A petition to appoint a new University of Guyana (UG) Council was yesterday presented to the National Assembly and the unions representing academic staff and workers urged that a Guyanese resident be appointed as Chancellor in the short-term.
The petition, which was presented by APNU MP Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, was sent to a special select committee by House Speaker Raphael Trotman.
It calls for the appointment of a new, fully constituted Council to ensure that UG “has a governing body that has the capacity to transform the institution into a truly national asset.” It asks that members of the new Council be chosen through an open, inclusive and participatory process, involving the Minister of Education, the University’s Academic Board and the National Assembly in the nominations and appointments. It also asks that that the Council is truly representative of interests groups in the society, that its members are informed about the needs and functions of a national university and that they have significant experience in academia to reflect the academic purposes of the university.
In framing the petition, the University of Guyana Senior Staff Society (UGSSA) and the University of Guyana Workers Union (UGWU) and the University of Guyana Students Society (UGSS), which comprise the ‘Operation Rescue UG’ movement, declared that they have “no confidence” in the current council, which they do not trust as currently constituted “to conduct its business impartially and in the best interest of the growth and development of the institution.”
With the presentation of the petition, the UGSSA and the UGWU, in a joint statement, said that they were pleased that a new council would be appointed, but emphasised that the “outdated” and “ineffective” council structure that makes it “deficient” remains.
Among the deficiencies they identified is that the council lacks sufficient academic representation of the university in its composition. “There are only four out of twenty six guaranteed academic members of the Council and this is insufficient membership to reflect the academic purposes of the university,” they said.
In addition, with the Chancellor obligated to nominate four members from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Commit-tee for International Coopera-tion in Higher Education (CICHE) in the UK and the University of the West Indies, the unions said that the Chancellor’s discretionary scope is limited to the detriment of the university. “…[T]hree of the agencies identified as sources of representation may have been pertinent in pre-independence times but not currently,” they said, noting that the CICHE no longer exists and new academic organisations have come into existence. As a result, they added that “even when the new council is appointed, it will not be fully constituted.”
The unions also said that the specification that staff must be represented by the UGWU restricts the staff to a specific set of representatives, since UGWU represents non-academic staff. As a result, academic staff, represented by the UGSSA, are unrepresented, they pointed out.
The civil society representation, they noted, was designed to ensure public representation of important groups in Guyanese society, which is fully acceptable, but in practice has been debased by partisan political considerations. “We trust this practice will cease,” they said.
According to the unions, the council also fails to function as a national representative body due to the lack of participation of most of the appointed members. “A quorum of eight suggests either the committee is too large or there is little or no penalty for no shows. The ability of a minority (five members) making the decision for the 26 members has led to undue influence of a small group to control the council, they pointed out.
As a result, the unions recommended that a Guyanese resident be appointed as Chancellor in the short term and that there be a de facto return to the original formulation that in the absence of the Chancellor, the Principal and Vice-Chancellor shall act in the Chancellor’s stead.
In the longer-term, the unions are calling for all stakeholders to support the review by consulting firm Trevor Hamilton and Asso-ciates of the university’s governance structure and they said that following the submission of the consultant’s final report, the necessary legislative changes are made to the UG laws and statutes.
