One of this year's distinguished recipients of an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of the West Indies, Professor Havelock Brewster, has offered a disturbing perspective of what can happen when intellectual challenges are made to ideas, policies and programmes in our Caribbean region.

RICKEY SINGH

With his own long history of service to regional, international institutions and governments of the Caribbean, the Guyana-born scholar and first professor of economics of the UWI (Cave Hill campus) focused his analysis on an observation made earlier this year by Chancellor Sir George Alleyne during celebratory activities for the university's 60th anniversary.

Speaking at the UWI's "Presentation of Graduates Ceremony" (Mona campus) on November 7, Brewster recalled that when he arrived on that campus just over 40 years ago as a young economics lecturer, the big challenge the community and governments offered the region's university was:

"To make itself, in its research and teaching, advice and practice useful and relevant to the real and pressing needs of our Caribbean community..." He then made a link with the observation by Chancellor Alleyne on the UWI's 60th anniversary, that:

"The stature of our (UWI) legacy will be determined by our ability to become the first port of call for regional leadership, seeking advice and technical expertise for policy development, strategic planning and programme implementation..."

Speaking directly to the graduating class, he chose to first reflect on the past and then the present over the 40-year period and "to leave you, the graduates, to draw out your own personal exhortations".

Among the academic challenges taken up, consistent with the identified requirements of that period, were, said Brewster, the need to "orient public policy to the eradication of persistent poverty and the roots of the plantation system to lessen dependence on primary commodities...

"Like sugar and bananas, exported under preferential terms to get greater returns and added value out of our raw materials and services, like petroleum, timber, fishery products and tourism to diversify the production structure...."

Then followed his scorching comment on what responses had followed that commitment to scholarship. "You would think", said Brewster, "that all this was pretty respectable stuff...But all this was greeted, forty years ago, not as the 'first port of call' but with unprecedented hostility...

"The authors were hounded (on the campuses) as communists; Marxist revolutionaries, conspirators with Fidel Castro, at best lunatics. The would-be reformers had passports seized; some expelled from the country; fired, threatened and one, assassinated...."

EPA HOSTILITY

As a journalist, I recall some of those sensational developments and academic victims. But let Brewster "fast-forward 40 years" to, as he said, our present-day experience with 'the contemporary issue of fundamentally reshaping our relations with the old colonial powers of Western Europe, now codified, they say for all time, in a so-called Economic Partnership Agreement...

"Whatever be the political viewpoints and interests of the Caricom parties to the EPA and their individual understanding of its provisions", argued Brewster, this much must be clear and common to most observers as he identified five points:

. "The EPA focuses on market access and marginalises support for development that was supposed, promised, and expected to be the centrepiece of our new relationship with Europe.

. Reciprocity, in the form of the full and free access to our markets for goods, services and investment, that we have been forced to give up to Europe, is fundamentally unjust and dishonest, among partners who are so vastly unequal.

. We have given Europe valuable concessions in trade, services and investment in exchange for uncertain or non-existent prospects of exporting to their markets.

. Our discretion to promote development according to our own policies, objectives and priorities has been qualified in significant respects; and

. We have permitted our own plans for deepening integration in the CARICOM Single Market and Economy to be pre-empted, to be subordinated, to the requirements of Europe."

In extending his comparison to the earlier period when academics and other advocates for change suffered tremendous hostility and worse, Brewster, having sketched his five points to debunk features of the EPA signed between this region and the European Union last month, concluded:

"As in the earlier event, 40 years ago, the advocates of change (critical of the EPA), have been greeted, again, not 'as the first port of call for regional leadership', but with harassment, at the port of entry and in other ways (he was one such victim but did not identify himself in his presentation) including a barrage of public vituperation of the most personal and offensive kind...

"We have had", he lamented, "the spectacle of a prime minister, a graduate of this university (whom he chose not to identify but who is known), vilifying as 'mendicants' those who hold other views, including a head of state; of editors of hitherto respected newspapers descending to the depths of personal abuse of dissenting individuals, impugning their loyalty, integrity and qualifications...

These included, he noted, "professors who served this and other universities and international institutions with high distinction; (also) mocking one of the most eminent Caribbean statesman, a long-serving Commonwealth Secretary General, Chancellor of this university for many years, and of other universities, the recipient of Honorary Doctorates from 25 universities all over the world (unmistakable reference to Sir Shridath Ramphal), as seeking the 'glare of public visibility for personal, pernicious and morally elastic purposes..."

He contended that there is much in common in the two examples he provided, separated by 40 years from the time he emerged as a young lecturer at the UWI to the 2008 graduation ceremony at Mona. The common thread in the hostile responses referred to, as presented by Brewster was "ideological dogmatism and the fear of change..."

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