Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 23, 2014 Letters
Dear Editor,
I refer to Freddie Kissoon’s column “Ask Chancellor Carl Singh; ask Attorney Gino Persaud too” published in Kaieteur News, May 22, 2014.
I have long been a public admirer of Mr. Kissoon, and his truth, so it was not difficult to agree with the general tenor of his essay on law students’ activism.
Suffice to say, and with humility I say that I am a law student. And when Mr. Kissoon’s essay asserts with a generality that as early as 2012, law students were apathetic towards activism, it does not reflect my student activism . The essay, therefore, is at best conjectural.
Since I reengaged University life in 2009 as a Communications major and began Law in 2011 there is scarcely a protest, if any, at UG I have not supported physically. As a matter of fact with Mr. Kissoon ouster from the employ of the University in 2012 I was calling around students groups asking and indicating what the response should be and I did in fact participate in the protests to have him and the others reinstated.
I do not recount this publicly to compare who has more UG protests stripes under his belt but more so because newspapers serve a function to also chronicle our times and become a repository of history. I would have generations to come an accurate as possible account of the that history.
In the pages of that history text let me write this and recount a sad episode of UG’s history as I bore witness to it. In 2010 when the University of Guyana Students’ Society (UGSS), led by yours truly, called for ‘Civil Disobedience’ across Turkeyen Campus for what we saw as UG administration’s unwillingness to remedy several long standing student concerns.
I engaged the University of Guyana Workers Union (UGWU) in the persons on Freddie Kissoon and Bruce Hanes for the Union’s support. It was promised but never delivered. My colleagues locked the administration out of admissions and locked UG main gate at Turkeyen. We were not proud to do those things but ‘we had to do what we had to do’. The Union’s non-involvement never stopped me from supporting the Union in its causes, especially when it intersected with students’ interests.
I fully appreciate the value when Mr. Kissoon rehearses that… “UWI-based countries contribute to the Council, Guyana does not and Guyana does not make a financial stipend to the upkeep of UWI. Secondly, Guyana was guaranteed those twenty-five places when it was a financial contributor to the Council, it withdrew that assistance.”
But I would hazard, especially as it concerns the 2014 prospective law graduates, that would not be a good legal argument. In my humble submission Guyana historical contribution to UWI/CLE has impetus coupled with the fact that the end that was brought to the special arrangement regarding the top twenty-five and entrance examination was (to borrow my favourite word from the Kissoon lexicon) most “egregious”, arbitrary and unreasonable.
I have spelt out in previous letters to the editor that I believe when UWI/HWLS opened and closed applications in January 2014 in the local jurisdiction it signaled by conduct an intention to continue the arrangement. When UG law students applied to the HWLS we had a legitimate expectation cemented by the application process holistically that those applications would be considered on the merit of GPA in the first instance and grades via the Entrance Exam.
I would like to proffer here that when UWI/LEC voted in February 2014 to nullify the arrangement soon after they had received our applications to HWLS and application fee, application for Entrance Examination and that examination fee the LEC must have known throughout that process of its intentions to disallow the facilities. It would mean the Council took our monies under a false pretense, and a malicious misrepresentation. That is the immediate situation that requires remedy and more so requires justice.
Sherod Duncan
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