Latest update April 20th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 10, 2014 News
“I was anxious to leave more than a year ago,” said Dr Prem Misir yesterday during a press conference venued in his office to officially announce his resignation as Pro-Chancellor of the University of Guyana (UG).
Dr Misir was not available to take calls on Thursday when word of his resignation first surfaced. However, reports of his resignation were confirmed by Registrar of the University, Mr Vincent Alexander.
Dr Misir during yesterday’s press conference explained that he took the decision not to say anything about his resignation earlier since from a statutory point of view he felt that the announcement should have been made by the University’s Council. “Indirectly I think that based on some of the comments made by the Registrar one would assume that there has been some kind of an announcement,” said Dr Misir. He pointed out that the ideal procedure was for him to first send his resignation to the University Council.
According to him, he has functioned as the Pro-Chancellor of the University since October 21, 2003, even as he noted that “in my own mind that is a long time.”
Dr Misir, whose resignation will take effect on June 2, is a re-migrant from the United States, where his family currently resides. He disclosed that most of his life was spent in university teaching even as he highlighted that moving from one university to another is not at all a difficult task. He, however, did not intimate any plans to take up any looming job offer neither here or overseas.
Speaking of his career since returning to Guyana around 2000, Dr Misir recounted that he held the position of Permanent Secretary with the Ministry of Information which was eventually disbanded and replaced with the Government Information Agency. Dr Misir was initially named Executive Director of GINA.
His desire, however, to remain in the academic arena would soon after see him being appointed Pro-Chancellor of UG. “It has been a great eye-opener for me; it was a great job…we do pretty much policy over-sighting and formulating at the (level of the) Council and it is the job of the administration to implement those decisions.”
However, Dr Misir insisted yesterday that he has “moved on” from his dedicated role at the University even as he noted that his decision to do so was nothing sudden. There were some who expressed surprise at the move since Dr Misir had only last month chaired a Council meeting and did not mention any plans to resign. “I don’t think you generally tell people that you are about to resign; you don’t say those things but it was not like a sudden thing,” said Dr Misir who related that “this thing has been discussed with my principals a long time…”
He explained that in light of a “number of loose ends” and new appointments, he made a decision to remain grounded at the University a while longer in order to ensure that there was some level of stability.
However, he disclosed that “I have a lot of other professional goals and interests that I want to consume…I have lots of time left and I want to do a lot of things.”
Dr Misir recently released a publication ‘HIV/AIDS Knowledge and Stigma in Guyana’ which was published by the University of the West Indies Press. And according to him, he has plans to embark on the expansion of his research work in this regard into three countries, an undertaking that would require some amount of funding. Moreover, he noted that “there may be some international collaboration from possibly the London South Bank University…I made a presentation at that University and one or two people are interested in being part of the project…”
“These are my kind of interest and these are the reasons why I resigned; I want to do these things,” confided Dr Misir yesterday.
Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
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