Intellectual ghetto has failed Jamaica

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I always understood the term 'intellectual ghetto' to mean a place where there was more 'form than substance,' where professors and PhDs paraded their qualifications to impress rather than inform, whose tangible contribution to Jamaican lifestyle was minuscule compared to the prestige that they conferred on themselves.

Recently, I took a trip to the bookshop on the UWI campus and was amazed at the number of books I saw written by professors like yourselves chronicling the experience of the Jamaican and Caribbean people filled with in-depth analysis of our problems, the causes and solutions.

Yet, 99 per cent of your colleagues (you excluded, of course) lock themselves away in their own little world, writing and researching documents and books that will only be read by themselves, forever cut off from the common people by the prohibitive prices, incomprehensible language, and poor marketing of these books.

The UWI is an intellectual ghetto because since its inception, it has been living off the backs of taxpayers, getting (much like the persons in the garrisons) the equivalent of free light, water, education and housing subsidised by taxpayers, without fulfilling its main purpose of using the vast knowledge at its disposal to the wider benefit of the uneducated citizens.

Professors like yourselves have failed the Jamaican people, and I regard you as cowards. You should be the ones on radio and TV, in the press and in Parliament, leading and moderating the discussions about history, sociology, science and technology, laws, economics, development etc, yet you cowardly remain silent and hide behind your complex words.

How could you and your fellow self-appointed experts allow our little nation to deteriorate to this level of crime and corruption compared to our Caribbean neighbours?

D. H.