DR Rae Davis has put away his university curriculum, crossed off the final item on his to-do list and is now relaxing in his ‘easy chair’.,/B>

He is going nowhere anytime soon, he tells the Observer. In fact, Davis says he is just “cooling out” after exiting office as president of the University of Technology (UTech) last December. He is enjoying his days leisurely, with no immediate plans of taking up a big role, he says.

On one of Davis’ recent ‘easy days’, the Observer sat down with him to reflect on his time at UTech, the future of the university and the way forward for Jamaica’s educational system.

“To be honest, with you, I am taking a rest. I haven’t reached to a stage where I can say definitely, ‘This is what I am going into’. But I’ll be engaged some way or the other in education,” Davis said in his unrushed, deliberate manner.

Davis, who has served the education sector for a number of years, was the president of UTech for a little more than 10 years until his retirement last December. He was initially mandated to manage the school’s transition from a college, (the College of Arts, Science and Technology) to a university. That in itself was a challenge that carried several secondary problems as well, and Davis got “turned on.”

“I just felt that this particular challenge suited my own personal growth desires at the time,” Davis said, explaining that he is “more of a change agent than a maintenance person”. In fact, it was passion to be a change agent that led to his involvement in the Reform of Secondary Education (ROSE) programme, which was primarily aimed at providing a standard curriculum for secondary schools.

“It (UTech) was a situation that required significant changes in an organisation, and that’s more up my street,” Davis told the Observer.

Ten years on, Davis, stating his obvious bias, feels that UTech has successfully managed to shift from operating as a college to a university. The fundamental difference between a college and a university, he said, is that a college is primarily a teaching institution, while a university has a wider scope, including research undertakings by faculty.

“Then there is the element of offering service particularly as a public university, so it’s a broader mandate. But underneath it all, it requires a cultural transformation,” Davis said, adding that the academic staff must see themselves transformed.

“Of course I’m going to say I think we have successfully managed the transition. The most challenging part of the journey is getting out the blocks, so to speak,” Davis said. For his work there, the university will this afternoon honour Davis in a special ceremony this afternoon.

“In the earlier days when somebody would say they are going to the university to do so and so, jokingly people would say ‘which university?’ But there is more consciousness now that we have two universities up at Papine.”

Taking seriously its role to provide service to the community, the university has undertaken a number of initiatives to that end under his guidance, Davis said. He believes the university should lead in making Papine and its surroundings “an educational space.”

“Everybody knows that UTech as part of its brand has to embrace volunteerism. For example, we have more or less adopted Papine High School and our faculty of education works with Papine High teachers focusing on, in the first place, literacy, but generally trying to assist the school,” Davis said.

The university has also established a football and netball club with the community, through its sports programme.

The athletics programme at UTech, which boasts the famed MVP club, Davis calls a “legendary” achievement, which is largely the result of efforts by Jamaican Olympian and former head coach of the senior athletics team, Dennis Johnson.

In fact, Davis is proud of the university’s sports and cultural programmes and pleased with their integration into the curriculum. Students can get credit for playing golf or drums through the sport or culture electives.

“The cultural programme has perhaps been the most revolutionary of the lot, it’s not the sort of thing we sometimes associate with a technology university, we think that everybody would be so focussed on the technical aspect of the work, but that has caught on as well….integrated in curriculum,” Davis said, adding that students can excel at the arts and technology at the same time.

Despite these achievements, however, Davis said he would have liked a more wholesale and early buy-in of the vision of the university by internal partners – students and especially staff, and external partners – industry and donors.

“One of the difficulties in managing the change process is how you keep all your partners together so that they embrace the changes, even before embracing, they must assist in developing the vision. And I felt that as the leader it was my responsibility to put forward a vision, and then to get the partners to buy into that vision, so relationship management is critical in all of that. That, I have to concede, has to be a working progress because you can develop vision statements, but ideally you want it to mean something to every level of the organisation. And we talk about student-centered learning, so you want to raise the bar, but you have to give them (students) support in terms of resources and mentoring, and those inputs into the process still remain a working progress,” Davis said.

“I would love to have seen that sort of thinking more advanced, but I am not going to be harsh,” he added.

That kind of acceptance of a broad vision and making sacrifices along the way is what Davis – a former permanent secretary in the ministry of education – believes is needed for the local educational system.

“Just about everybody accepts now that it is education which makes the difference between what you call a rich country and a poor country…educated countries are rich or rich countries are educated. So we don’t have any argument there. But strong education systems give you strong economies, it’s a cycle. And countries like Korea, Singapore, Ireland, these are the ones we like to quote, just stuck with it and didn’t say ‘OK, well we poor so we can’t find more money’. You cannot keep yourself in that loop, you just have to stick with it and yes you’re going to lose people through out migration , but you just have to stick with it.

“I think we’re going to need some sacrifices, I don’t agree with throwing money at the problem, but eventually you’re going to come back to resource issues, and it’s another Davis you’ll have to interview to get that,” Davis said with a chuckle, in reference to his Minister of Finance brother Omar Davies. “But the point is that there are challenges. If you say you want a world-class country with a world-class educational system, you just cannot escape it,” he said.

As UTech develops, Davis would like to see the university offer graduate programmes in its niche areas and focus more attention on faculty carrying out relevant research in accordance with its role as a public university.

“There are still some resource issues that the new leadership will have to grapple with in terms of providing some of those inputs- classrooms, technology support and so on, these are straight resource issues,” Davis said.

He believes that UTech will have to carefully monitor the market to decide on new undergraduate programmes. Additionally, the provision of affordable access to the university still remains a concern.

Of the ceremony in his honour this afternoon, Davis said, “I’m just going to present myself and go with the flow.”

“I’m more inclined to small, intimate type functions, but I appreciate the gesture,” Davis said smiling, flipping his shirt collar.