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A Tribute Paid to Sir Alister McIntyre on Ocotber 22, 2009

For Release Upon Receipt - October 27, 2009

Cave Hill


By Sir Hilary Beckles

Today The University of the West Indies at Cave Hill honours Sir Alister McIntyre, Vice Chancellor Emeritus, and role model for administrators and academics within the academy.

The facility that formerly housed the Centre for Multi-racial studies, expanded and refurbished, will be officially named the Alister McIntyre Building. It houses the Archives of the West Indies Federation, and a number of other archives and research projects dedicated to sustaining the regional integration movement.

The area within which the building is situated has been named “The Caricom Research Park” on account of the many integration studies projects and research programs situated within the space.

I consider this moment of great historic significance. Sir Alister has championed integration research policy for more than fifty years and the excellence of his contribution has served to safely guide regional institutions and governments through some very stormy waters. No other scholar in this region has taken up the Sir Arthur Lewis mantle with such distinction, passion and dedication. He has been the quintessential policy strategist and intellectual investigator of regional trade. No one has shown as clearly how best to build relevant policy formulations upon a platform of sound, effective, scholarly research.

But this is not all. Sir Alister has been described as the most transformative Vice Chancellor within the Arthur Lewis tradition, having radically regionalized the university. He injected robust management and governance reforms, enlivened by an effective income generating and budget formulation strategy that stabilisted teaching and research while modernising the infrastructure. 

For sure Sir Alister became for a subsequent generation of university administrators the model of the effective Vice Chancellor. He provided strong intellectual leadership, a clear vision for high academic standards that was non-negotiable, and a skilful ability to inject financial resources into the cash-strapped university. For near a decade, he was central not only to the sustainability of The University of the West Indies, but to the higher education sector of which UWI is a part.

His capacity for hard, smart work is legendary. He knew how to get to the substance of matters and did not waste his time on superficial issues and poorly formulated plans. For many of us within UWI management he remains to this day the living example of the effective university leader; a role model and shining light.

The depth of my personal gratitude to Sir Alister cannot be fathomed. Through him I learnt the art of university management and keenly appreciated the critical importance of foregrounding at all times the regional character and interests of the university. It was an enormous learning experience; to work with him was an exercise in watching a modern master at work.

Today, the university now has within its ranks an “Open Campus’. But we must recall that it was Sir Alister, as Vice Chancellor, who pulled together the scattered elements of the outreach sector, the School for Continuing Studies, (headed with distinction by Professor (now Vice Chancellor emeritus) Rex Nettleford), Distance Education, etc., and secured funding for the expansion and technological upgrade of the UWI centres across the region. He also created a Board for Non-Campus Countries and Distance Education, chaired by a Pro-Vice Chancellor, that represents the operational and conceptual core of the Open campus which is now headed by its own principal, Pro Vice Chancellor Hazel Simmons-McDonald.

What in fact has been rebranded as the “Open campus” represents, then, the basic infrastructures established by Sir Alister and led by Pro Vice Chancellors Woodville Marshall and Lawrence Carrington. It was a critical development in the movement to radically increase access to university education across the Caribbean. In this sense, then, Sir Alister is truly the father of the “Open campus”.

Cave Hill cannot thank Sir Alister enough for his contribution. As Vice Chancellor he negotiated the now famous Inter-American Development Bank loan, a financial facility that benefitted Cave Hill by driving transformations that doubled its operational floor space across faculties. Our distinguished former Principal, Sir Keith Hunte, worked closely with Sir Alister and established the base for the modernization of the Cave Hill campus; a foundation on which we are now building.

By today’s ceremony, Cave Hill and the wider university celebrate one of our finest thinkers and activist in the field of Caribbean nation-building, and records our debt of gratitude as a campus to a Vice Chancellor whose legacy and footprint will forever be respected.

 

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