The UG strike reflects the sentiments of frustrated Guyanese

Sentiments shared by Guyanese who are tired of a PPP/C system riddled with false promises, abuse, banditry, greed, and corruption.

Mr. ASJ, Seepersaud, Benschop (Pardoned treason accused), let's be honest. All Guyana problems are not govt-caused problems. At what point will the UG leaders take responsibility?

Have you seen this.

The Tragedy of UG: An Honest Insider Perspective

The plight of the University of Guyana continues to be a tragedy in the nation, but it is a tragedy choreographed by UG itself.  The government shares some blame but the bulk of the root causes of its plight has to be attributed to the people who have been running UG.

Let’s start with leadership. What can you get from people like Alexander, former YSM leader and Burnham admirer? The biggest failure has been at the Registry where they cannot produce student grades in a timely manner to allow students to register for the next semester.  Although the Berbice Campus sends grades to Turkeyen on time, the Turkeyen folks cannot do the data entry quickly enough to produce student grades. Some students said they are about to graduate and their grades are not in their transcripts, when they pull up their profiles on-line. Who is responsible for this fiasco? – the Registry, not the University Council or government.  The Council has blame only that it did not fire the dimwits who are running the Registry. Now that there is a vacancy for Registrar, I trust UG will bring someone from overseas.  There is nobody there now who will do any differently than is being done now.

Why do you even have a process where the Turkeyen Campus has to do data entry for the Berbice Campus grades when it can easily be done automatically when done electronically.  Are we saying Guyana does not have anybody with sense to program that process? Or, is it that we don’t care.

If you go to the Exams Division area, you would notice every square foot of their space has someone sitting there. They have expanded their staff over the years, yet you cannot get a transcript on the spot if you walk in, as is done in universities abroad, where with 2 clicks, the printer spits out your transcript. In fact, if you graduated from UG in the earlier years such as the 1980s, your transcript is not stored electronically.  They have to go search for it and you will get it after some weeks. They are in paper files, and if UG has a fire, your record is gone forever- you do not exist and you did not go to UG.  Since Opadeyi’s lucrative side job is to digitize land records, this is a project he should have been doing with the transcripts at the UG Registry. But good luck with that.  You think all those people sitting up there in the Registry care about that?

Now, let’s focus on the VC. I believe Mr. Opadeyi might be the highest paid VC in the history of UG, and probably the highest paid government official in Guyana.  Maybe, the Council can set the record straight on that. I understand he negotiated some very good terms and conditions for himself. (Is it true this package is close to $2 million per month?). On top of that, why did the Council allow him to take a side job, when he has a lot of mess to clean up at UG?  The Council must take blame for this. Having two jobs can cause a man to have to check in at the Heart Center.  And if something fatal happens to him, with all that stress doing a side job and the UG job, Guyana may have to pay for it. Is Opadeyi the only VC with such a lucrative side job while being VC? And how is that project going? Many thought Dr. Jaipaul Singh, a Guyanese who has been working with UG over the years, was a more experienced candidate with access to more resources to help UG.

However, we must give credit to Opadeyi for trying to revise the UG staff workload. That’s going to root causes of UG’s current problems. UG Lecturers are probably among the lowest paid in the world.  But UG academic staff have some of the lowest workload and duties compared to foreign colleges and universities.  In terms of work, UG is a cushy job where you may not see some lecturers on campus apart from their scheduled teaching times.  This is a norm at UG. Why don’t Opadeyi or the Press release the proposed, new workload for the public to judge if the expectations are too unreasonable?

But it is a great crying shame that someone is a UG Lecturer and cannot afford to own a car, or a house. I remember seeing a Deputy Vice Chancellor jostling at the car park to get a car to UG.  This is a shame. In the USA, some cleaners have nicer vehicles than their bosses. Shame must go to the government for not giving duty free concessions to the UG Staff. I felt sad when I heard it was under Dr. Jagan that the concessions were withdrawn. (From the recent sniping between the GTU and Education Minister, it is clear that even when the concession is agreed upon, the Government side does little to enforce it).  The government and country must understand that UG is a foundational institution, and must be accorded some special treatment. Academic staff can do better outside of Guyana, and so we must honour those whom have stayed and want to help their country. Without UG, where would teachers, scientists, accountants, managers, nurses, lawyers, doctors, and even crooked politicians come from? In the US, someone receiving unemployment benefits gets more money than a UG lecturer. The Council should lobby the government to restore the duty-free concessions right away. Any support for better salaries must be tied to a revised workload. That’s not negotiable.

Is UG poor?  Not really.  UG has lots of money, but the problem is how the money is spent.  Some see UG as a feeding trough and they milk it. Opadeyi and the Council should release the travel list and expenses for the staff who travel. There are some senior staff and heads of departments who try to hog those travel funds.  Many travel to things that bring no direct benefit to UG.  One senior person at the Berbice campus went to Thailand.  I understand that costs UG almost a million dollars, and UG got no benefit from that.  At the Berbice Campus, a request was made for $125,000 for a going away party for someone who was promoted to Turkeyen. Luckily, that request was denied.  UG spends money on fancy retreats and staff parties. When you have a serious money problem, you have to control or eliminate this type of spending until things improve.

These are some more ways in which UG wastes your money due to continued backwardness. At American universities, each instructor creates and gives the final exam to their students in the regular class setting on the last day of class.  They are already being paid and that’s their job.  You don’t have to pay them extra. There are no Exams Division or bureaucratic process for approval of grades. The instructors collect the papers, grade them, put their grades in the spreadsheet electronically and grades are ready in a day or two.  Grades don’t have to be approved through a department head or bureaucratic process.

But, this is how our UG does it. They pay outside invigilators to come in and give the Exam. That costs extra time and lots of money. Your money. Before that, the Instructor has to create a test and get it approved. That costs time. If there is a full time instructor at the Turkeyen Campus teaching a course, and there is a part time lecturer at the Berbice Campus teaching the same course number, UG requires that both lecturers develop and create one test, although each instructor may have taught the course based on their own styles and emphasis. That costs time. Further, the instructors cannot discuss the test by phone or by email. You have to meet face-to-face.  If the part-time person from Berbice travels to Turkeyen, he has to be paid salary, travel and expenses.  That costs time and money. Your money. In the 21st century, why are we operating like this?

Next, once you decide on the test, you have to send the test to the Exams division. They print the test; they have to do special packaging of the tests.  If you are in Berbice, they have to transport the tests to Berbice.  Once it gets there, somebody has to store it. On Exams day, the outside invigilators have to get it from the Test Office. After the test is given, the papers have to be packaged, taken back to the test office to be stored. The Instructor has to get papers from the office, score them and return them after grading. Have you counted the number of tasks of packaging, handling and shipping going on? Now, the test has to be graded. The part time person is paid extra. So there is a long drawn out, inefficient, unnecessary steps in the UG process. After the tests are graded, you submit paper copies of your grades.  Some committee has to approve the grades, then someone has to put the grades in somebody’s spreadsheet at Turkeyen. So the stupidity of the UG process never ends. 

Opadeyi needs to scrap this testing process and adopt the US process and you save tens of millions with the stroke of a pen.  Unfortunately, when Opadaeyi first came to UG, he talked about sending the papers abroad for more scoring. So he won’t see the stupidity of the current process. UG needs to establish a fully electronic process for grades and transcripts, and disband the Exams Division and reassign or fire those people to save money. They can do an electronic process now; they have the capacity and software and tools to do that.  Why are they not doing it? Is this a Council or government problem? I think not!

Another way UG wastes money is paying for course revisions.  There was a news report of UG paying money to some external group to do course revisions.  Why do they have to pay for this when they can go on line and find what other universities are doing? Don’t UG have smart people who can do that? Is this a Council problem or a government problem? Why waste money this way?

Why isn’t UG offering on-line courses as part of its regular degree curriculum, in this the 21st century?  UG has the Moodle software to do on-line courses, why are they not using it?  Whose fault is this?  The Council or government? American universities are able to be solvent because they are increasingly using on-line courses as a cost saving measure to boost their profits.  The labor cost and overheads to run an on-line course is a fraction of what it costs to use full time staff.  Even high schools in America offer on-line courses. If UG starts to use on-line classes, there are many Guyanese abroad who would be willing to help out or teach for UG.  Why aren’t we using this option? This is what I call the “braindeadism” that afflicts UG.  Who really are the progressive people at UG? Think of the cost savings when you don’t have to pay Georgetown folks to go to Berbice, or vice versa.

Another way UG shortchanges its students is in certain courses such as introductory politics and economics, instead of doing small group tutorials after the lectures, they do large group tutorials. This is unfair to students.

UG simply cannot wait on the government for handouts when they can be creative and do things to help themselves.  Suggestions were made to Opadeyi that he should connect UG with government resources.  The same way Opadeyi worked out a side contract for himself, he could have done that for UG.  Take the Berbice Campus, for instance.  The ministries combined in Region 6 have tens of millions of dollars for project monitoring, project evaluation, training of government staff such as the police, etc. What UG needs to do is secure government contracts to monitor the government projects, do training, etc.  In this way, the lecturers are leading projects and can earn extra pay or bonuses for that, they can employ the students in part time work or provide internships or work study experiences. Lecturers can write about the projects, thus boosting their research and publications.  In addition, we might end up getting better roads, bridges, buildings, because smart students are doing the monitoring. This is a win-win for Guyana.  Instead, the unions are out protesting, want full pay while doing that, and are withholding student grades.  Is this a winning formula? (It makes you wonder if not providing grades in a timely manner is deliberate to have leverage for their union protests).

In some areas, UG is overstaffed. There are people sitting in offices doing nothing, while they squeeze and pressure the underpaid and under-resourced cleaning staff and janitors.

UG staff complains about opportunities for advanced training.  One professor told me he had contacted a UG Registrar about scholarships that he can swing for UG from his American university.  He never heard back from the UG Registrar, so that person arranged about 20 scholarships over the years to the University of Belize.  Several Belizeans got their Masters and Doctorates that way.  People would tell you it’s hard to help UG because sometimes you have to beg them to help them.  If they do reply you, they put you through all kinds of red tape.  Is this a Council problem or government problem?

Now, why is it one of the UG unions is not recognized?  Is it that they have failed to meet some union compliances?  So how much credibility do they have, if they can’t get their own house in order? They need to correct that problem, if this has not been resolved as yet.

The UG administrators have no shame and no standards of quality.  I have seen long lines of students waiting to register.  I have seen long lines waiting at the student loan department.  I have seen lines of people at the Bursary. What can these people run efficiently? Are these the people teaching our students how to run a country?

Notwithstanding that UG has choreographed its own demise by backward thinking and poor leadership, on the whole, the Union people are good people. Dr. Ifill, Dr. Francis and Mr. Haynes are good people, and they are doing the right thing.  However, we need a new, responsible unionism, that goes beyond “The Council is bad, the government is bad.”  The Unions need to push for creative, 21st century leadership and strategies to rescue UG.

I do believe in a national university, but if the UG staff continues with the old unionism, and the administration continues with its old backward ways, only privatization may save UG.  The Nations University and Trexila should expand and give UG a run for its money or even make a bid to buy UG.

Guyana cannot afford to pour new wine in the old wineskins of UG. If you double their salaries, they will operate in the same old, ineffective ways.  Nothing will change. But in the midst of this melee, where is the voice of the Minister?

Sincerely,

Friend of UG

HEHEHEHEHE

The PPP are running UG like everything else in their control, into the ground.

So after reading the "UG Tragedy" your conclusion is the govt can't run anything?  Then you missed the point.  

The article argues that the UG people has the greater blame.  The govt has put a lot of $$$ into UG but you have dunderheads running it and the new VC making $3.12 M a month plus benefits.