For­mer Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley crit­i­cised Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) lec­tur­er Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath for re­cent com­ments made dur­ing a me­dia ap­pear­ance. In a post on his of­fi­cial Face­book page, Row­ley ac­cused Ra­goonath 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.”

He took is­sue with Ra­goonath’s re­marks re­gard­ing 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 from the in­sti­tu­tion, 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 fur­ther stat­ed, “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.