Dear Editor,
The Jamaican consultancy on the restructuring of the governance edifice at UG has been submitted. I will forward a copy to Chris Ram’s Plain Talk, the independent dailies, Prime News, Capitol News and Demerara Waves. There is a recommendation that the predominance of governmental (read that to mean PPP) appointees on the Council be drastically reduced.
When the consultants met with the leadership of the unions and the wider public, I made my submissions and I stressed the curtailment of political input in the council because it was this that eventually led to the complete loss of morale at UG. My letter here is to fill an omission. I did not speak to the issue of the nature of the Academic Board decisions
I hope when the report is to be discussed by UG and the wider Guyanese society my particular point here will be aired. Under the rules governing many legal organizations, for there to be an adoption of a decision or a motion or a vote to change the constitution, there has to be a two thirds majority of those present.
In some organizations, once there is a quorum, the meeting is legal and the decisions are legal, never mind if in the last ten minutes only three voting members remain. Here is what obtains with the Academic Board at UG and during the administration of Dr James Rose, the thing became a farce. This is what would happen. The Board consists of around fifty voting members.
Once a quorum is achieved, the Board goes into legal session. By the time, you reach the last item on the agenda, ‘Any Other Business,‘ almost ninety per cent of voting members would have left. The few remaining members would raise issues for which there was no opposition or detailed discussion. And the minutes recorded the emanations as decisions of the Academic Board.
This is not only immoral but a distortion of history. Fifty years from now, when researchers read those minutes, they would actually think that those were legitimate decisions of UG. Here now is a great piece of misleading news that the Stabroek News reported on. It was not that the Stabroek News committed an error.
The fault is the nature of the Academic Board. What the Stabroek News reported on did have legal backing but it was completely devoid of any moral content. The Academic Board in full session discussed the faulty leadership of former Chancellor, Dr Compton Bourne. There was no formal decision. Few persons spoke. There was hardly any defence of Dr Bourne. When most voting members had left, a certain academic raised the Bourne issue again under ‘Any Other Business.’ The Office of the Acting Vice Chancellor, Marlyn Cox, later published a press release saying that the Academic Board rejected Bourne’s resignation. This was completely untrue. One academic spoke in the dying moments of the session.
This farce at the Academic Board should stop. We need to change the statutes of the university to ensure that any formal decision of the Academic Board carries a two thirds approval, a simple majority or maybe even a third. But we have to stop the nonsense of three persons having a chat at the end of the meeting and because there was no rejection, what they ruminated on passes as a decision of the Academic Board.
The masquerade is quite simple. Wait until everyone is gone, air an unpopular subject, make sure the secretary records that it was ventilated and there was no opposition, and it becomes a decision of the Academic Board. Guyanese stakeholders must put an immediate stop to this.
Yours faithfully,
Frederick Kissoon
