UWI Principals:
Professor Gordon Shirley
Principal of the Mona Campus
by Alake Pilgrim
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The Hands-On Approach
As a child, I enjoyed building things. During the holidays, in the workshop at Mico College in Jamaica where my father was Head, I would pull things apart to see how they were constructed and try to put them back together. I liked the sciences a lot and always did well in them, particularly Physics and Mathematics. So I decided to build on these strengths by doing Engineering.
I’m very happy that I did my undergraduate studies at The UWI St. Augustine Campus. I lived on Canada Hall which is, in many ways, a little Jamaica, but for the first time I was also exposed to people from across the Caribbean. In the process, I got to see our differences but, more importantly, the enormous similarities that exist among us as a people. There was great camaraderie on Hall but also great competition. I remember the football matches and various games in which different floors competed against each other, along with, of course, the great rivalry between Milner and C-Hall. We also had cultural events in which we displayed our talents and I was very involved in all of these activities.
One of the faculty members that I remember vividly is Professor Ken Julien who was a lecturer in Electrical Engineering at the time. I remember him as a comparatively young lecturer who also served as Chairman of the national power company. I had a sense that Ken was always very busy, but he was an outstanding lecturer. He was able to apply the theoretical aspects of the programme to real-life examples from his own experiences. Later on in life I also became Chairman of the power company here in Jamaica while I was a lecturer in Management at UWI Mona and it was sort of a déjà vu moment.
Defining My Own Challenge
When I graduated from UWI St. Augustine, I had the option of doing postgraduate work, then coming back to teach in the Faculty of Engineering. But at the time, I was convinced that, unlike my parents, teaching was not something I wanted to do. So I took up employment at ALCAN Jamaica, the largest aluminum company in the island and ended up spending five years there. This was a really great experience as I worked for the first set of Jamaican managers in the company. They put me in challenging positions which I enjoyed and each time I thought that I had risen to the occasion, they would give me an even greater challenge.
However, at the end of five years, it seemed to me that the Jamaican managers were hitting a plateau within the system and that a lot of important decisions were still being made from Canada. I felt that rather than doing an advanced degree in Engineering, I should learn how to make the best management decisions. So I applied and was admitted to Harvard University and ALCAN offered me a scholarship to do my MBA. When I completed the Master’s, one of my professors asked if I was thinking of continuing on to do a doctorate. What I hadn't seen before and had come to understand through my professors’ experiences, was that academia gave you the opportunity to pursue the questions that you thought were interesting and important. You got to define your own challenge.
I focused on the management of new technologies, particularly the use of fully automated computer systems in manufacturing. Nowadays, the development of the ICT platform offers opportunities for companies in the Caribbean to work more easily and share information across long distances without replicating the centralized architectural and administrative systems that currently exist. As a result, ICT’s can play a critical role in the growth of our business sector.
Integrated Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is a critically important area for us in the Caribbean. Our growth will increasingly rely on the formation of new businesses and on existing businesses expanding internationally and starting new ventures. One of the challenges for UWI is to facilitate not only the development of small and medium enterprises by graduates and the wider community, but also to help provide the capacity to pursue larger entrepreneurial ventures. I think that the biological sciences and health care systems are going to be big growth areas that The University is well-positioned to take advantage of within the Caribbean region and beyond. In the process, UWI has to build stronger linkages with the business community. This became even clearer to me as Executive Director of the Business School in Jamaica for many years. When I began my tenure, the USAID resources that had supported the School were just coming to an end. So we built bridges to the business community and provided students with an academic curriculum that was more practical; related to the problems they would actually face. Both students and the business community wanted this development, resulting in a dramatic increase in our enrolment and the willingness of the private sector to support us financially.
Another factor in all of this is that Caribbean integration is proceeding despite the fact that not all of the regulations and pieces of legislation are in place. For example, a number of Trinidadian firms now operate in Jamaica, Barbados, up the Eastern Caribbean islands and even in the Dominican Republic. The same thing is happening culturally. It struck me when I was a student that you would rarely hear Jamaican music in Trinidad and vice versa. Today, it’s almost exactly the opposite. At the same time, one of the challenges to integration is the fact that we are developing at unequal rates. This reality will require strong leadership to keep the region’s economies together, but I have a lot of confidence that we will stay united and that our future will be great as we are able to overcome these challenges.
