Chamber president bats for a single university for MoBay
WESTERN BUREAU – Winston Dear, the president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce & Industry, has proposed the merger of the city’s four tertiary institutions to form one single university in order to stem the migration of students from western Jamaica.
“It is our wish that the Montego Bay Community College, the Caribbean Institute of Technology, the Sam Sharpe Teachers’ College and the teaching section of the Cornwall Regional Hospital merge together to form a university of Montego Bay,” Dear said Wednesday.
He was addressing the University College of the Caribbean’s partnership-building luncheon at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in the city.
According to Dear, students from western Jamaica should be given the opportunity to study in Montego Bay.
“We (have been) concerned for some time that those students wishing to further their education have to go elsewhere in the island or overseas. No community can develop to its full potential if tertiary education is restricted to those that can either obtain scholarships or can afford to meet the tuition and accommodation (fees),” he said.
He pointed to the merger between the Institute of Management Sciences and the Institute of Management and Production to form the University College of the Caribbean (UCC) as “a move in the right direction”.
The Chamber president was however critical of what he said was the UCC’s failure to make its presence strongly felt in the area.
“We know that you have been here for some five years… But we as a community have not felt your presence the way that we should and this we ask you to correct because you have to be part of the community if education is really going to succeed,” Dear urged.
There have been calls, over the years, for the establishment of a major university in Montego Bay but those calls have yet to bear fruit. At one stage, Dear explained, there was some talk of plans for the University of the West Indies to establish a campus in the western resort city. That has not happened, with the university opting instead to offer long distance education from a facility next door to Cornwall College.
