University wanted to be responsive and to reach out. And of course, the South Campus came at the same time as the expansion of Law and therefore it found a natural home in there, just half an hour from St. Augustine,” he said.
“So yes, I won’t want my legacy to be seen as something just physical or expansionary, it was an expanded vision that included the growth of student enrolment, ensuring quality with institutional and programme accreditation at the centre. When I became Principal, students were sitting on the floors and corridors of this Campus. And the new facilities have removed all of that. There was a crying out for more space. Today we have some of the best teaching spaces in any part of our University at the Teaching and Learning Complex, the Faculty Development Centre on St. John’s Road, and many more.”
He is happy about the residences that were built for medical students at San Fernando General Hospital and Mt Hope and he regrets that one, possibly the most pressing, has not yet been started at Port of Spain, though he says the plans are already there.
He lists some of the buildings that were completed under his watch, and some he initiated. The Film Building on Carmody Street, he says, was one of his promises.
“The Department of Creative and Festival Arts has publicly complained about space. The first building built under my tenure, you wouldn’t believe, was for the DCFA in Gordon Street. And as I leave, we are putting up a $25 million building for the DCFA that is rising in the air with the support of Republic Bank. This is also one of the achievements under my leadership, forging multi-million dollar partnerships with the private sector and also building strong international partnerships, for example with China, India, Korea, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, etc. ”
He gets up to show drawings of the projected design of the northern entrance of the campus where Republic Bank is being built. It will transform the look and feel of our Northern Entrance, he says.
He says he has wanted to build a “world-class university” and I ask whether he thinks he has left behind a world class university and what would be those world class characteristics.
We are on that path, he says, offering a “quick checklist” taken from a 2013 lecture at UWI delivered by a global tertiary education expert, Dr Jamil Salmi.
 The first thing would be attracting the best talent. “Now my score would be St. Augustine continues to attract the best. You just have to see the quality of students we accept from our secondary schools – many very good. Other leading universities in the world would be pleased to have them. We continue to attract excellent West Indians and others to the academy as lecturers. We could do better if we had the ability to compensate better, but the environment also in Trinidad and Tobago has sometimes defeated us because good people have been turned off because of the crime.”
The second aspect would be securing great resources, essentially money.
“In many ways in the last several years we’ve done very well. The regional governments have supported us and particularly the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. The advent of GATE has brought immense benefits for students and their participation in university education, but I leave at not such a good time because we are now engulfed in the downturn in Trinidad and Tobago’s gas and oil economy and so the Campus will be challenged in the next couple of years for resources. We are aware of this. And we are developing strategies to deal with this downturn, but if we do the necessary restructuring and implement with resolve, we can emerge in the next few years a much stronger Campus and University.”
The third item on his checklist is “very good” governance.
“The UWI has a very unique governance structure because of the regionality – 17 governments – a structure that is sometimes seen as excessively bureaucratic and difficult, but let me say that we do have a governance structure that works and ensures accountability at every level.”
He says that while the UWI gets “great marks from me in terms of governance, I still think we have a way to go to becoming a world class university.”
But for him, it is time for a different way of life, one where he spends time with his family and tries to catch up on lost moments. “I’m looking forward to experiencing what it means to not be on a treadmill every day of the year, he says, but at the same time, “I’m not ready to be hammock-ized.” |
