Accreditation purgatory

THE EDITOR, Sir: WITH NCU, UTech, and The UWI now all receiving institutional accreditation from Mount Olympus, all students in these institutions must now feel better.

Employers should ensure that past students also feel better. I hope there are no employers in either the private sector or the public sector (the private sector, typically, does not operate like that) who have been paying people less because their degrees were from an unaccredited Jamaican university.

Nobody did this juvenile thing to either UWI, UTech, or NCU students before the University Council of Jamaica (UCJ) was established, and it should not happen after.

I have been amused at how quickly we set up a prepurgatory and a post-purgatory world since the UCJ was established. Did the UWI surgeons and UTech pharmacists endanger people’s lives before UCJ granted institutional accreditation to those institutions?

Did the UWI and UTech engineers build structures that collapse the way structures collapse in the country that we have recently embraced with peculiar messianic glee?

We really need to mature in our thinking as a country and stop behaving as ‘never-seecome-see’, creating heat without light and smoke without fire.

“As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. “

MICHAEL MCANUFF-JONES Kingston 6