Director of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus Country Sites, Dr. Francis Severin, has called on Dominicans to take pride in the institution.
“…We are region-wide, and I say that with a lot of pride because the fact is that the University of the West Indies is truly a regional organization—the last bastion of regionality that we have, and we have to preserve it because without a university of your own, we do not have a civilization,” he said, at the opening ceremony of the site’s Dominica Country Conference, on Thursday.
In 2018, the Jamaica Gleaner reported that the establishment was positioned among the world’s top institutions in the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings for the first time. UWI, the only Caribbean university on the world-wide list, was ranked at 591 out of the 1,258 universities selected, placing it in the top five percent of 25,000 globally recognized universities.
Severin revealed that the university recently underwent a reaccreditation process, for which they were granted institutional accreditation, for another seven years, the maximum possible period.
“We have heritage, we have patrimony, we have legacy. I mean, we have pedigree…We take ourselves very seriously,” he stated, referencing the university’s seventy-year existence.
UWI was established in 1948 and comprises three traditional campuses in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica, and a recently-added fourth landed campus in Antigua. There’s also an open campus which provides an online platform with over 40 physical site locations across the region.
UWI should have put in a bid to expand its campus and improve its facilities by trying to use the vacant Ross campus up in the north. Antigua has just been approved to have a new campus. Why cant we? We can specialize in Agriculture and Food Science and Marine Biodiversity. Or any other field that isnt dominated by Jamaica, Trinidad or Barbados, and i guess more recently, Antigua.