On be­ing ac­cused of nepo­tism and mis­man­age­ment by Dr Adel Mah­moud Sharaf, for­mer Vice-Provost and Pro­fes­sor of En­er­gy Sys­tems, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go quick­ly is­sued an ad­ver­tise­ment that sought to place the blame for such is­sues on both their ac­cuser and the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion of the uni­ver­si­ty.

De­scrib­ing its board of gov­er­nors as be­ing "com­mit­ted to right­ing the wrongs of the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion," the state­ment fur­ther not­ed that the board "has been work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly to iden­ti­fy and elim­i­nate such ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties, as ev­i­denced by the com­mis­sion­ing of sev­er­al in­ves­tiga­tive au­dits by in­de­pen­dent pro­fes­sion­al firms."

In an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian a week ago, UTT chair­man Cur­tis Man­choon de­scribed a uni­ver­si­ty still run­ning at a $67-mil­lion deficit, with op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es of more than $400 mil­lion, and salary costs of $300 mil­lion. Mr Man­choon al­so hung out a colour­ful ar­ray of the uni­ver­si­ty's dirty laun­dry for air­ing, in­clud­ing claims of nepo­tism, over­pay­ments to both staff and stu­dents, ab­sen­tee staff, lec­tur­ers with no stu­dents and ath­letes in a high-per­for­mance sport pro­gramme who de­liv­ered noth­ing of the sort.

Po­si­tion­ing him­self as the leader of the cleanup crew shov­el­ling through the Augean sta­bles es­tab­lished un­der the PNM, the UTT chair­man has not yet ex­plained why it took two and a half years and the fo­cused ac­cu­sa­tions of a for­mer Vice-Provost to an­nounce ac­tion on is­sues that should have been ev­i­dent soon af­ter his ar­rival.

Dr Sharaf claims he has lodged 800 mem­os with UTT's ad­min­is­tra­tion over the three and a half years of his tenure. The for­mer Vice-Provost's ap­point­ment was ter­mi­nat­ed 14 months be­fore his con­tract end­ed. Pol­i­tics has been em­bed­ded in the UTT since its in­cep­tion. With­in two days of the PP's suc­cess at the polls, its found­ing pres­i­dent Prof Ken Julien re­signed his pres­i­den­cy.

At a uni­ver­si­ty set up by the PNM and guid­ed by Julien, the par­ty's en­er­gy czar, the new coali­tion-gov­ern­ment ap­pointees could have ex­pect­ed to meet some is­sues of po­lit­i­cal ori­gin in the ar­chi­tec­ture of the new­ly cre­at­ed in­sti­tu­tion, but it should have clear­ly ar­tic­u­lat­ed a strat­e­gy to lift the in­sti­tu­tion above such con­cerns in­to the no­bler realms of pure schol­ar­ship, re­search and im­ple­men­ta­tion that are key to UTT's stat­ed poli­cies and strat­e­gy.

UTT is yet to do so and the scrap­pi­ness of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion sug­gests that the present ad­min­is­tra­tion may be play­ing pol­i­tics of its own. That would be a re­gret­table way of man­ag­ing the sit­u­a­tion. If the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion is in the process of do­ing ex­act­ly what it says, then it should swift­ly and clear­ly ad­dress the prac­tices that are mak­ing it im­pos­si­ble to run the uni­ver­si­ty prof­itably.

The uni­ver­si­ty's ad­min­is­tra­tion clear­ly will not ben­e­fit from ac­tions that might eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for a po­lit­i­cal house­clean­ing. There is no ques­tion that a uni­ver­si­ty for Trinidad and To­ba­go has a key role to ful­fil in ex­pand­ing the na­tion's ter­tiary-ed­u­ca­tion op­tions and pro­file.

While the uni­ver­si­ty was orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived as a de­vel­op­ment cen­tre fo­cused on en­er­gy-sec­tor re­search and de­liv­er­ing grad­u­ates to fu­el lo­cal­ly dri­ven ex­ploita­tion of nat­ur­al re­sources, the cul­tur­al re­search and teach­ing that has tak­en place at UTT has of­fered valu­able per­spec­tives and in­sight in­to cul­tur­al ini­tia­tives. These may one day play a role in the non-en­er­gy di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my.

The in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to and ac­tions on the is­sues at UTT should pro­ceed with trans­paren­cy and on the ba­sis of es­tab­lished pro­to­cols of gov­er­nance. A uni­ver­si­ty should be a durable, ven­er­a­ble in­sti­tu­tion, and should not be treat­ed as a po­lit­i­cal foot­ball.