VICE chancellor of The University of the West Indies (The UWI), Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, in insisting that the institution has “become an entrepreneurial university in search of income from the market economy”, says the “impressive” response from campuses to the overall “strategic plan for revenue revolution” is responsible for that shift.

Beckles, speaking at the open session of the Annual University Council Meeting at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus in Trinidad on Friday, said the university’s management has taken “responsibility for finding the financial resources necessary to fill the gap between what the governments are investing” and what the entity needs “to keep growing”.

He was delivering a report to the council themed, ‘Regionally Respected, and Globally Celebrated’.

In recent years, contributions from regional governments have dropped from 80 per cent of the total operational budget to just under 40 per cent, negatively impacting the financial resources of the university.

Beckles said Friday that this reality led to the realisation that The UWI “must now be far more entrepreneurial in the search of income generation from multiple sources, but effectively by generating commercial resources through the transformation of our research into products for market”.

“There were impressive results from campuses to this trajectory. So we can now establish that the university has, indeed, become an entrepreneurial university in search of income from the market economy in order to sustain our growth and quality,” he told the council.

He said the university’s “revenue revolution” has seen it moving to capitalise on its global ranking through its various campuses.

“We have already had the reputation revolution reflected in our global ranking, so yes, we are a highly respected global university at the top of our game; however, we have to convert that reputation into revenue and this is the stage of our development as we come to conclusion of the first quarter of this century,” Beckles outlined.

He said while the university’s income fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has since rebounded and “is moving in the right direction”.

Beckles, in the meantime, highlighted successes such as the university’s sargassum seaweed research project, which is now paying off, as well as what he said is the “significant decision by St Augustine to re-energise the project it has been working on for six to seven years to create an international school for medicine” in the country.

“There are over 45 offshore medical schools in our region and there is a tremendous market for medical education and training, and why should we sit back and allow external capital to be hegemonic in respect of that market potential? So UWI did what it had to do…We have the oldest medical faculty in our sub-region…our medical faculty is a vanguard global leader…so we have now entered into the space with the establishment of our own offshore medical school that will be entering into the market…giving the country a medical corridor of scientific research, training and teaching medicine,” Beckles said.

“This revolutionary stuff, we are now expecting our first cohort of students this academic year; this is a major development and we are saying to the market, ‘UWI is coming for its share,’ so all of those offshore schools in our region, we are coming to compete and take our share of the market,” he continued.

Added The UWI vice chancellor, “This is good because it gives us a chance to have a for-profit medical school and to enable our medical professors and academics and other disciplines related, to contribute to this enterprise because we do know that many of the offshore medical schools in the region rely on UWI medics on contract to come and teach their students.

“We are saying, ‘Fine, colleagues have a right to do certain kinds of consultancies, but we want to indigenise that industry, let us build out this’,” he said.

Beckles said, too, that while The UWI continues to attract significant capital for development from governments to keep it going as a regional public university, it has not been unaffected by certain shifts on the global front.

“We have not been funded as a research university, we are primarily a teaching university and our budgets are built around attracting resources for the delivery of our academic products. Our researchers have had to rely primarily on resources generated external to our funding model. So the international donor community, we have partnered with them all over the world to attract significant resources into our university to drive our research excellence…We are now entering a stage of volatility in respect of shifting paradigms and the USAID [United States Agency for International Development] removal from that ecosystem is having its impact,” he told the council.

He, however, said the institution is clawing its way back from the impact of those shifts.

“At the moment, we are down by quite a few million dollars and we are working to fill that space as a result of the removal of this significant donor, but we have always had a strategy to diversify our donor contributions to our research project. So yes, we will take a hit but it is not going to deter, undermine or weaken because we have strategies in place to access funds in other locations,” Beckles stated.

The UWI was among several institutions affected when USAID froze all its financing in January this year. The UWI reportedly lost US$2 million in research funding due to the abrupt suspension of USAID projects.