SUNDAY 6TH DECEMBER, 2015 – UWI TODAY
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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 onemeans 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 CARICOMregion through their respective
governments which, over the years have kept faith with the
original promise theymade to create andmaintain 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 positionmust 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 samemanner as theymake 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 researchwhich
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.
