While the drama of Linden has been commanding national attention, other things have been happening under the radar, so to speak. The life of the last UG Council, the governing body of the university, came to an end on June 30, and on Wednesday of last week citizens discovered from Minister of Education Priya Manickchand that the new council had been almost fully constituted, bar two nominees still to be identified by specific organizations. Considering that the composition of the council had been a major concern of the UG unions and students’ association since January this year after it arbitrarily terminated the contract of Mr Frederick Kissoon and others, and considering that there had been protests on campus and formal petitions from the unions and student organization in relation to it, Minister Manickchand can only be said to be operating with stealth as her watchword.

The intention was clearly not to say anything until the full council was in place, but after a petition concerning it was presented to the National Assembly by APNU MP Rupert Roopnaraine, following which Speaker Raphael Trotman referred it to select committee, Ms Manickchand was forced to make clear that this was all an exercise in futility. Neither she nor the government, it seems, has any great interest in allowing the university to function as a true academic institution, or in promoting the structural reforms which would be necessary to achieve that. For them, politics trumps everything else, and political control is what is at issue here.

Subsequent to the termination of the lecturers’ contracts early this year, there was a staff strike on campus which homed in on the appalling conditions at the university, and held the University Council responsible for the deterioration. It was Minister Nanda Gopaul who negotiated an agreement which allowed a return to work while the two sides talked. While there were one or two minor improvements on campus, a more comprehensive upgrading was painfully slow in materialising, according to the University of Guyana Workers’ Union (UGWU), the University of Guyana Senior Staff Association (UGSSA) and the University of Guyana Students’ Society (UGSS). In addition, they said that the council was not abiding by the terms of resumption which ended the strike, and their concerns were not being addressed, all of which produced further protest action.

Since the competence and arbitrariness of the University Council were seen by the campus organizations to underlie many of the problems at UG, these sent a petition to Minister Manickchand in March requesting a restructuring of the council, and proposing, among several other things, that the non-academic members to be appointed should be distinguished, principled and experienced. The Minister had ample warning that the campus bodies were also asking an MP to introduce a petition in Parliament, since that was indicated at the time, so one can only presume that thereafter she wasted no effort in setting about pre-empting it.

That document, as we reported in our Friday edition, asked that new council members be selected by an open, inclusive and participatory process involving the Minister of Education, the UG Academic Board and the National Assembly, and that (among other things) the members should have significant experience in academia to reflect the university’s academic purposes.

After they heard about the Minister’s statements in Parliament, the two unions issued a tactful press release, saying they were pleased that a new council would be appointed, but that the defects of its structure remained. Primary among these, of course, is the paucity of academic representation. “There are only four out of twenty six guaranteed academic members of the Council,” they wrote, “and this is insufficient membership to reflect the academic purposes of the university.”  They also pointed to the fact that the staff representative on the council is required to be nominated by the UGWU, which is the non-academic union of the two on campus. The academic union, the UGSSA, therefore, has no member to represent it.

The other major concern reflected in the petition, although again, discreetly expressed, was the political nature of the council’s configuration. While acknowledging that civil society representation on the body was acceptable, the petition said it had been debased by partisan political considerations.  It might be observed that after under-funding, it is political control of the council and political decision-making that have constituted perhaps the main problem of UG.

That political control has been possible partly because of the unwieldy structure of the council, which has a large number of sleeping and surfeit members on it who do not show their faces at meetings, thereby permitting a small group to dominate decision-making. The petitioners, for example, alluded to the four nominees from overseas university associations the Chancellor had to put forward (the Chancellor has six nominees in total), an arrangement that had no relevance nowadays. In any case, they wrote, one of these associations no longer exists at all, and new academic organizations have come into existence. “Even when the new council is appointed,” they said, “it will not be fully constituted.”

Out of the 26 members of the council, eight form a quorum, and as UGSSA President Patsy Francis has said, this equates to the same number of persons the Ministry of Education can nominate.  The implications do not need any further expansion. It might be noted too that there is a review under way into the university’s governance structure by consulting firm Trevor Hamilton and Associates.

It seems that the Minister was not even prepared to consider the interim suggestions of the petitioners pending the recommendations coming out of the review, and one wonders, therefore, whether she will be receptive either to the recommended reforms as they relate to the council when the Hamilton report is finally handed over.

What is most disturbing, however, is Ms Manickchand’s clandestine modus operandi in this instance, and her total unwillingness to discuss any interim proposals regarding the council with the various stakeholders in UG. If there is any institution outside of Parliament where one would expect that views could be given a genuine hearing and taken into account, one would expect it to be in a university. The Minister, however, appears to have another less liberal model in mind.