Ke­jan Haynes

News­gath­er­ing Ed­i­tor

ke­jan.haynes@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has scold­ed lec­tur­ers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies whom he feels are pub­lish­ing more columns in the news­pa­pers than valu­able re­search.

Dr Row­ley was speak­ing at the UWI Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre’s 70th An­niver­sary func­tion Wednes­day, where he was ho­n­oured as the first di­rec­tor born and trained in the Caribbean.

Dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion, how­ev­er, he said the uni­ver­si­ty has been in­flu­enced by the pub­lish or per­ish mod­el, where it seeks to be “recog­nised as on par, with pres­ti­gious in­ter­na­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions.”

In do­ing so, he said, “they com­plete­ly ab­di­cate re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for as­sess­ing the mer­it of home­grown, pos­si­bly con­tro­ver­sial re­search to the for­mal peer re­view sys­tem.”

“Do we al­ways have to have ac­cep­tance by oth­ers to feel good about our­selves? In ad­di­tion, all of this, is it that there’s some­where that we need to go or some­where that we want to be?” Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley mused.

“The an­swer to that last ques­tion is def­i­nite­ly yes. With that an­swer, I’m a lit­tle im­pa­tient that UWI has fall­en away from its mis­sion in sci­en­tif­ic re­search.

“A uni­ver­si­ty that has its pedi­gree in the great work done in re­search, as the Im­pe­r­i­al Col­lege of Trop­i­cal Agri­cul­ture, can­not and must not be sat­is­fied with a pro­fes­so­r­i­al or se­nior staff CV that is dom­i­nat­ed by col­umn inch­es of ques­tion­able opin­ion­at­ed ex­pres­sions in the lo­cal dai­ly or Sun­day pa­pers.”

Row­ley said there were hun­dreds of ar­eas of re­search to be ex­plored and pub­lished, giv­ing ex­am­ples like con­struc­tion, di­et, land use, pol­lu­tion lev­els, age­ing, and new species in­to agri­cul­ture.

Al­so speak­ing at the cer­e­mo­ny was UWI Prin­ci­pal Rose Marie Belle An­toine.

In her in­tro­duc­to­ry re­marks she said,” re­search must be a liv­ing or­gan­ism not stuck on a shelf, but dri­ving de­vel­op­ment and solv­ing dai­ly prob­lems”

Prin­ci­pal re­sponds

Guardian Me­dia reached out to Belle An­toine again to re­spond di­rect­ly to Dr Row­ley’s com­ments.

She said, “It seems that UWI needs to pub­li­cise its good work and its great re­search bet­ter. UWI aca­d­e­mics are ac­tive­ly re­search­ing all of those top­ics and more.”

She said they are al­so ac­knowl­edged in­ter­na­tion­al­ly for their work.

“We have re­search on sar­gas­sum; we are cre­at­ing green pes­ti­cides, cut­ting edge plas­tic and ma­rine sealants and prod­ucts ca­pa­ble of build­ing roads in T&T that are sus­tain­able, al­so prod­ucts to counter the prob­lem of re­sis­tance to an­tibi­otics which can save lives.

She said much of the uni­ver­si­ty’s cut­ting-edge re­search in sci­ence has to be done in part­ner­ships abroad be­cause of the lack of fund­ing here.

Belle An­toine left a fi­nal thought, “Who do you think ‘in­vent­ed’ or iden­ti­fied scor­pi­on pep­per? UWI!”