EDITORIAL - Consider merging UTech with UWI

Judging from the tone of the report of the committee that probed the problems at the University of Technology (UTech), Errol Morrison, the institution's president, is a tyrannical leader, enabled by a compliant university council - its overarching governance body, which, incidentally, is chaired by the former Jamaican leader, Edward Seaga.

At 84, Mr Seaga is not, physically, the same combative politician who was prime minister of eight years, leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) for three decades and who, with wile and brazenness, defeated the several attempts by party factions to oust him. But we sense that intellectually, Edward Seaga is as sharp and certain as he has ever been. We, therefore, find it difficult to perceive of Edward Seaga as a malleable chairman of a council that acts at the whim of Errol Morrison.

All this, of course, is not to deny that there are genuine matters of concern at UTech, or that the place is in need of a new leader and/or new leadership. For, as this newspaper often notes, when organisations slip into crisis, and trust is in short supply, leaders who presided over the decline are generally not the ones to spearhead the turnaround.

In that respect, it is sensible that moves to provide Professor Morrison with a new contract have been quietly abandoned and that he will leave when the existing one expires next February.

Nonetheless, we are surprised that UTech's staff unions reject this face-saving compromise and continue to insist on Professor Morrison's immediate departure. For while the stance of the unions is influenced by, and in line with, the committee's assertion that Professor Morrison's incumbency is not "in the best interest of the university", the proposed course is unnecessarily polarising and would only perpetuate the very same sin of which they accuse the UTech president.

But such, perhaps, is the nature of personality conflicts - fuelled substantially by a collision of vision and necessary bureaucratic restraint - which oozes heavily from the committee's report.

First, this newspaper, as we have noted several times before, has a problem that a university, whose raison d'etre is supposed to be the expansion of science and technology education, has about a third of its students enrolled in business and law courses. The emphasis, taking into account the needs of a modern economy, ought to be grounded in science and technology if it is to be globally competitive.

A DANGEROUS MOVE

But we do believe that UTech ought not to be a polytechnic-style training institute. Leave that to community colleges. We, therefore, appreciated Professor Morrison's drive to establish UTech as a full-fledged, globally acknowledged and competitive university. Any such transformation is expensive and demands a quality facility.

Even as we question the wisdom, academically and otherwise, of some of the faculty, we sense the urgency with which Professor Morrison felt he needed to move. As is often the case in such circumstances, impatience sidelines processes of accountability. That can be dangerous.

These are the issues that UTech needs now to work through; ensuring that it has transparent systems, without operating like a primary school, directed from the education ministry. Further, given UTech's ambitions, the country's educational priorities and Jamaica's financial problems, it may be worthwhile looking at the possibility of merging UTech with the University of the West Indies at Mona.

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