Former Director of the Univer-sity of Guyana Berbice Campus (UGBC) at Tain, Professor Daizal Samad who recently tended his resignation, is ready to serve in that position again.
In an interview with Stabroek News, Dr Samad said he has reapplied for the job because he wants to continue the projects he had started. With this is mind he has postponed plans to return to Canada where he is a citizen.
Samad’s biggest dream is for the UGBC to have full autonomy and he had pushed feverishly for that. The professor said it is difficult
to understand why UGBC has to be under the control of the Turkeyen campus, noting that not much can be achieved “if you’re bound hand and foot”.
He also said that he wanted to be “given a chance to do the work I am meant to do… We have situations where no registration is being done or not done in a timely manner.” The professor also said that UGBC had to abandon several courses and programmes because it did not have the authority to get things done.
“You can’t ask us to be of service to the people of Berbice and the people of Guyana and then bind us up. It cannot work! I think if we have our own campus… We can do miraculous things.” he said. The professor expressed a desire for the institution to eventually be renamed the University of Berbice or Cheddi Jagan University. According to him, the UGBC was fast becoming a broken place like Turkeyen but with the help of others, he had “stitched it back together.” The buildings which were reportedly in a bad shape are “now new and well maintained and the grounds are well kept.”
Malaysia
Dr Samad’s accomplishments at UGBC pale in comparison to what he achieved while serving as Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the National University in Malaysia in 1993. He also worked simultaneously with Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam. At that time there were only four universities in Malaysia and by the time he left in 1998 the number of universities had increased to 40. Dr Samad beamed with pride when he recounted that he was part of that great achievement.
“If prosperous, modern day Malaysia” can grow to that extent where a “lil Corentyne, Berbice boy was involved, then having only one university in Guyana is almost retarded thinking,” he posited. “This is not the idea of progress and development. That is the kind of thinking we have in this country which I think retards the development of education and other areas.”
Samad was born in Albion, and spent portions of his childhood in Rose Hall, Port Mourant and in New Amsterdam. He attended the Rose Hall Scott’s School, the Port Mourant English School (primary) and then the JC Chandisingh Secondary where his father was deputy headmaster under Mr Chandisingh.
“They put to you a kind of discipline, I think they over did it a little; my old man used to pick on me,” he recalled with a chuckle. However, he believed the said discipline informed his approach to studying when he was at UG in 1977, where he earned a First Class Honours Degree in English, all the way to earning his doctorate from the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Canada.
Samad started his teaching career at age 16 at the Port Mourant Primary School. Three years later when he enrolled at UG he “suddenly discovered I was fairly bright. It was a real shock.” According to him, UG at that time had really good lecturers and mentors, like John Rickford, Walter Edwards and others whom he described as “top-notch teachers and scholars. In a way they prepared you for life. You tended to learn as you watched them.”
According to him, Rickford pushed him to start publishing and by his sophomore year, he had already started his publishing career. Samad wrote articles for international scholarly journals and books. Today, he encourages young university students not to wait until they graduate but to start getting published early in order to boost their chances of securing overseas scholarships.
On completing UG, he taught at Cummings Lodge Secondary for three years before winning a scholarship to UNB to read for his masters and subsequently his PhD.
“There is a habit in Guyana where people think that to have a Masters, they have arrived,” he observed. However, he was taught different by Canada’s premiere administrator Professor David Robertson of Galloway that “Masters is nothing. It’s just a stepping stone to the PhD and then the PhD is a stepping stone to a real career.
“The PhD is the beginning, not the end. I learnt that pretty fast. Everything I learnt about university administration, I learnt from him as well,” he reiterated. Samad said his performance at UNB was outstanding, despite having to compete against students who came from Oxford, Cambridge and other internationally recognized universities. He outshone them because he had the “old Guyanese, Berbice hunger where you’re never satisfied. You want to do better and just don’t want to be beaten.”
For five years he was the best graduating student and that meant “more money coming in” to take care of his family and pay his tuition. His entire fee amounted to about US$1.8 million, and he was grateful for the scholarship. “We need to learn that there is a lot of money out there at Canadian, American and UK universities and the money is available to us as Guyanese, as world citizens” he said, while encouraging students to work hard.
Samad taught at UNB for some time before moving to St Thomas University where he was an assistant professor. This is where his career started to take off, he recalled. According to him, the Modern Languages Association of America – the largest scholarly body in the world, soon ranked him at number eleven in the world. However, he believed “The ranking system was unfair to people like my supervisor. I was ranked above him. They neglected to count up a whole lifetime of work and they counted a year’s work.”
He subsequently went to South East Asia as an Associate Professor, attached mostly to the National University of Malaysia. In 1999, King Hassan (II) had built the top class Al Akhawayn University in Morocco and invited him to serve as senior professor.
“It was a very exciting experience. Students were drawn from the top one per cent of the rich.” The school was “horribly expensive…” Dr Samad designed Masters programmes for communications studies, liberal arts and other programme. The king wanted it to be accredited by the Middle States University Association and after five years of hard work, it was achieved. Dr Samad said he was then invited by the Sultanate of Oman to be a senior advisor to the sultan for higher education and was solely in charge of about 16 private and public universities and colleges. He started to design new classroom spaces on rails and Olympic-sized swimming pools and black box theatres because they had the money and would get it almost immediately when he made a request.
UGBC projects
The professor said that he has travelled to over 60 countries and all over Guyanese would portray Guyana negatively. But, he thinks the only problem with Guyana is that the “moral fabric has been torn apart” and steps must be taken to restore it. As such, Samad has implemented a number of community service projects at UGBC where students distribute hampers to the elderly, disable and needy in poor communities.
He also undertook an initiative to work closely with the police to enhance their professional image and started rigorous training of ranks from the Felix Austin Police College. Ranks were given free lectures at the Tain campus in subjects such as ethical behaviour, oral and written communication, police report writing, mannerly conduct, the fundamentals of law, first arrival medical treatment, conflict resolution, domestic violence and information technology.
Dr Samad has also helped to obtain 14 scholarships for “very bright Berbician students who are poor or financially distressed” and had pledged to obtain 22 more but “I was off the job and no one pursued it.” During his four-year tenure, he also saw an increase in enrolment by 200 per cent, consistent fiscal surplus and cutting edge computer centres with high speed internet. Coupled with that, Samad said within three years there was a massive turnaround where 86% of UGBC lecturers had Masters degrees and higher as opposed to only first degrees. He was also proud that the Tain campus boasts the most well-equipped and well-stocked agriculture, chemistry and biology lab in the country.
There has also been huge spike in research and publication and despite the other 14 per cent of the lecturers having only first degrees most of them were published in the international scholarly referee journals. Further, he noted that Dr Gomes, a plant pathologist is the most published scholar at the UGBC. The campus has also engaged the farmers and has “helped to cure diseases in plantains and bananas, potentially disastrous disease in sugar cane and have been looking at dead fish syndrome and worms in fish.”
Samad said one of the ways in which he nurtures his students’ success is by encouraging them to do a lot of personal research and expand their knowledge. When a student enters his classroom that student must leave a different, better and evolved person.
“University education is not about your grades you achieved but about what capacity you have at the end of it to analyse your actions and the consequences of those actions… Now that’s an educated nation,” he said.
