UG must be worthy of business sector support – VC – says quality of output has compromised entitlement
The wholehearted support of the business community for the University of Guyana is unlikely to be forthcoming in circumstances where the institution provides little if any meaningful evidence of its worthiness of that support, Vice Chancellor Professor Ivelaw Griffith has said.
In an extended interview recorded at the institution’s Turkeyen Campus earlier this week (and which will be published in full in the Guyana Review later this month), Griffith said the falling away in the quality of UG’s output had raised searching questions about its automatic entitlement to the support of the private sector.
Asserting that there can be no expectation that the business community’s backing for UG can be unconditional, Griffith said such support had to be measured against the extent to which the university provided reciprocity for the private sector. “We have had the misfortune in Guyana that for more than a decade the neglect of the university has led to a certain decline in the quality that it has offered so that the people in the business community and in industry have not been fully thumbs up with what we have put out,” he said. And while he conceded that it was not “comforting” for a Vice Chancellor to make such an assertion, Griffith said it had to be conceded that there were “issues with the quality of what we have been putting out.”
At various periods in the history of the 55-year-old institution there have been a succession of collaborative initiatives with various businesses and business support organizations ranging from technical assistance to support for various faculties and for enhancing learning resources at the institution. The appointment of Professor Griffith as Vice Chancellor last year against the backdrop of critical resource scarcity and an uneasy relationship between the university’s administration and the student body has been