THE HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF
THE
DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT
The
Beginnings
The Department of Government was created
in the University of the West Indies forty years ago
with a full-time staff of four: Professor Brian Chapman,
on secondment from the United Kingdom's University of
Manchester, as Head and Director of Training in Public
Administration, Francis Mark (Trinidad/Tobago) moving
from the Department of Economics, where he had been
teaching Politics and Political Institutions as a B.A.
course, Ogilvie ("og") Buchan
(Scotland) Political Theorist, and Gladstone Mills (Jamaica),
recruited from the senior civil service (Assistant Under
Secretary, Ministry of Finance) as Associate Director
of Training in Public Administration . This small staff
was supported by a group of distinguished part-time
lecturers, which included G. Arthur Brown at that time
Director of the Central Planning Unit and Dr. Gladstone
Bonnick (teaching Public
Finance), Dr. Lloyd Barnett and H. D. Carberry
(Law)
Simultaneously, the year 1960 also
saw the establishment of the Faculty of Social Sciences
with Departments of Economics and Government and the
older Institute of Social and Economic Research; and
Sociology joining in 1961. The Department of Management
Studies at Mona was established later, though a Business
Administration course had been introduced in the Economics
degree from the early `60s. The Department began by
offering two programmes: a group of courses constituting
Government as a subject specialization in the B.Sc.,
Economics degree and a one year Diploma in Public Administration
designed for administrative official personnel within
the public sector. In addition, optional courses in
Politics and Public Administration were added to the
B.A. Programme.
An Era of Development
From these beginnings, the Department
moved to the mounting of a Master's programme in 1964-65,
and by 1971, a hierarchy of programmes had been established:
from the Certificate level, the CPA, through undergraduate
BSc. of degrees (in separate specialized areas: Political
Science, Public Administration and International Relations),
to the DPA, MSc. and Ph.D. The first MSc. was awarded
(Course work & Thesis in Public Administration)
in 1965 (Harold Lutchman)
and Ph.D. (International Relations) in 1972. One of
the most far-reaching developments was the extension
of the CPA to non-campus countries in 1983 in an outreach
dimension. This has enabled a larger number of junior
public officials in all the contributing countries to
be exposed to education and training in Public Administration
and associated subjects at home.
Incredibly, most of these developments
occurred during the decade of the 1960s despite considerable
instability in staffing of the Department; members who
functioned within a turbulent environment, which involved
protests within and outside of the University against
the Jamaica: Government's "exclusion", first of Walter
Rodney and shortly after, of Clive Thomas. Throughout
that period the Department experienced the arrival and
departure of professors and lecturers whose contracts
were terminated for one reason or another, leaving me
as Acting (1963-65) and later, Head (1965-'80) with
Ann Spackman and Archie
Singham being the other
elements of continuity.
From its inception the Department benefited
significantly from external aid-the donors: the Carnegie
Corporation, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, Canadian
and U.S.A.I.D, the United Kingdom's Inter - University
Council However, in order to ensure its further development
and to sustain this, especially in light of the` experience
of instability during the early years, we considered
it essential to create a capacity for institution building.
Institution Building
The process was initiated via a link
arrangement with the counterpart department, the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom (from 1964 to '77), which involved a two-way flow
of graduates for Ph.D. studies on Caribbean topics, and a limited staff exchange scheme. This
very successful arrangement was strengthened by also
maintaining continuous contact with other outstanding
graduates who were studying at Michigan, Yale and
Oxford with a view to recruiting them for one of the University
of the West Indies campuses. Hence, by the early 1980s the Department
Heads on all the campuses (and the University of Guyana) and by the mid-`80s, all the Deans of Social Sciences
were Mona Government graduates.
A
Personal Perspective
Incidentally, too, on my retirement,
all members of our staff at Mona except myself
were graduates of this Department. My successor as Head,
Dr. Edwin Jones a graduate of the Manchester Scheme,
returned to Mona in 1973 after teaching for two years
at the University of Zambia. Continuing on a personal note, apart from scholarly
publications, I have been chairman of a large number
of commissions and committees, outside of the University
and leader of teams focusing on development of the University,
including interalia,
the creation of the Centre for Hotel and Tourism
Management in Nassau, the development of the Department
of Management Studies and several link schemes. I was
Dean of Social Sciences in 1967-'70 and the period 1980-'84
(All of these at a time when the Dean covered all the campuses.)
Gladstone E. Mills OJ, CD
Professor Emeritus
August 2002
