UWI examines fresh financing plan

Governments of the region have formed a special committee to establish a new financing model between themselves and the University of the West Indies (UWI).

This was revealed today by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, who said the decision was taken following the conclusion of a “high-level” meeting on Wednesday chaired by Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

Sir Hilary said the move was necessary as the UWI remained hamstrung due to the millions of dollars owed to it by governments of the region.

Earlier this month, Sir Hilary disclosed that government debt to the UWI had been significantly slashed from US$117 million in 2014 to US$50 million at the end of last year, mainly through an asset for cash swap.

Mottley led the sub-committee of the University Grant’s Committee, which also included Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne, Jamaica’s Minister of Finance Nigel Clarke, Minister of Finance of Trinidad and Tobago Colm Imbert and several consultants including president of Sagicor Dodridge Miller and president of the Caribbean Development Bank Dr Warren Smith.

“In that discussion, there were two objectives: to recognize finally the increasing arrears owed to the university over the decades, the enormous impairment of those arrears that have seen over US$200 million leaked out from the university’s balance sheet. That we needed to find a solution to this crisis because these matters were from time to time, in addition to agreed but unfunded pension liabilities, that these matters of arrears, impairments and unfunded pension liabilities, these three issues alone, from time to time when our balance sheets are consolidated, they would show the driving of a deficit in our finances and that these matters are outside of our control.

“We have no control over arrears and impairments…” Sir Hilary said during a UWI Open Campus Council meeting this morning.

“But it was wonderful to participate in a meeting under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Mottley that said we need to find solutions to this, we need to find a way to take these matters off the university’s balance sheet because if we can take those matters off our balance sheet, our balance sheet goes into a very healthy and attractive condition…It ended beautifully with the setting up of one committee to deal with this matter to find solutions going forward.”

Sir Hilary said he believed it meant the end of “divisive discourse” and described the development as “the beginning of a new era of acceptance of mutual responsibility”.

He pointed out that even though the UWI’s enrollment had doubled in the past two decades its budget did not match that growth.

Sir Hilary said Government and the UWI had agreed on changes going forward.

“Now we’re entering into a new culture of university budgeting. We are moving from 30 years of a deficit-financing model over to a balanced budget model, and that is fine. The university has no difficulty with the balanced budget approach so that we contain ourselves within the margins of the contributions of the Governments, the student fees and the income that we are earning.

“So we now are entering a new partnership model arising from the meeting…The university now feels a sense of liberation removed from ill-informed narratives that illustrates that the success of this university in the last seven decades has been this intimacy of relationship between this management and the governments of this region.

“So this is a new paradigm ahead of us, a new paradigm of partnership is now before us, a new sense of professional responsibility based on the maturity of our collective responsibility,” Sir Hilary noted.

The Vice-Chancellor said suggestions over the years that the UWI’s finances had been mishandled were false.

“Unfortunately, many critics over the years have used the deficit to make the argument that somehow the five campuses and the university itself was being mismanaged when that was never true. It was never true and it was always dishonest and what this committee is saying is let’s take collective responsibility. Let’s work it out, no finger pointing,” he said. (randybennett@barbadostoday.bb)