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alexk
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The firing of University of T&T (UTT) academic staff continued yesterday, as close to 30 more of them were given retrenchment letters at the various campuses, including O’Meara, Valsayn Teachers’ College, John Donaldson and Point Lisas.
And management is next, with as four vice presidents and about 20 managers identified, deputy chairman and acting chairman of the board of governors, Clement Imbert, said during a media conference yesterday.
Imbert said in the first phase, 59 retrenchment letters have been prepared, 30 of which were given out last week Friday, including 11 lecturers from the Centre of Education Programme (CEP). The remaining letters in the first batch were sent out yesterday.
Yesterday’s letters were supposed to have been sent out on Monday, but the board halted the process after Minister of Education Anthony Garcia said he was going to raise the issue at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting.
After Thursday’s Cabinet meeting, Garcia, in a release, said UTT had been instructed to explain to the public the process that was undertaken to arrive at the decision to dismiss staff.
In his explanation yesterday, Imbert said academics, which is the core of the university, had to be looked at first.
“UTT embarked on an audit of the workload of the academic staff, which revealed a relatively low student to staff ratio. In other words, the university could deliver international quality education with fewer academics,” he said.
He said the criteria for separation of lecturers in academics were based on the adoption of a Staff Loading Model, whereby the teaching load, research and community service were taken into consideration to ensure that staff were fully occupied with an equitable distribution of academic duties.
“UTT’s new structure will see a reduction in the top management from seven VPs to three and 56 managers to about 33 to 36,” Imbert said.
“UTT has taken other restructuring measures…it has eliminated certain programmes, merged certain programmes and will be looking at all programmes, campuses and systems in its restructuring exercise and the strategic direction for the future.”
Imbert further explained that there were over 400 academic staff and after looking at all the programmes and staff, it was found about a quarter “we could do without.”
“Where we saw we had surplus, we said fine. First, we did a numbers game, look at programmes and speak to programme leaders to ensure that the programmes could survive,” Imbert said.
But speaking at the press conference, which was held at UTT’s NAPA campus, one the dismissed CEP staffers, Solomon Ragnathsingh, who lectures in Math Specialisation, claimed they were told by their programme leader that the Staff Loading Model was not applied to them. He questioned Imbert on what criteria was used for the CEP. Imbert said he was not sure.
A UTT student, who is in the Indian Classical course, told Imbert there were two instructors for Kathak and Odissey and since the teacher for Odissey was sent home that style of dance cannot be taught by the Kathak instructor.
“Must I think that I only have Kathak alone because my Kathak teacher cannot do Odissey and in addition, to which, she teaches four other courses?” the student said.
In response, Imbert said he “will have to investigate.”