WHEN I SAW the headline Send All To UWI, I literally backslapped the paper. The suggestion is for Scholarship awardees to study at another institution only if UWI does not have the right programme. This is the same thing as an Exhibition. So, for one, the Barbados Scholarship would be gone, leaving only the Exhibition. This is deleting an honour which has been presented annually for many decades. For another thing, this asserts a blind pride that studying at UWI is equal to studying at MIT or Cambridge. So why would you need something so unnecessary as an experience at a top-notch school when you can study just down the road? UWI is not the same thing. Yes it can produce doctors and lawyers on par with any other, but no matter how much pride you push onto the place, the institution itself is not near the top of any university ranking.The name of the university you attend is everything for careers in the sciences or the arts. It puts you in contact with future employers or associates. If you are going into research, your university is a direct link to your career opportunities in that field. Suppose you are an absolutely brilliant student, and are yearning for the high levels of intellectual stimulation and challenges that could only be offered by the peers and programmes of an Ivy League school. You are looking to pioneer scientific research at the boundaries of our understanding of physics. Suppose there is little chance of your being able to afford such a school, and you burst your tail to receive a Scholarship. There is a physics programme at UWI.Sorry, you are not going to meet the people you need to meet to get involved, not get the intense stimulation you crave, and not get a second glance at your resume once it is in a pile of other Ivy League applicants for the research projects. You have to go to UWI, where the Government already subsidises the tuition for everyone else who received a fraction of your marks. There goes the chance of this Barbadian inventing the teleportation device or whatnot. Well, not that it is entirely ruled out, but made significantly more improbable. Mind you, even if you found a specialised programme for this you, would have to now explain why teleportation would be relevant to Barbados and have to come up with some myopic fluff to do with sugar cane and tourism – not that it wouldn’t already be an incredible feat of science on behalf of all human ingenuity. It is all well and fine for an outsider to look in and tell us to stay put in our little island, but for the student it seems like suffocation.I’m sorry to bash UWI. I am fully supportive of the endeavour to create this intellectual institution of our own. However the reality is that it is just not at that level yet. The Scholarship is a chance for the brightest sparks in the island, from any economic background, to not only do Barbados proud, but to get involved in something great for the betterment of the entire world.I would truly mourn its death; I truly would.
