GEORGETOWN, Guyana, CMC—Sixty-one years after its establishment, the University of Guyana (UG) received its formal accreditation on Monday after fulfilling 16.5 of the 17 standards required.
The accreditation undertaken by an external committee under the chairmanship of the former executive director of the National Accreditation Council of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Michael Bradshaw, now paves the way for the tertiary institution’s transfer of credits to be easily recognized by other universities in the Caribbean.
The other committee representatives were from Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica.
“I want the world to know that this accreditation was not an incestuous approach where persons, right from within Guyana, came and put a stamp of approval. These persons were external to this country,” said Executive Director of Guyana’s National Accreditation Council (NAC), Dr Marcel Hutson, adding that the accreditation is valid for five years.
Hutson and the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Professor Emmanuel Cummings, said UG’s accreditation now positions that institution within the context of the Caribbean Community’s Treaty of Chaguaramas.
“If your institution is unaccredited, they will not be accepted as a transfer student. They cannot come with their credits. Now that the University of Guyana will achieve institutional accreditation, credits from the recipient can be transferable to other regional institutions as part of the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas,” Cummings said.
The Vice-Chancellor explained that UG did not achieve the 17 standards due to the 1970 Mission Statement not aligning with current realities, so the new UG Council would have to make the necessary changes. “The evaluators thought that the university was doing much more than its present mission statement,” she said.
Hutson singled out the contribution of UG’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Paloma Mohammed-Martin, who said the assessment team conducted a thorough job.
“It’s a whole university exercise. These people don’t come here and speak only to us. They speak to students, they speak to clients, they speak, and they dig up everything. They dig it up if this is what you say you’re doing. They say, Bring the minutes. Bring the Bring, bring, bring the data. They go and talk to the people. If you call somebody’s name, they check these people,” Dr Mohammed said.
She said, “very quietly,” over the past four or five years, UG has been climbing the international rankings, and the aim is to get into the top global 200 over the next four to five years.
“That’s where we should be because you cannot say that you’re a world-class country without a world-class university, and we do indeed deliver and stand on standards.
“Nobody who knows this university administration knows we don’t play. We accept our problems, and we fix them,” she said.
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