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History
Cheddi Jagan, then Premier of British Guiana, considered that the University of the West Indies, to which his government had contributed since 1948, was not meeting the demand of his countrymen for higher education. On 4 January 1962, Jagan wrote to Harold Drayton, then in Ghana, to ask him to seek the advice of W.E.B. Du Bois on starting a new university.
Drayton returned to British Guiana in December 1962, and it was on his advice that Jagan wrote to socialist scholars in the United Kingdom and United States, including Joan Robinson at the University of Cambridge, Paul Baran at Stanford University, and Lancelot Hogben at Birmingham to involve them in the recruitment of staff.[3]
The University opened on the grounds of Queen's College in late 1963. Its first chancellor was Edgar Mortimer Duke and its first Principal and Vice-Chancellor was the British biologist and mathematician Lancelot Hogben.
Excerpt from a speech from Dr. Harold Drayton in 2009.
βMuch as I enjoy all the many flattering tributes you always shower me with, I want to confirm tonight what I have always acknowledged: despite the hard work of all those of us who were involved with the University project, it was Cheddi Jagan who was the unfaltering political sponsor of UG. And now that I am busily engaged in looking in detail, especially at the records of 1962, I can tonight sharpen that assessment. Had it not been for Cheddi's steadfastness, in firmly resisting those who as late as December 1962 made their last attempt to reverse the decision to establish an autonomous Guyanese institution for Higher Education and Research, UG would almost certainly never have come into being. That is our History."