As for me, I had little doubt that the man’s range of leadership experience in the context of The University of the West Indies, a place known to be a fertile breeding ground of technically difficult and politically contentious regional development issues, had endowed him with the internal complexity needed to give leadership and vision to the region’s premier multilateral financial institution but this being an interview, and the man being Dr. Compton Bourne, I mean, I still had to ask. The answer, of course, was yes. But with an interesting caveat.

“In some ways, managing the University is a preparation, but it doesn’t really begin as Pro Vice Chancellor. It really begins as Head of Department, and as Dean of the Faculty,” replied Dr. Bourne, a former UWI Pro Vice Chancellor (PVC) and St. Augustine Campus Principal, who was unanimously elected as the fourth president of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) in 2001, and who started his second five-year term on May 1, 2006.

Professor Bourne’s authority on the matter seemed unassailable, not just because he carried the Roman alphabet in his back pocket (B.Sc. in Economics from the University of London, M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Birmingham and Ph.D. in Economics from The University of the West Indies), but because the man has loads of personal experience to back it up, having passed through the ranks of the University himself, starting as a Lecturer at Mona Campus in 1971, thence to St. Augustine as a Professor in Economics in 1981, before becoming Head of the Management Studies and Economics Departments, then Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences in 1984, and then Pro Vice Chancellor for Planning and Development in 1990, and finally, in 1996, Pro Vice Chancellor and St. Augustine Campus Principal.

“Essentially, University management is managing internal constituents in a situation of tight resource constraints and many demands. In a University environment, each department is a constituency with its own interest. Each Faculty is a constituency made up of Departments. And then you have the divisions: the segmentation between students and academic staff and non-academic workers, and so on,” Dr. Bourne continued, fluently weaving the academic, the technical and the political into one seamless and coherent worldview.

“It’s a multi-component environment in which the essence of decision-making is by consensus. In a university environment, you’re dealing with people of intellectual capacity. And you’re either trying to develop [their minds] for the independent expression of thought, or in the case of people who have developed that capacity, you have to allow them to express their ideas. So you attempt to reach decisions through a process of discussion and persuasion. You don’t give orders in a university environment. So you learn the business of listening to people and trying to understand their point of view, while articulating yours as clearly and as forcefully as you can. And you learn patience.”

Patience which Dr. Bourne no doubt put to good use, inasmuch as his tenure as Pro Vice Chancellor for Planning and Development for the entire UWI system, from 1990 to 1996, overlapped with a period in the history of the University marked by economic hardship and dwindling staff morale.

“The University entered the 1990’s in financial crisis,” he recalled. “Most governments were in arrears, significantly, to the University. In some cases, the University had been obtaining bank loans with a promise by governments to pay. […] Maybe with the exception of the Cave Hill Campus, but certainly with the Mona Campus and the St. Augustine Campus, there was a huge backlog of arrears, which then affected the ability of the campus to purchase many essential inputs. I remember a time when the libraries, for instance, in order to cope with budget cuts, had to stop taking some volumes of journals, order fewer books and actually ask the Faculties to say which books they would cut, not which books they would get.”

Collaborating with the then UWI Vice Chancellor, Sir Alister Mc Intyre, Dr. Bourne spearheaded the reform of University finances, perhaps most notably through the introduction of tuition fees. In the midst of the crisis, however, Bourne continued to display the commitment to leadership capacity-building and human development that has earned him the title of Professor Emeritus and membership on the University Council today.

“A lot of effort was made to ensure that students who didn’t come from homes with means would nonetheless be able to access funds to pay their tuition fees,” said Dr. Bourne, giving some detail into how he worked “very closely” with the Trinidad and Tobago government, in particular, towards successfully revamping that country’s student loan scheme.

“The relationship between the University and the CDB has always been a very positive one,” Bourne said, deferentially crediting his presidential predecessor, Sir Neville Nicholls, who now chairs the UWI Cave Hill Campus Council. “The CDB was always very helpful to the University, since long before I arrived at the CDB.”