To say that UWI St Augustine principal Brian Copeland has had a lot on his professional plate lately would be an understatement. Since being appointed to the post in July 2016, Copeland, 60, has been confronted with two primary challenges: battling to cater to the present needs of both the staff and student population at St Augustine, while at the same time attempting to mold the university into an institution capable of meeting the needs of a bold new world.
His most recent “test” revolves around finding a resolution to an undertaking three years overdue: the completion and enrolment of students to the UWI Penal/Debe campus.
The $500 million project has garnered no shortage of attention in recent weeks.
Copeland, the first recipient of the Order of the Republic of T&T—the nation’s highest award—sat with the Sunday Guardian for a Q&A on the south campus, and his desire to move the issue forward.
Q: Where are we in the stream of time with the completion of the Penal/Debe Campus?
A: Right now, we’re exactly where we were at the start of the year. We are finalising discussions and negotiations with the contractors who will be taken on board to complete at least phase one of the campus. We were supposed to start (construction) at the beginning of February, that was our plan, but contractor negotiations have held us back.
The university put out a release recently speaking about the implementation of an operationalisation committee to resume activity on the campus. Can you speak to what this committee is all about?
It was at the end of January that we put that committee together. Prior to that, we were in negotiations with the last contractor and that didn’t come to an end until late December. Only at the end of January we began to see the light at the end of the tunnel and decided that it was time to start looking at the logistics of moving forward. The committee includes the administrative managers of the university, those who would be looking at things like security, transport, health and safety and the like. It also includes the Guild and it includes the faculty representatives from the Faculty of Law.
Initially the discussion surrounding the campus was that it was going to house the Law Faculty. The discussion seems to have broadened and the campus seems as if it is being repurposed. As principal, what do you conceive as the best use of the Penal/Debe campus?
We are looking at St Augustine right now and its current existence and we’ve recognised the need for us to essentially reinvent the campus. It’s 55 years old. It’s extremely difficult to do that while you’re in the same space. So what I see for the south campus is the opportunity to create a new UWI, or the nucleus of a new UWI. So we’re looking at a faculty that will take the leadership role down there but in doing so, we will look at all of the processes that pertain to the faculty, the way in which it operates, the entire system because it’s separate from here and we will use that opportunity to observe, and once it develops a sort of new operating environment we will try to clone that into this (St Augustine) campus.
This isn’t really a new technique. IBM did it when it was trying to reinvent itself whereby it selected a group of people and purposefully moved them out away from its central operations. They resourced them, allowed them to do what needed to be done there and then they copied that into their central operations. So that is the opportunity I see down there at that campus. So the new UWI we want to go to, for which we don’t have much time, we see the campus as providing us with a great opportunity to recast that vision.
You said a faculty taking the leadership role? Has that faculty been decided already?
Well we were pushing initially to shoot forward with law however, after a bit of reflection, we thought maybe we should just look at how best the space could be used. One dimension is the approach that I just described which is a sort of a new approach to university administration and organisation and so on. The other one is considering exactly which faculty could go down there and give us the best response to this mandate and objective. We’re still very early in this assessment and it will take us a couple extra months to get there. So the operationalisation committee will be tweaked a bit to accommodate this. Right now, the faculty representative is the faculty of law, but we intend to have reps from other faculties get involved. This is actually not new since before the work at the site ground to a halt there was in fact discussions with other faculties to see what they could offer at the south campus in addition to law.
All these plans obviously have to be guided by timelines. So tell me, what sort of timelines are we looking at for the south campus to ultimately be ready to admit students and to be fully up and running?
Well to force the timelines, we’re looking at January 2018. Again, this is to force it. This is, however, not a hard and fast thing that we’ll actually move into there by then since we would still have to do an assessment. Much of this will be guided by the operationalisation committee in terms of determining when the campus is ready to be occupied, how do we do it. But before we could even get to that, you have to make the place habitable. So when construction starts, we’re looking at about seven months from the restart of construction to the date when we can say ‘ok, this is no longer a construction site, and is now ready to be occupied.’ That being said, in terms of the site being ready to be occupied as a campus, that will take a bit longer.
Where are we today in the construction phase?
We are about 85 per cent complete. There is no progress to date because, as you know, construction has stopped and the building that is most behind in construction is in fact the signature building which is the library.
Has the construction remained on budget?
So far it is on budget.
What were some of the issues with the previous contractor?
Basically the progress was way too slow. We’re talking about a project that is now three years behind time. We negotiated with that contractor and decided to terminate our relationship with them. We’re now in negotiations with the local contractors who are interested in the job.
What do you think the public has been most misinformed about with the south campus?
I think the biggest misconception involved knowing what the finished campus would look like and how it would connect with the main campus here at St Augustine.
Is the south campus necessary?
We had started looking at the possibility of expansion way back in 2008, 2009 thereabout. Right now, the population density at St Augustine is quite large. We have 17,000 students and 4,000 staff members. For the acreage that we have and the buildings that we have, we’re actually crammed to capacity. So to answer your question, yes there is a need for another campus. I personally felt that the campus should have been in Couva. There are a number of supporting amenities, a sufficient amount of land, and its quite accessible from both the north and the south.
ANDRE WORRELL
