Edna’s disgrace
WHAT IS going on at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts should never be allowed to happen, let alone to dribble on in the way it has been. This is another Caribbean Maritime University (CMU) scandal; this time, not about money, but about the rank disrespect being doled out to staff and students. Education is becoming infected with troubles which the sector ought never have to countenance. Look at it: at year end, two critical tertiary institutions with broken reputations. Why?
First off, it is clear from Minister Karl Samuda’s fuzzy answers to Peter Bunting’s questions about Edna, in late November, that the board of the college and, one must assume, elements in the Government, want to get rid of the current principal. The strong rumour is that there is an undistinguished guy with green blood, who they are intent on installing. After Bahadosingh, Grindley, Ramharrack, and the host of other tribal satraps foisted on the Jamaican public since 2016, we are prone to believe.
What equal rights and justice are we to glean from Samuda’s narrative, whereby Dr DeGrasse Johnson correctly refuses to go on leave, which was obviously proposed by the board to get her out of the way, then is suspended and charged for “neglect, inefficiency and misconduct”? Where are the particulars? And that was in July, when you compromise the principal’s professional reputation, hobble the administration of the college, show your collective bottoms (or to be more in sync with the recent ethos of Edna, their b...cs) to the deans and other staff members, who write the Most Hon Brogad in vain, protesting this treatment and declaring no confidence in the board chairman.
Well, now it is running into six months and the principal has heard nothing, the personnel committee of the board has not been convened, letters not replied to, and all this is supposed to be acceptable. Well, it is not. As Bunting said, they are clearly scratching for evidence – anything to shame, blame, wear out and exhaust the principal into resigning.
DELAYED JUSTICE
Karl Samuda, in riposte, put his personal integrity on the line, vowing that he would never condone injustice being done. He knows that this is happening now but, perhaps, because he never appointed the board (with a member with an unresolved charge of misconduct) and is really not the minister of education (why?), he can’t really do much to quell Edna’s disgrace. Anybody remembers the maxim that justice delayed is justice denied?
Forty years or so ago, Carl Stone wrote about the way politics got in the way of sound economics in Jamaica’s history. Edna’s disgrace is that narrow political objectives also interfere with basic decency and the principles of law and natural justice. In the meanwhile, the issue of predatory sexual behaviour in some of our schools remains unresolved. I gather it was Edna’s principal, now accused of doing nothing, who was herself developing a code of conduct for the college. Many institutions have none.
The disciplinary proceedings provided in the 1980 Education Code are so hard to navigate that most complaints are dismissed on procedural issues with the substantive allegations never being tested and the accused persons returning to their posts. Up to a few years ago, and who knows, perhaps still, there was one serving high-school principal against whom serious allegations of sexual misconduct having been laid, had never been adjudicated.
The recent standards and guidelines for public-sector board members, piloted by Minister of Finance and the Public Service Dr Nigel Clarke, are welcomed. They must extend to school boards as well. Members of parliament must give up their prerogative to virtually select school board chairpersons. They should share the task of recommending with the education officer and the principal of the institution.
In all events, the boards of Edna and CMU ought to step down and be replaced with persons whose political proboscis is not their unerring guide and who will clear the miasma stinking up the reputations and productivity of these two colleges.