UTT TURNS ROGUE

THE University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) has been sanitising its top staff for political purposes.

And taxpayers are made to fund such “shameful, offensive, discriminatory, high-handed and reprehensible” action.

The Keith Rowley Government has remained mum following the stunning ruling by Justice Frank Seepersad that $1.3 million in damages for wrongful dismissal be paid to sacked provost Dr. Fazal Ali.

The dismissal of Dr. Ali is just one of several high-profile firings after Dr. Rowley’s PNM came into national office in 2015.

Dr. Vashti Singh, Head of Centre of Education Programmes, was the first to go; she was replaced by Dr. Judith Rocke.

Not long after, Allan Raghunanan, Vice President of Human Resources, was sent home, followed by Professor Dyer Narinesingh, UTT’s President.

Over several months, a total of 69 lecturers lost their jobs.

They included Rudrunath Singh, Aarti Persad, Dr. Balmatee Sukha, Omar Maraj, Dr. Kumar Mahabir, Solomon Ragnathsingh, Amanda Rambaran-Sookraj, Dr. Rhonda Dookwah, Carol La Chappelle, Dr. Joseph Sanchez, and Patricia Bascome-Fletcher.

The Board of Governors was led by Professor Clement Imbert, and included Orville Carrington, Michael Patrick Cooper, Jerome Dookie, Elizabeth Foster, Professor Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool, Ulric McNicol, Nicolin Carol Moore, and Shivan Ojah-Maharaj.

In his other persona as a calypsonian, Chalkdust has crusaded for a generation against social injustice, political vendettas and prejudice.

Most of the sacked academics did not legally challenge their dismissals.

But Dr. Ali went to court, and Justice Seepersad ruled that his employment contract was wrongfully terminated.

The judge noted that Ali had been at UTT for more than five years and did not have a track record of improper conduct or failure to discharge his professional obligations.

He stated that in a democratic country that cherishes constitutional rights, a board, especially of a State-owned enterprise, should act without bias.

The board, Justice Seepersad said, “should focus upon the effecting of sound and measured decisions which applaud performance and ability which advances the mandate of the entity.”

The judge said that boards “must be mindful that they must prudently manage and allocate public funds.”

There “can be no room for personal agendas or political vendettas, nor should there be any attempt at staff sanitisation premised upon the ill-conceived notion that is ‘we time now’.”

The process engaged by the UTT board “was outrageous, high-handed and egregious,” Justice Seepersad stated.

He said: “The board operated in a manner which was shameful, offensive, deliberate, discriminatory, high-handed, and reprehensible.”

He said the board’s action was “devoid of merit and has no place in a plural, civilised society which adheres to the tenets of democracy, fairness, and equality.”

The Government has not responded to the court’s sharp rebuke.

Education Minister Dr. Nyan Gadsby-Dolly, a brand-new deputy leader of the ruling PNM, has stayed silent on the stinging indictment.

Dr. Gadsby-Dolly’s predecessor at the ministry, Anthony Garcia, had proudly said in 2018 that there would be more staff cuts at the university.

But an outraged former UTT Registrar Phillip Robinson lashed out at UTT.

Robinson asked whether the university has “gone so bad it is incapable of discerning the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, decency and indecency, shamefulness and shamelessness.”

UTT “has a dismal track record in the court,” he said.

He added: “Those responsible for this debacle, and whose conduct must be punished so as to reflect the blameworthiness of their conduct, will escape with a mere tongue-lashing in the High Court.”

Taxpayers, Robinson observed, would have to continue to financially support UTT “while we cannot afford to pay to defend or feed ourselves.”

He slammed that “there is no protection for the rest of us in a plural society that is fast approaching uncivilised status, with no respect for the tenets of democracy, fairness, and equality.”

Robinson summed up that “our children’s future matters.”

But while UTT has gone rogue, it does not matter enough for the Government to promise good corporate governance at this institution of learning and at other taxpayer-funded enterprises.

The critical issue has not even provoked a national discussion.