The integrity of leadership
MUTTY PERKINS used to sneer at The University of the West Indies (UWI), calling it “the intellectual ghetto”. I thought he was wrong then, but I am less sure of my disagreement now. Knowledge and generosity of spirit applied to human concerns are the essence of leadership and the path to every kind of sustained progress. This is the essence and purpose of a university, the State and personal endeavour. Its outcome is human flourishing.
In the early days of the national movement the Mona campus throbbed with i deas and personalities in almost every faculty, straining for betterment, challenging the colonial nostrums, creatively deconstructing, with an underlying conviction that we are a worthy people, noble in creation, purpose and destiny and certainly capable of making poverty of spirit and matter the exception and not the norm it is even now.
Getting a degree there was much more than learning a trade. It was finding a calling in life. Of course it wasn’t all like that, but there was enough of a germ to make commitment reasonable and excitement inevitable. A rarefied space, but not a squalid ghetto divorced from the public square, the search for the common good.
These memories were stirred recently when celebrating the life of Kitty Beckford, widow of the great economist, Professor George Beckford, one of the most earthy, kind and brilliant scholars of that early period. To hear him contend with the likes of G. Arthur Brown at a New World meeting was uncomfortable, but liberating.
And it was so in almost every field, every faculty. Scholars and students were convinced that Jamaica could escape from the suffocation of colonial thinking, of a classist and racist paradigm. Of the numerous activists/academics who enfleshed this verve, one must be never be forgotten, the martyr Walter Rodney, exiled by a frightened Jamaican Government and murdered at the behest of the rulers of his own nation.
And more. I describe the UWI as the thinking arm of the Jamaican state. The university must be held accountable for every devalued dollar received from the taxpayers of Jamaica and spend it in pursuit of national goals, broadly defined and agreed. But Mona must never be gutted to become the satrap of a political administration. This is why undue interference in the choice of the next Mona campus principal is reprehensible. Why is the minister of education reportedly asking for delay in confirming the overwhelming choice of Professor Williams? Can you imagine government trying that in the days of Sherlock or Nettleford!
LEADERSHIP A BEHAVIOUR
Then last Thursday, newly (and controversially?) elevated Professor Canute Thompson delivered his inaugural lecture entitled, ‘Reimaginative leadership: its implications for and applications to educational policymaking and the role of the university’. This man, of peasant stock and Christian lineage, describes himself as a public scholar, an activist whose research is unquestionably thorough, is fearless of criticism and correction and offers himself and his ideas in accessible media, in the conviction that there are choices, alternatives to public policy and personal practice which can make Jamaica inclusive and great.
Thompson spoke of a reimagined concept and praxis of leadership which models what it professes; is eminently respectful and motivating of those who are led whether in home, business, school or nation; of leadership as a behaviour, subversive of position or style – “tough and compassionate, mighty and weak”.
EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP
It is nigh on two school years since the Patterson Report on education in Jamaica has been completed. Very little if anything meaningful has been done to implement its recommendations. It is undeniable that we continue to be architects of our own escalating misfortune when we so limit the horizons of possibility that we fail to do what it is so obviously needed.
Could the same university celebrating, if a little scared, of Thompson’s model of publicly engaged leadership, not revive our spirits and better justify the big money we contribute, by taking a more activist role in pressing for educational reform? In what way is the Academy listening, then thinking and guiding us in this the supremely important area of national importance?
LEADERSHIP & CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM
And continuing on the imperative of conscious leadership. What is the role, where is the presence of the Faculty of Law and the Norman Manley Law School in the process of constitutional reform? They, the scholars of law and the formators of future lawyers and judges, ought to drop every other priority and frontally engage this epochal and foundational exercise. What other subject could be a higher concern than defence of the already palpably threatened basic rights and responsibilities of every citizen?
For how much clearer can it be that the present direction of reform is seriously wrong-footed. For one, there is strong indication that neither the deformed committee nor the majority of citizens are united around any “consensus” which could justify a draft of a constitution being presented as a bill to the legislature by the end of this month or any time soon.
Look here. A few t own hall meetings do not public consultation make. At the one in Montego Bay, the minister could not even cogently describe what would be the role of the president who is to be enthroned. This is not 1962 where apprehensive people swallowed what guineagogs told them.
At least a year of intense public education and listening must precede any legislative change. Otherwise the likelihood of cynical abstention or a deliberate “No” vote is likely. There is a legitimate desire to make our fundamental law the instrument of our own legislature, but that cannot supersede the imperative of first stimulating the knowledge and satisfying the questions and suggestions of all Jamaicans, here and abroad.
It all comes back to the integrity of leadership. There is a huge trust deficit to be overcome, especially by politicians and their appointees. There is a reasonable fear that, after becoming a republic, government will be able to abrogate our rights and freedoms by majority vote of a ever-dwindling minority.
Respectful reasoning and reverential listening, qualities emphasised by Professor Canute Thompson, are scandalously absent from the process as it is presently evolving. Scurrying to edit, redact and release the minutes of committee meetings while still refusing to live-stream all proceedings is the habit of arrogant pseudo-leaders, many with their own hidden agendas and presumptions, no matter how much they protest otherwise.
That was the mentality Mutty used to ascribe to the university. A ghetto is a closed space where by circumstance or intent, people live unto themselves, smug and satisfied in their insularity. UWI, please don’t prove him right. We can do better.