BRIDGETOWN,
Barbados, Friday December 20, 2013, CMC – Barbados Prime Minister Freundel
Stuart, who four months ago ended a five-decade-old policy of funding tuition
for Barbadians at the University of the West Indies (UWI), on Wednesday called
on the UWI to graduate intellectuals with good ideas to ensure the Caribbean's
future development.
“The
possession of a university degree should begin to mean that its holder is
equipped to meet a wide range of intellectual challenges because his mind has
been developed to a level that admits of a certain flexibility based on a firm
grasp of logic, of sequence and of a basic ethics,” Stuart said at a ceremony
marking the end of the UWI Cave Hill Campus’ 50th anniversary celebrations on
Wednesday night.
“Yes,
the university will produce professionals and academics. But it must also
concentrate on producing intellectuals. As I see it, the true intellectual is a
man or woman who believes in the generation and elucidation of ideas. He or she
has to earn a living and must, of necessity, live off of what he or she knows.
But he or she must live also for what he or she knows.”
Stuart
said that developing countries, like those in the Caribbean, could not afford
to lose the battle in the area of ideas.
“We
may not win in areas like oil, commodities and military hardware. But we can be equals or, better still, superiors,
in the realm of ideas,” he said, adding there was much ado nowadays about the
need to produce graduates who could satisfy the demands of employers in the
public and private sectors.
“What
I find troubling from time to time, though, is when the end result is a
graduate so narrow in focus, that he or she gets lost in his or her
‘professionalism’ and, taken beyond the immediate perimeters of the specific
area of study, that graduate can reflect too little of the roundedness that
graduate status should imply,” he said.
Mr.
Stuart told the ceremony that there was a perception within the society that
the university was no longer commenting on issues critical to the development
of the region.
“It
is the university which should be helping the population to perceive some kind
of structure behind the complexity and seeming confusion of life today; some
kind of ordered drama behind the daily whirl of events. If the supposedly
leading thinkers in our society are not doing this, I ask, who should?
“If
Barbados and the Caribbean ever needed clarifying voices it is now. My sense is that these voices are either in
too short supply at the university or are certainly too muted. We live in a multidimensional world, and we
have to manage even the things that we cannot see by effectively managing the
things that we can see,” he said.
The
prime minister noted that the world had changed drastically from the years when
the UWI was established in 1963, noting also that socially, the region was
experiencing a situation where an increasing number of people, across classes,
face mounting frustration, hopelessness and insecurity as they seem to be
losing control over the forces that determine the quality and content of their
lives.
Stuart
said that education provided the solid foundation for a society to develop its
true potential, adding “the public services of this region are now better
resourced than at any other time in the region’s history, thanks to the
University of the West Indies; and to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, the
Cave Hill Campus has contributed immeasurably in that regard.
“Many
an individual, old and young, has been able to actualise a God-given potential
through access to this campus and has set out on the path to a vertebrate
life,” he said, describing the university as one which could stand head and
shoulders above many in the world of universities, despite the many challenges.
“Its
icons through the years now dot our landscape and have continued to serve the
Caribbean and the world with distinction.”
But
he acknowledged that a university in the West Indies had to reflect the
legitimate aspirations of a post-slavery and post-colonial people, and not
mimic the priorities of universities which were responding to a different set
of historical and developmental imperatives.
“I
concede that the task of the university can be made that much easier if
governments are clearer about what kind of societies they want to create. But the task of crafting a regional vision is
not one from which the university can afford to divorce itself. While not hostaging itself to governments of
whatever stripe, the university must see itself as a partner in the process of
development of the wider community which it is supposed to serve,” he said.
Finance
and Economic Affairs Minister Chris Sinckler in his 2013-14 budget on August
13, said that effective 2014, Barbadian students pursuing studies at the
university’s three campuses will be required to pay their own tuition fees,
while the government continues to fund economic costs.
The
decision effectively ended a policy of free university education for Barbadians
dating back to the Cave Hill Campus's opening in 1963, a year after the
government introduced full free secondary education to Barbadians.
Sinckler
said tuition fees would range from BDS$5,625 to BDS$65,000 (One Barbados
dollar=US$0.50 cents) and that the new policy would reduce the transfer to UWI
by an estimated BDS$42 million a year.
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