RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Grate­ful for the planned open­ing of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Glob­al School of Med­i­cine, Debe vil­lagers are now urg­ing UWI to go fur­ther—by open­ing the long-await­ed cam­pus to the Fac­ul­ties of Law and Agri­cul­ture as well.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia, com­mu­ni­ty ac­tivist Destar Dythe said that for decades, south­ern­ers have been mak­ing the trek to St Au­gus­tine to pur­sue un­der­grad­u­ate and post­grad­u­ate de­grees.

"We have been wait­ing a long time for this cam­pus to open, and we are hap­py to hear the cam­pus in Debe is fi­nal­ly open­ing," she said. How­ev­er, she ques­tioned whether the Uni­ver­si­ty had the funds to retro­fit the cam­pus to ac­com­mo­date med­i­cine.

"We know mil­lions have been spent to build this law cam­pus, and we are hop­ing that it will open in Au­gust not just for med­i­cine, but for law as well."

She said res­i­dents of Di­a­mond Vil­lage were dis­ap­point­ed with the state of dis­re­pair the cam­pus.

Mean­while, so­ca/reg­gae artist Adan­na Paul, who lives at Pa­pourie Road, said cor­po­rate T&T should help the Uni­ver­si­ty to open the cam­pus if funds are low.

"We have a lot of peo­ple look­ing for work and wait­ing for this cam­pus to open," she said.

An­oth­er ac­tivist, Son­ny­lal Kan­hai, al­so said they were hap­py about the pro­posed open­ing. He ex­pressed hope that there would be no set­backs for the pro­posed Au­gust open­ing.

Mean­while, UWI prin­ci­pal Pro­fes­sor Rose-Marie An­toine said she is ar­rang­ing a me­dia walk­through of the cam­pus amid grow­ing pub­lic in­ter­est and me­dia ques­tions over the in­sti­tu­tion’s plans to be­gin op­er­a­tions there by Au­gust 2025.

In a state­ment is­sued on Wednes­day, UWI said the cam­pus was orig­i­nal­ly in­tend­ed as the new home for the Fac­ul­ty of Law. How­ev­er, it said the South Cam­pus was re­pur­posed af­ter protests from staff and stu­dents in 2017. The Fac­ul­ty of Law nev­er made the move, and by 2018, the ad­min­is­tra­tion de­cid­ed in­stead to es­tab­lish a self-fi­nanc­ing Glob­al School of Med­i­cine, which was ap­proved by the UWI Uni­ver­si­ty Coun­cil in 2021 as the new flag­ship of the Pe­nal-Debe site.

UWI said the GSM will cater pri­mar­i­ly to in­ter­na­tion­al stu­dents and is ex­pect­ed to bring “eco­nom­ic and so­cial ben­e­fit through in­creased ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion, med­ical ser­vices, in­ter­na­tion­al vis­i­bil­i­ty and for­eign ex­change earn­ings."

The uni­ver­si­ty con­firmed that key build­ings at the cam­pus—in­clud­ing the aca­d­e­m­ic build­ing, stu­dent union, au­di­to­ri­um, health fa­cil­i­ty, cafe­te­ria, and gym­na­si­um—have been re­stored “to a high stan­dard” and are ready for use. How­ev­er, ad­di­tion­al struc­tures such as the Fac­ul­ty Build­ing and recre­ation­al spaces will un­der­go phased re­pairs as fund­ing be­comes avail­able.

The state­ment al­so re­vealed that the cam­pus, al­though com­plet­ed in 2019, had re­mained most­ly un­der­utilised un­til it was tem­porar­i­ly hand­ed over to the State dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic to func­tion as a step-down fa­cil­i­ty. When it was re­turned to UWI in May 2022, it was found to be in a state of dis­re­pair.

“De­spite its lim­it­ed fi­nan­cial re­sources, The UWI pri­ori­tised and pro­ceed­ed with crit­i­cal re­pair works and se­cu­ri­ty en­hance­ments to pre­pare the fa­cil­i­ty in an­tic­i­pa­tion of its phased re­open­ing,” the uni­ver­si­ty stat­ed.

UWI stressed that fi­nan­cial sup­port from the gov­ern­ment re­mains crit­i­cal, not­ing that it has sub­mit­ted de­tailed re­quests and pro­pos­als for ad­di­tion­al fund­ing over the years. While the uni­ver­si­ty has man­aged to cut op­er­a­tional costs by TT$300 mil­lion in re­cent years, it con­tin­ues to face chal­lenges in main­tain­ing and mod­ernising in­fra­struc­ture across all cam­pus­es, in­clud­ing St Au­gus­tine.

Along­side the med­ical pro­gramme, UWI in­tends to of­fer blend­ed-for­mat cours­es from the Fac­ul­ties of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy, Food and Agri­cul­ture, En­gi­neer­ing, Hu­man­i­ties and Ed­u­ca­tion, and the Fac­ul­ty of Med­ical Sci­ences at the South Cam­pus. It will al­so house the UWI ROYTEC pro­gramme.