Islands Business - We Say: FAITH OF STAKEHOLDERS IN USP SHAKEN

'At a recent meeting of education ministers, there were concerns raised about USP’s capabilities to coordinate and manage region-wide projects in the education sector.'

The region’s tertiary education system has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons.

USP: The region's premier tertiary institution Pic: Dev Nadkarni

Its premier institution, the University of the South Pacific (USP) is yet to recover from the severe financial strain it was put through, following a series of questionable decisions taken by its management under its last vice-chancellor who quit early last year in an unseemly hurry shrouded in a cloud of controversy.

A raft of allegations ranging from financial imprudence, nepotism and favouritism to lack of transparency, high handedness and unilateralism were hurled at the previous management—and most of it by its own disaffected academic and other staff.

Embarrassing emails with details of how much some of the top academic staff earned in terms of wages, allowances and perquisites did the rounds—courtesy obviously of the bitter elements in its large workforce. The management unsuccessfully tried to discredit those emails, which in turn brought in more criticism.

The vice-chancellor’s market-oriented approach drove the university down the path of investments in such projects as other universities anywhere in the world might think many times before doing so. That left the university—whose finances are contributed to by all the Pacific Islands Forum member countries—dipping into its reserves for even its regular expenses.

That coincided with the university’s long-contemplated restructure prescribing the reorganisation of its schools into faculties that necessitated a costly recruitment process to bring in academic-managers and even a costly wage bill to lure what was touted to the brightest and best among them from all over the world. The restructure and the vice-chancellor’s intervention also saw staff salaries rise sharply putting an even greater strain on financial reserves—and ultimately on the reserves.

The resignation of the last vice-chancellor has left the university leaderless for the second time in the space of just four years and forced it into another expensive recruitment exercise to get a new person at the helm.

It will be take yet another year before the university’s offices and its council sift through some 50 or so applications from candidates all over the world and choose a person to lead the university. This time around the stakeholders and regional governments must ensure the selection process will be objective and transparent and will not be reduced to the petty politicking it was reduced to the last time.

The new person in will have the most onerous task and will have to be much more than an academician. He or she will have to be an exemplary leader with financial and personal skills to not only mend the premier tertiary institution’s finances but also restore the severely dented reputation of its top management—to say nothing of the low morale of its staff that comprises some of the best academics from the region and beyond.

There is no doubt that the faith of many stakeholders in the regional institution has been shaken. At a recent meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum education ministers in Auckland, there were murmurs of concerns raised about USP’s capabilities to coordinate and manage region-wide projects in the education sector.

That is indeed a sad commentary on the extent to which the institution’s image has suffered—that too in the very eyes of its own stakeholders.

Unfortunately the trouble with the region’s tertiary education system does not end with USP. Last month, another premier institution, the Fiji School of Medicine (FSM), was also in the news—again for the all the wrong reasons.
Question papers of one of the institution’s medical examinations are reported to have been leaked. Primary investigations revealed that it might well have been an inside job implicating members of the senior management.

Students will now have to sit the exam again but the systemic failure has put the institution—that turns out the scarcely available resource of medical professionals for the region—under intense scrutiny.

The tertiary education sector will need to do much more to regain the confidence of not just the stakeholders—the Forum countries who fund them—but also aid agencies, international organisations that work with them and, not least of all, the common people.

Such a scenario will encourage bright young people to seek higher education in tertiary institutions abroad and in fact contribute to the brain-drain—a trend many governments are looking at reversing.

Another fallout may well turn out to be that students would be lured away from academics to trade-based education which, in itself, is not a bad thing.

Especially so, since the demand for skilled tradespeople will very likely skyrocket, thanks to the increase in infrastructure projects all over the region—and of course, the building of the mega United States military base in Guam.

Australia is in the advanced stages of launching technical courses in its new Pacific Technical College in Fiji as well as elsewhere in the Pacific. This will hopefully have the requisite output to meet the demand of the region’s growing infrastructure sector.

Technical education may be an excellent venture for a well-established, region-wide institution to consider. Though not in the strict purview of an academic university, the institution could well look at lending its management expertise and goodwill to take under its wing a quality technical education institution for Pacific islanders scattered across the region.

The Fiji Government already has plans to have a series of such institutions throughout the country.

It would be well worth the effort to look at pooling together the resources of USP, Fiji Institute of Technology and other technical institutes in the islands like those in Samoa to come under a regional umbrella under a common standard curriculum.

Pacific leaders must urgently address the problems of the tertiary education sector, including technical education and come up with a system that puts premier institutions above the pale of petty politics and the personal ambitions of a few powerful people at the helm of affairs in these institutions.