With 10 000 students, the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Barbados has evolved into one of the leading tertiary institutions in the Caribbean. And its principal Sir Hilary Beckles is routinely credited with spearheading that dramatic transformation in recent years.
In this week’s Big Interview, Sir Hilary tells of the big plans he has for Cave Hill to NATION North American correspondent Tony Best while in Charleston, South Carolina, where they recently joined hundreds of Bajans and Carolinians for a weekend of activities organized by the Barbados Consulate General in Miami under the theme Barbados Comes [Back] To Charleston, SC.
As a new academic year begins at Cave Hill, Barbados and its Caribbean neighbours are facing tough economic times. How is the UWI faring?
Sir Hilary: We have expanded the university considerably in the last five to six years. We did that because we felt it was necessary to sustain development in Barbados. We could not imagine Barbados going forward into the 21st century without an expansive investment in higher education, without a campus that is relevant and modern, and without all classes and races committing themselves to higher education and human resource development.
This was a strategy we set out to pursue to protect and enhance the national interest of Barbados in a very competitive world. The economic recession has affected all of our stakeholders. We know that the Government (of Barbados) has some serious challenges with its cash flows and its revenues.
Is the private sector taking up some of the financial slack?
Sir Hilary: The private sector has been very generous to the campus and we have been able to work with them. Through our connections with the private sector we have generated close to $80 million in the last five years to expand the campus. The physical plant at Cave Hill and the physical expansion of the infrastructure at Cave Hill have been driven almost primarily by the private sector and we are extremely appreciative of that.
How are you bridging the financial gap caused by the recession?
Sir Hilary: The arrangement we have had with the Government is this: pay the tuition fees, pay the economic costs and pay for the students. We at the university will find the capital to pay for the expansion. That arrangement has served the campus very well. The reality is that both the private sector and the Government are having similar challenges.
I know that in the private sector in Barbados most of the big companies . . . have committed themselves to maintaining employment and most of their reserves have gone toward that end.
Is the campus under severe financial strain?
Sir Hilary: The campus is now severely strapped for cash. We have had to slow down our rate of growth. We have had to effectively say that revenues cannot sustain the growth. The private sector is challenged to continue the expansion of the infrastructure, so we are at a moment now where we are moving beyond Barbados and the Caribbean and into the international community in search of additional revenues.
So we are internationalizing our student body.
We are internationalizing our research.
Where do China and Brazil fit into this approach?
Sir Hilary: I have just come back from China speaking to university officials and we are going beyond the Caribbean, trying to connect to the centres of growth. We have recognized that the two centres for growth that we need to tap into are China and Brazil.
We have established strong Brazilian contacts. We have now established contracts, MOUs (memoranda of understanding), with three Brazilian universities. We are going to be offering academic programmes jointly with three Brazilian universities to bring Brazilian students to Cave Hill.
We already have over 100 Venezuelan students at Cave Hill. We are looking to Latin America and Brazil to generate revenues through the expansion of the student numbers.
What have you worked out with the Chinese?
Sir Hilary: The Chinese government has agreed to work with us and begin teaching Chinese at Cave Hill in September. We are hoping to have an undergraduate degree in Chinese studies by next academic year.
So we are looking far and wide to find revenue streams, student numbers, student research facilities to build the Cave Hill Campus.
Where do the law faculty and the medical school come in?
Sir Hilary: That’s something we have been working on all along. In order to establish accreditation facilities to allow American students who graduate from the UWI to return home and have their degrees recognized at the professional level, we have had to build accreditation.
The medical faculty is now internationally accredited so our graduates can go anywhere in the world, North America especially, and practise, pass the professional examinations and what have you.
We are doing the same for the law faculty. Our expectation is that the Faculty of Law is going to drive the international agenda at the Cave Hill Campus.
We are a centre of excellence in English common law, laws of tort and European law. There is a tremendous demand for that body of knowledge and already we are laying the foundation for this.
How are you going to house the influx of international students?
Sir Hilary: A critical piece of the puzzle has been the accommodation. The provosts of American universities are saying to us: ‘We don’t want to send students to Cave Hill and have them looking for accommodations in the neighbourhood, back rooms and small apartments and so on. If you can provide us with a package, tuition fees, economic costs and accommodations we will send them down.’ So, we are in the process of building what will be the Keith Hunte Hall. We are building 400 new dormitories at Cave Hill. We have started the work. That will be the dormitory complex dedicated to international students. So we imagine we will have close to 1 000 North American and European students at Cave Hill.
In his Budget presentation, Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler spoke of a proposed loan arrangement, a borrowing package from the National Insurance Board that would involve the UWI. Have you worked out the mechanics of that plan?
Sir Hilary: It’s not really for the campus to do. The Government has maintained its commitment to the Cave Hill Campus and to the university on the whole. The Government has an obligation to meet the economic costs of those students and, in a sense, the university is funded in a retroactive way. The Barbados Government sends its citizens to the university for an education. That education is provided and then the Government is billed.
There is a conversation in Barbados that the Government makes a subvention to the university.
It is not a subvention. It is the honouring of an invoice. That is, we invoice the Government for the education. From time to time the Government may make a supportive grant to help with specific projects.
At the moment the Government has committed to helping the campus with the building of a new library. It’s the same library there now with 10 000 students that was there when we had 3 000 students. So the Government has said we would give you a grant to build a new library.
Effectively, the debt that is owed by theGovernment to the university is an invoice that is sent to the Government for services delivered. Sometimes, it pays the invoices in phases. What the Government has said is: we do not have cash at the moment to honour that invoice at once. We will make an arrangement with the National Insurance where the National Insurance provides the funding for that bill.
It would appear as a loan to the university. But the Government is committed to repaying the loan since it is their debt; it is the Government’s debt. So they will repay the loan and service the debt.
But the minister didn’t put it exactly that way. He spoke about a “borrowing package”, to the UWI, the Transport Board and the Barbados Tourism Authority.
Sir Hilary: I did not hear the specific words of the minister. But I can only tell you that my understanding of it is that this is a mechanism through which the Government will honour its debt to the University of the West Indies and allow the university to carry the responsibility for the loan, while at the same time the Government will honour its debt to the university. So it becomes a method of servicing debt while at the same time resolving a cash flow problem.
What are your priorities at Cave Hill Campus over the next two years?
Sir Hilary: We are involved at the moment in making a transition to the science technology initiatives at Cave Hill. We are recognizing that in the last five years the growth of Cave Hill has been in the social sciences. We looked at the Barbados economy and we see that the growth was generated by tourism, banking, insurance, the offshore sector.
We did a survey at the university and we found that 80 per cent of our graduates were finding jobs in the first six months, which is very high by international standards. These jobs were in the private sector.
Looking at Barbados now, going forward, we recognize the future growth areas to be in scientific applications.
We are now targeting the science faculty for the future growth. In fact, we are virtually capping the social sciences growth and focusing our resources on the science discipline.
We are now getting ready to roll out the science and innovation park and we are going to be offering some new and innovative programmes in science.
For instance?
Sir Hilary: An example of this is that Cable & Wireless has agreed to fund a chair in digital telecommunications at Cave Hill. We are going to be offering BSc. degrees and specialized Master’s degrees in global digital telecommunications, which is exciting and very innovative.
We are going to be offering degrees in electronics and electronic engineering, again a fascinating field. We are merging computer science with mathematics, with physics, to produce degree programmes in electronics and digital engineering. These are two growth areas that we are looking at.
Medicine is already there. We are looking at bringing medicine directly into the science park to offer programmes in biotechnology.
In the next three years, these new initiatives are going to be coming out of the science faculties and we are going to be seeing new streams of growth. Science at Cave Hill is now being targeted for all of the major initiatives going forward.
Is this a major shift or a continuation of what’s there?
Sir Hilary: It’s a continuing search to make sure that the university that uses public and private revenues remains very relevant to the growth agenda.
You may have heard that we recently signed a contract with Biojet because we are going to be researching with them.
Biojet is one of the largest manufacturers of oil from algae and we are going to be building the laboratory to do the research for new forms of fossil fuels. Biojet is very keen to work with us. So the Biojet lab is to be constructed at Cave Hill in short time and that will change the whole mix of science research and application at Cave Hill.
We are working in renewable energy. We are working on digital telecommunications and on electronic engineering. This is just a continuation of adjusting the campus, calibrating it to fit into the needs of the economy going forward.
Who is going to pay for this in these economic times?
Sir Hilary: We are looking at ways to do this. We have had conversations with Sir Kyffin Simpson and we are talking with him about partnering with us to develop the laboratory complex for the energy research. He is a graduate of the Cave Hill Campus – he has an honorary degree from there. He is very keen.
We are speaking to Cable & Wireless. They are funding the chair that will enable us to do that Master’s programmes in digital telecommunications which is a joint programme between Cave Hill and Middlesex University. We have signed that contract.
We are working on a contract with Middlesex University. So we are going to be pulling the private sector in and we are going to be pulling the international donor community in.
We are always out there searching for non-government sources and we have tried to reduce the impact of Cave Hill’s growth on the Government.
