Higher Education in the West Indies

Abstract

F OR many years a large section of the people of the West Indies have urged the establishment of a university to which their young men and women could come, not only to receive higher education, but also to develop that tolerance of spirit and breadth of outlook which is engendered by university life. This university has now been launched. In January, I949, a Royal Charter was granted which incorporated the University College of the West Indies; King George VI accepted the office of visitor, and Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, has been appointed the first chancellor. Thus the university starts its career with high hopes and consciousness of the importance of the task which lies ahead. The history of this new University College goes back to I 944 when a committee of the Asquith Commission on Higher Education in the Colonies, under the chairmanship of Sir James Irvine, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, paid an extended visit to the British West Indies. The Committee was charged with the task of examining the need and feasibility of establishing a seat of higher learning in the wide arc of islands which stretches from British Honduras in the west to British Guiana in the east. In its report the Committee recommended that a university should be established in the West Indies as soon as possible, since there was not only a sincere demand for this among a large section of the peoples of the West Indies but the standard of secondary-school education and the intellectual quality of the pupils were sufficiently high to provide many students who could, with profit, extend their education to the university level. The Committee then outlined plans for bringing a university into being. These took the form of creating, in the first place, a University College in Jamaica, whose students would sit for examinations for degrees in an established university. Later, when a probationary period had been served, and academic reputation and standard achieved, permission should be sought for acquiring full university status. This approach has much to commend it and is modeled on the practice which has been followed by the newer universities in Britain. The Government of the United Kingdom accepted the report of the Asquith Commission and with it the recommendations of the Irvine Committee, and in I946 T. W. J. Taylor, a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, was appointed principal of the new University College. Then came two years (I 946 and I 947) of planning and