IN a time past, the Economics Department of UWI, Mona, was the part of the University of the West Indies that attracted the most public attention. There were good reasons for that.

These included the quality of its scholarship, the pioneering but often controversial nature of some of its output and its contribution of economists to public policy institutions.

Above all, it was justifiably renowned for its commitment and practice of putting its skills at the service of the people of the Caribbean and the developing world. It accomplished this by a vigorous and continuous involvement in the public debates on current economic policy issues, which has taken the form of articles in the press, radio commentaries, public speaking, and popular publications. The activist scholar in service to the community was the culture.

We believe it is true to say that the UWI Economics Department has provided several brilliant activist scholars, such as George Beckford and CY Thomas, to name two examples, who created Caribbean development economics.

The ranks of the teaching staff of the department have provided a prime minister (Owen Arthur of Barbados), a minister of finance (Omar Davies of Jamaica) and the Vice Chancellor (Sir Alister McIntyre of Guyana). They include heads of several regional institutions, for example Compton Bourne (CDB), Richard Bernal (RNM) and Norman Girvan (ACS).

International institutions have benefited, example Havelock Brewster (UNCTAD), Delisle Worrell (International Monetary Fund, Wayne Henry (World Bank) and Desmond Thomas (IDB). Local institutions have drawn on the dept, example Bank of Jamaica (Owen Jefferson) and PIOJ (Norman Girvan, Davies). Messrs Michael Witter and Clairemont Kirton have advised several Caricom governments.

The question is, where has all this briliance gone?

There has been an unprecedented global economic crisis with dire consequences for the Caribbean and Jamaica has made a momentous break with its past economic policy, yet no public utterances from the famous economics department. This was a department that had something to say about everything.

The silence of the economics department is deafening in the midst of a region with some of the highest levels of debt, crime and youth employment in the world yet little or no comment. Sugar and banana are struggling, Haiti has been devastated and Cuba is in pristine consistency. So much to think and speak about and yet only embarrassed silence.

This immobilisation has its origins in the ideological schizophrenia between the ‘un-reconstituted’ Plantation-Dependency fossils and the equally naïve free market theologists. A house so divided cannot stand and hence the halcyon days of the late 1960s to the early 1990s are over.

Where have all the Economics Department staff gone? Gone… gone to consultancies, which leave no time for fulfilling the responsibility of free public commentary. No blog, not even a posting on the department’s non-existent website.

The Economics Department has fallen from an activist vanguard of the Social Science faculty to poor relation of the departments of government, history and management studies.

Our advice to Prof Gordon Shirley, principal of UWI, Mona is to give less attention to the construction of sporting facilities and more to the reconstruction of the intellectual faculties, starting from the ground zero of the Economics Department.