There was much hype and high-spiritedness inside the University of Guyana’s George Walcott Lecture Theatre on Thursday. Students at the University of Guyana were being afforded the opportunity of engaging the four presidential candidates, one of whom, in a matter of weeks would be positioned to make decisions that can determine both the university’s fate and their own future. Diplomats and other important personages might have been invited but this was, above all else, an encounter between the students and the candidates.
The university’s Department of Government and International Affairs deserves full credit for pulling off such a forum. Some of the candidates have been finicky about public debates, mindful, it seems, that a less than convivial environment or a lacklustre performance might result in loss of political face. In that context the fact that all four of the presidential candidates showed up at Turkeyen suggests –or so it seemed – that each recognizes the importance of the constituency which our university students represent. Given their numbers at the event, the students too appeared to recognize the importance of being involved in and having their say in a political campaign to elect a government. They are, of course, not unaware, that students at other universities in other parts of the world have taken the lead in influencing political events in their respective countries.
Last Thursday’s forum, therefore, was always likely to be a lively one. On the one hand the presidential candidates would have wanted to impress an important constituency; for their part the students and their lecturers would have been keen to demonstrate that even a seriously ailing University of Guyana must be taken seriously as an institution for discourse and debate on issues of politics and government. The students would have wanted to, among other things, parade their intellectual credentials and also to hear from the candidates themselves about their plans for the growth and development of a much-maligned university as well as opportunities for job-creation once they would have graduated. The other consideration, of course, is that such a forum may have helped the students, as part of the electorate, not only to make their individual political choices on November 28 but also to help influence the political choices of their peers and their parents. This consideration, in particular, is not one which the presidential candidates could afford to ignore.
The University of Guyana has long been a hotbed of political jousting for ‘control’ of the institution. Often, the politics is crass and crude, so much so, that it has been the bane of the university’s very existence. Students too have brought their differing political persuasions to the campus, which practice, of course, is not unique to UG.
Both the presidential candidates and the students would have planned for last Thursday’s forum. The respective political parties would have ensured that the audience included their own supporters among the students and many of the students would have been keen to make their political convictions clear at such a forum. Again, such is the nature of some university-organized fora elsewhere in the world.
From all reports many of the students made clear their feelings on the respective presentations by the presidential candidates and it appears that how they choose to express their feelings did not go down well with Mr Hydar Ally, a prominent member of the ruling party. In a letter published in the Saturday November 12 issue of the Stabroek News. Mr.Ally took issue with what he described as “an orchestrated attempt by some people in the audience to disrupt the activity by way of manifest expressions of biases based on their own political preferences.” Participants, he said, “showed a clear preference for one candidate over the others” in circumstances where Mr Ally apparently anticipated “higher levels of tolerance for a diversity of views on the way forward.”
No stranger to the university’s political environment, Mr Ally’s letter contains elements of both feigned naïvety and patent double standards. One doubts that Mr Ally seriously expected last Thursday’s forum to be anything more or less than what it was, an important campaign appearance for the respective presidential candidates, on the one hand, and, on the other, an attempt by the students to give robust expressions to their political feelings. The UG forum, whatever else Mr Ally may have expected it to be, was not just an intellectual exercise but also an important campaign event for both the presidential candidates and the students.
If it is that Mr Ally might have anticipated that the students would have listened politely, provided muted rounds of applause, posed intelligent but patronizing questions and let it end there, then he is reflecting a surprising ignorance of the fact that this is an elections campaign and that “academics and budding academics” are as much a part of the electorate as are the crowds that gather at street corner political rallies. As is continually demonstrated in universities the world over, political passion often reposes in even the most austere intellectual environment.
And if, as it appears, Mr Ally was offended by what he perceived to be attempts “by some people in the audience to disrupt the activity” last Thursday, he would do well to remember that we continue to endure far more shocking demonstrations of inappropriate conduct from President Bharrat Jagdeo himself during this elections season.
