For­mer prime min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has crit­i­cised Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) se­nior lec­tur­er Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath for re­cent com­ments made dur­ing a me­dia ap­pear­ance.

In a post on his of­fi­cial Face­book page yes­ter­day, Row­ley ac­cused Ra­goonath, who is a mem­ber of UWI’s De­part­ment of Po­lit­i­cal Sci­ence, of pre­sent­ing po­lit­i­cal opin­ions as aca­d­e­m­ic analy­sis. The post did not ref­er­ence a spe­cif­ic pro­gramme or sta­tion but re­ferred to Ra­goonath’s ap­pear­ance on air “yes­ter­day morn­ing.”

“I woke up yes­ter­day morn­ing to, once again, a so-called an­a­lyst from the po­lit­i­cal are­na, us­ing their pres­ence on UWI’s pay­roll to hold them­selves as an “an­a­lyst” when in fact they have done no prop­er re­search, they con­sult­ed no one in the know nor are they an “ex­pert” in the facts of the is­sue that they at­tempt to bring clar­i­ty on,” Row­ley wrote.

He ex­plained such was the case with Ra­goonath who he ac­cused of “mas­querad­ing as some chair­man of re­spon­si­ble con­duct in pol­i­tics.”

He took is­sue with Ra­goonath’s re­marks on the le­gal­i­ty of pres­i­den­tial ap­point­ments, say­ing, “All that he said could so eas­i­ly have been re­fut­ed and he turned out to be sim­ply a car­ri­er of UNC talk­ing points that have noth­ing to do with UWI scholas­tic ef­fort.”

Row­ley, who iden­ti­fied him­self as a UWI alum­nus with three de­grees, wrote, “I am re­al­ly of­fend­ed by these peo­ple who do no work (re­search) but are on­ly ea­ger to ap­pear on me­dia to ped­dle their opin­ions on is­sues that do not al­low them to have their own facts.”

He added, “They em­bar­rass the UWI and they are sim­ply pur­vey­ors of mis­in­for­ma­tion as they par­rot op­po­si­tion codswal­lop.”

Row­ley called for a mech­a­nism to ad­dress what he de­scribed as the mis­use of UWI’s rep­u­ta­tion.

“There must be a way to stop this non­sense oth­er­wise peo­ple will soon be­gin to dis­miss the ex­cel­lence of UWI,” he said.

It is not the first time Row­ley has lev­elled crit­i­cism at Ra­goonath. In Ju­ly 2023, the then-prime min­is­ter hit at out the Coun­cil for Re­spon­si­ble Po­lit­i­cal Be­hav­iour, which is chaired by Ra­goonath, af­ter the coun­cil ac­cused the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment of breach­es dur­ing the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tion cam­paign.

Back then, Row­ley said, “An eth­i­cal coun­cil with­out ethics and steeped in bias is to be ig­nored for what it is.”

Con­tact­ed for com­ment yes­ter­day, Ra­goonath de­clined to re­spond to the for­mer prime min­is­ter’s crit­i­cism.

Mean­while, UWI St Au­gus­tine Prin­ci­pal and Pro-Vice Chan­cel­lor Pro­fes­sor Rose-Marie Belle An­toine al­so de­clined to com­ment on the for­mer prime min­is­ter’s com­ments.