On funding UWI

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Advocate - Whichever of the two main parties is eventually successful in forming the next governing administration on February 22, after the current ostensibly garish and noisy electoral campaign, will have a legacy of economic troubles left on its agenda for immediate treatment. One of these, we submit, is the substantial debt currently owed to the University of the West Indies (UWI) by the state. The conundrum, of course, is that “free” tertiary education has, by now, become one of the sacred cows of the national political dispensation. In other words, as with the preservation of current parity of the Barbados dollar and the maintenance of our constitutional status as a titular monarchy, it is generally felt that local state provision of taxpayer-funded tertiary education is a civic item that an administration might remove only at its electoral peril. Surprisingly, this topic has not, to our best knowledge, formed part of the contemporary platform agenda of either party, although we should refrain from final judgment until the publication of the respective manifestoes, hopefully by the weekend. Even so, we should not expect therein from either party an undertaking to remove completely the funding of this form of education by the taxpayers.