#BTColumn – Governance of the UWI report

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by Ralph Jemmott

The Transmittal Letter to the Chancellor suggests that matters addressed in the report should be considered with a sense of urgency.

It emphasised ‘the urgent attention that the situation requires if the long-term sustainability and viability of the university as a regional enterprise and as an enabler of regional development in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is to be assured.’

The signatories concluded that the report was submitted ‘with the deepest expectation’ that its contents might ‘challenge the university and its contributing governments to reflect and act upon, with the urgency required.’

The whole report covers some 142 pages. This brief analysis attempts to look at the first 14 pages which address the key issues of the governance and management practices within the university. Reports of this nature according to the document itself, usually follow a ten- year cycle.

It may be interesting to know that the current report comes some 15 years after its predecessor. The question could well be asked as to why the five-year lapse. This in itself might constitute an indictment of the governance process.

The Report makes the legitimate claim that the University of the West Indies represents a regional and global success. Those of us who attended it feel justifiably proud. At the time of the report’s submission it had graduated some 248, 342 students and has a current enrolment of 50, 000 students.

The physical infrastructure at Mona and Cave Hill (I am not acquainted with the St. Augustine Campus) has grown exponentially over the years. The Times Educational Supplement ranks the UWI highly although there has been some question as to what that ranking actually means.

Unquestionably the UWI has achieved global recognition and accreditation with access to any of the top Universities in the world. As the report itself stated, the University of the West Indies has been ‘a premier shaper of Caribbean human capacity.’ This includes much of the leadership in numerous areas of endeavour, not excluding the region’s politics.

However institutional organisms like human organisms can suffer from a sclerosis, a slow and sometimes hardly perceptible hardening of the arteries. The report highlights a number of ‘macro-economic challenges’ facing the University of the West Indies. These include:

1. Political tension between the regional character of the University and the national remit of the territories.

2. Competition from foreign educational providers.

3. Under-developed funding mechanisms for regional tertiary education institutions and ‘structural anomalies’ in Caribbean education generally.

4. A high rate of migration for persons with higher level qualification.

5. Under-optimised opportunities to utilise I.C.T. technologies.

6. Questions about the business soundness implementation given the vision of the UWI in its attempts to internationalise itself.

7. The fact that recommendations on corporate governance are often not implemented.   

Academic Governance

In spite of the UWI’s ‘reputable accreditation standards,’ the Chancellor’s Report stresses some challenges in the area of Academic governance which if they are valid do not reflect well on the way the university or at least some of its campuses are actually run.  It drew attention to:

1. Unwieldy academic boards with a high degree of absenteeism

2. A perception by some academics that there is no forum in which issues relating to under and post-graduate concerns could be discussed.

3. Criticism of the promotion system for academic staff in particular.

4. Inadequate linkages between declared programs and the finances required to implement and sustain them.

To remedy these ostensible failures, the Chancellor’s Report has recommended the revitalisation of the University Senate to provide a forum ‘for collaboration, co-ordination, rationalising and monitoring of the university’s academic governance system as a whole.’ It stresses that the emphasis should be on a review of the academic boards in respect of their size, their membership and the high level of absenteeism. There are some serious concerns here.

Why should there be such a high rate of absenteeism, lack of transparency and accountability. Does this all reflect a deficiency in the personal style of management on some campuses where persons are hushed, ignored or bullied into submission and chose to opt out by absenting themselves, voting with their feet.

Or does this reflect cases where yes-people are rewarded and critics are victimised one way or another? It reflects poorly on both the bully and the bullied, the former for an absence of humanity, the latter for a deficiency of courage in standing up for what is right and just.

  The concluding section on governance treats to what it calls ‘People Management and Organisational Culture.’  It suggests that something is wrong beyond the management structures that goes to a behavioural culture.

Trinidadian social critic Lloyd Best used to say that many of the problems in the Caribbean are not technical, but cultural. They are people issues that cannot be solved by technology.

The Report states that feedback to the commissioners suggests that the university ‘is not intentionally focusing on the people in the organisation and that the employee experience is not managed efficiently.’

It spoke to ‘areas where appropriate attention and focus are needed and action taken to enhance the overall employee experience and improve engagement morale and productivity.’

The document concludes: ‘Changes recommended in the Report would require strong changes in management capacity, involving cultural issues, including the need to positively and urgently work towards building trust and leadership credibility. But these are human factors.

It therefore seems highly ridiculous to suggest that, ‘the digital transformation program has a HR stream that would support the implementation of the report’s recommendations.

Why do we look to technology to solve human issues when in fact the technology and the material and competitive status cultures are driven people further and further apart? If as I suspect, the issues of governance at the UWI are a people problem, restorative measures may prove more difficult than any of us suspect.

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.