Bahama Pundit

What's the Hold-up with a Bahamian University?

By Larry Smith

Recently, I caught the tail-end of a polite rant on JCN-TV by College of the Bahamas professor Nicolette Bethel. She was lamenting the fact that the College's move towards university status has stalled, threatening dire consequences for the future of the country.

My first reaction was: Well, aren't we already part of the University of the West Indies?

We are indeed - have been since 1964, in fact. And we contribute about $3 million a year to this prestigious regional institution, which operates a School of Clinical Medicine & Research, a Hotel Management Programme and an Open University 'campus' in Nassau.

My second reaction was: Why does the College need to become a university anyway?

"The concept of a university is a place where ideas are encouraged, where economies are expanded, where industries are created, where jobs are multiplied," Bethel explained to me. "If the country does not show confidence in itself, in its young, in its own ability to innovate, the moment will pass. Our lack of understanding of this is a recipe for future disaster."

And apparently it's all part of the plan - the 2009-2019 strategic plan, which says the College "expects to become a university…to develop new undergraduate and graduate programmes, increase research and innovation activities and focus its work in areas crucial to national development."

In his introduction to that plan, Council Chairman T. Baswell Donaldson says a university will "support and drive national development (and) the College is ready to take that step." He told me the same thing over the phone recently: "We are ready at any time to become a university, but I have no idea what the government's timetable is."

A rather startling admission. But before we get into a discussion of that, a little background is in order.

Searching for a New COB President – Pt. 1

In the opening chapters of 2010, two Caribbean intellectuals featured prominently. Following Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January, Sir Hilary Beckles, principal of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, penned the brilliant commentary, the Hate and the Quake. 

In early February, cultural icon Rex Nettleford died suddenly.  An intellectual and brilliant dancer, Professor Nettleford was still serving as a lecturer and vice chancellor emeritus of UWI when he passed away at 77.

These men were not singularly administrators. They were also academics whose visionary voices resonated in the academy and beyond.  Both men produced exuberant bodies of work, including a number of books.  Both proved to be beautiful thinkers, beautiful writers and beautiful citizens of the Caribbean.

Professors Nettleford and Beckles appreciated that the life of the community, both national and pan-Caribbean, requires a cultivation of the life of the mind, of the imagination and of the human spirit -- with a Caribbean flavour.  They dedicated themselves to these tasks through a fierce commitment to rigorous critical inquiry.

Bahamianizing the College of The Bahamas

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

The decision of President Janyne Hodder to resign her post at the College of The Bahamas after a short tenure provides COB and the country with an opportunity to revisit core issues related to the institution’s evolution towards university status. 

The knee-jerk reaction by some that her departure will harm COB’s transition to university status is based on all sorts of faulty assumptions.  It assumes that Mrs. Hodder is the only person in the world who can lead this effort, and that there are no others who can so do.  Notoriously unscientific newspaper polls notwithstanding, Mrs. Hodder’s retirement is not Armageddon. 

President Hodder has a number of accomplishments and many are grateful for her service and wish her well in her future endeavours.  There are others who remain generally displeased with her presidency.  It is disingenuous to suggest that all of the criticisms concerning her tenure revolve around her not being a Bahamian. 

A Laughable Letter Backfires

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

A brilliantly composed letter to the editor by Joan Thompson, President of the Nassau Institute, recently appearing in two dailies, should be used in C.O.B. freshman courses ranging from Introduction to Basic Logic to How Not to Write: 101.

The letter demonstrates, masterfully, how failed satire can turn into self-parody and how a scaffold of poor arguments collapses under the weight of false premises.  Writing back to an editor, insisting one’s opinion was intended as satire, is akin to a stand-up comedienne having to remind the audience to laugh at her jokes.

In an explanatory note to the editor of The Tribune, the letter’s author notes: “The article was intended satire, not a serious proposal for a system of education. This was lost in the edited version of the original.”  Unfortunately, the satire also failed in the original version.

Reality Checks in Education

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

There is a sustained and critical national dialogue on the state and direction of Bahamian education, most intensely as regards primary through secondary education in our public school system.

Success in reforming public education will be achieved through pragmatic solutions, borrowing ideas from across the ideological spectrum while challenging those including, sometimes, union leaders opposed to reforms such as merit pay, and more testing of and review of tenure standards for teachers.

Success will require a broad rethinking by political leaders, the education bureaucracy and parents as to how schools are run, the quality of in-school leadership and what a truly magnet school system may look like in New Providence and Grand Bahama.

But success will be stymied by ideological fantasies as typified in a letter to the press by the president of a local think-tank, which proposed a single thread-bare argument producing this logical fallacy and tautological disaster: public education is a failure because, well, it’s public education, or the equivalent of teaching little Johnnie and Jenny that the sky is blue, because the sky is blue.

Who is Making the Grade?

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

The recent release of the BJC and BGCSE results, including the accompanying national grade averages for these exams, was followed by the usual arguments, wailing and gnashing of teeth, surface analysis, finger-pointing and spin.

The results do tell us something about the teaching and learning in our schools, particularly in our public schools.

They are symptomatic of a rusting and outdated assembly-line system that has produced tens of thousands of students who lack basic competency in the most basic subject matters.

The Importance of Teachers in Improving Education

by Ralph Massey

Guest author Ralph Massey studied economics at Case University and at the University of Chicago, where his course advisor was Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate. His business career covered 37 years with four multinational companies. At Kimberly-Clark Corporation, for instance, he was assistant treasurer, and at Chemical Bank he was the offshore banking manager for the Bank of New Providence. He was a founding member of the Nassau Institute and since late 2004 has been a contributor to the work of the Coalition for Education Reform.

In a recent Tribune article, Adrian Gibson called Bahamian public education an “inadequate sham” and described this year’s public high school leavers in colourful terms.

Up to 60 per cent of them do not graduate; and in fact, they are, according to Mr. Gibson, a horde of “arithmetically-challenged halfwits” who get a certificate of attendance instead of a diploma. They are sexually permissive, speak and act offensively and are unprepared to enter the workforce. Yet…they attend lavish and wildly garish graduation proms.

Is Failure the Responsibility of Schools or Parents?

by Craig Butler

I was on the Platform with Wendal Jones and Godfrey Eneas recently. I must admit that I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I must not be as adept in explaining myself as I thought because the hosts and I locked heads all night.

The major point of contention was our education system. Before I go any further let me state that the role of parents in raising their children can never be abrogated or underestimated.

The foremost and best example for any child will always be those that are in the position to affect their lives, specifically the parents, guardians or custodians along with the extended family.

Accordingly these people must take an active role in ensuring that their children are taught morals and values and that they receive the education they need to enable them to play a meaningful and active role in society.

The Problems of Bahamian Education

by Larry Smith

"Well into the 20th century...Bahamian education was both backward and socially skewed. Many black Bahamians remained illiterate and only an exceptional few, whose parents could spare them and afford the fees, aspired to any form of secondary education.” -- Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream.

Although church-based schools have been around since the 1700s, it was the need to educate large numbers of emancipated slaves that led to the first "Board of Public Instruction" in 1836.

By the beginning of the 20th century there were half a dozen public schools on New Providence and 38 in the out islands (as well as a few private schools) teaching about 8,000 pupils in all. But over the past century, our education bureaucracy has exploded.

This year alone the government will spend $265 million on scores of public schools (and the College of the Bahamas) to educate more than 50,000 students. Yet experts say this massive investment is producing a growing underclass of functional illiterates who are virtually unemployable.

That's the startling verdict that is consistent with the research commissioned by a respected private sector group called the Coalition for Education Reform. This alliance of key labour and business leaders has been calling for dramatic education reforms over the past three years, but public officials don't seem to be listening.

Prince Charles, Me, and the Governor-General's Youth Award

by Larry Smith

You may not know this, but Tough Call grew up with Prince Charles.

He and I are about the same age, we went to the Clifford Park Independence celebrations together, and we still haven't figured out what we are supposed to do in life.

I clearly recall Charles' troubled childhood. But while he may have had distant and pre-occupied parents, he certainly enjoyed a much finer education than I did.

During the 1960s, while I was lectured by a Scot named Roger Kelty in un-air conditioned classrooms at Queen's College, Charles was at Gordonstoun - an elite school set in a 17th century Scottish estate that could have been the model for Harry Potter's Hogwarts Academy.

Students at Gordonstoun and its associated schools are committed to "academic excellence, personal development and responsibility...achieved by participating in community service, work projects, exchange programmes and adventuring."

Wow! Other than picking up rocks on the playing field and writing lines about 'trifling in de corridor' (set by prefect Winston Jones), all I can remember from my school days are Mr Kelty's literary jokes (as in "There's a divinity that shapes our ends...") - which he continues to email me from his Lifeless Cay office.