The University of Guyana Senior Staff Association (UGSSA) and the University of Guyana Workers Union (UGWU) have sounded their “profound disappointment” at the re-appointment of Professor Compton Bourne as University Chancellor, saying he has not demonstrated the qualities needed to lead the institution.
Bourne has been re-appointed to serve another three-year term by the University Council, which the two unions said is making critical decisions although its extended tenure expires at the end of this month.
“The offer and acceptance of a new [three]-year appointment that was made behind closed doors – a process that revealingly lacked transparency – fills us with dread!” the unions said in a joint statement, signed by UGSSA President Dr Patsy Francis and UGWU President Bruce Haynes.
They noted that Bourne’s initial appointment was met with great optimism by all University staff, particularly academics. “Here we believed was an eminent academic who had led a University of the West Indies Campus and the regional Caribbean Development Bank and who therefore was unquestionably capable.
“Professor Bourne’s stewardship of the UG to date however has been more than disappointing,” they, however, lamented, while saying that it was instructive that his equally eminent predecessors, Professor Calestous Juma and Professor Bertie Ramcharran, resigned as Chancellors of the UG rather than preside over a Council that compromises long-standing, globally held academic principles.
The UGSSA and the UGWU justified their opposition to Bourne by pointing out that he had attracted “precious little” in the way of funding for the university, “thereby entrenching the sense we have that the University is condemned to continue to operate with a $250-million dollar recurring financial deficit” at the Turkeyen Campus. In addition, they blamed him for sanctioning “by consent or silence” the practice of financing the deficit by taking an annual advance from the Student Loan facility and for overlooking the illegality of the University failing to remit the tax, insurance and credit union deductions from employees’ salaries on a timely basis, in accordance with the law.
They also said that Bourne presided over the Appointments Committee to declare ‘null and void’ contracts that were properly executed by Council, even though it is only Council that could make such a declaration. Added to that, they accused him of facilitating the setting of a precedent that University lecturers can be fired at any whim and fancy of the Council because they are employed at the pleasure of the Council.
The unions further criticized Bourne for showing “manifest contempt” for all the stakeholders of the University community by refusing even to acknowledge their correspondence or even dialogue with them despite several attempts to engage him. “He ignores the fact that our students and staff continue to work and study under grossly substandard conditions that he would have never dared to offer the staff and students at the St. Augustine Campus thus displaying disdain for his fellow Guyanese,” they added.
The UGSSA and the UGWU also highlighted the fact that Bourne’s re-appointment, which was announced on Friday, was effected by a Council whose life had expired since March 31, 2012, but which received an extension until June 30, 2012. “That this Council remains and more so, is making critical decisions notwithstanding a strong call by the Unions, supported by hundreds of signatures on a petition to be laid in Parliament, for the appointment of a new Council is an affront to us. We, the Operation Rescue UG Coalition of Unions and Students note with a mixture of sadness and disgust that hadn’t the media raised the matter following the Unions’ call for Prof. Bourne’s resignation, the UG Administration would not have seen it important to inform the University Community of Prof. Bourne’s reappointment. As usual, we, staff and students, are the last to be informed, perhaps because we are perceived as unworthy of such information,” the unions said.
They further stated that UG needs a chancellor who is “courageous, bold, resourceful, a consensus builder, and one who can make change happen.” They suggested DDL Chairman Yesu Persaud, Professor Sister Noel Menezes, and Professor Winston McGowan as persons who possess the qualities needed in a Chancellor and would serve in the post with “great distinction.”
