Looking at the alacrity with which the public digests regurgitates the more and more lurid scandals these days from the press and TV news via FB, Twitter, blogs and all that, you notice in practice a small, often warped, dollop of information is amplified, dissembled, reassembled, and endlessly discussed. But what comes out is plenty ole talk and strong feeling, based on little or no fact and analysis.
To take raw (social) data, assess their probity, and present the public with reliable knowledge, is a primary function of journalism. The media are the first filters that attempt to make sense of chaotic reality. But the function must then proceed to other institutions, like the university.This observation might be un-generously thought of as a brilliant grasp of the obvious. Unless you live in the land of Carnival, where wining is indispensable and knowledge optional.
In the metropole, the benefits of data gathering and analysis are so woven into the fabric of everyday life, entrepreneurs have made businesses of them–the so-called Big Data analysis, Freakonomics, Nate Silver's statistics-geek stardom, and Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller books, like The Tipping Point and Blink.
Alas, while we are ardent metropolitan mummers of the things that can do us no good and much harm, like smartphones, skinny jeans, Louis Farrakhan, the Kardashians and cosmetic surgery, we stubbornly spurn the smart stuff. Like data and research.In its editorial of April 15, the Guardian picked up on the dean of UWI's faculty of social sciences, Errol Simms' lament on the dearth of postgraduate research, wherein he "acknowledged supervisory shortcomings as part of the problem."
Research isn't entirely absent from UWI. The joint winners of the science and technology prize of the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence this year, Prof Anselm Hennis of Barbados, and Prof Dave Chadee of Trinidad, are both exceptional researchers. But both reported similar experiences at UWI and in general: apathy and wilful ignorance.
Prof Hennis was instrumental in increasing the size and scope of the Chronic Disease Research Centre (CDRC) in Barbados, which (inter alia) keeps registries of chronic diseases like stroke, heart disease and glaucoma. Its data collection has been so valuable, the US Centers for Disease Control has used this research in policy regarding African-American eye disease. CDRC's research can save billions in health care and productivity losses in the region.
But when he started off as a doctor with an interest in research, said Prof Hennis, he was looked at as "an eccentric" who was wasting his time. It took more than a decade, but he's made his point, and the CDRC is a world-respected institution, and its value in to society is widely understood. At least in Barbados.
T&T'S Dave Chadee had a similar but not identical experience. He worked for 20 years at the Ministry of Health as an entomologist and parasitologist, doing research into mosquito-borne diseases, like dengue, and publishing papers on his research. His work is used all over the world but, he says, it's hardly used in T&T.
Prof Chadee remembers several years ago he was summoned to a meeting by a government agency which had hired foreign consultants. At the meeting a consultant was asked whether he had any suggestions for Trinidad, and replied: "Why don't you ask him?" Pointing to Chadee. "What I'm telling you is from papers he wrote." Naturally, the government official preferred to pay enormous sums to foreign consultants.
It's a little different in the social sciences, where the foreign consultants have no local researchers to refer to.The only studies of Facebook and the Internet, and the effects of international media on local populations in Trinidad, were done by a British academic. The same applies to many other things of importance. Local academics are so engrossed with slavery and Carnival, they have time for little else, leaving non-locals to do social and cultural research that can actually be of use.
It's not that locals are uninterested or incapable. My experiences at UWI showed time and again that academic supervisors refuse to allow their students to explore new concepts, seek new data, and theorise new ideas. And academics are assiduous in punishing students when they do.
I once sent an article to a British journal which was assessed as "well-theorised, well-argued and well-written" and was recommended for publication with revisions. I sent the same article to an American one, which sent it to a UWI academic who concluded (along with the referees she selected) that it was an "unsubstantiated conspiracy theory." Many students have identical experiences, without the benefit of a newspaper column to tell the world.
The absence of sentience, and the chaos and animus rife in the public sphere, are consequences of this attitude which filters through the society, since UWI trains the bulk of local technocrats, teachers, and bureaucrats.We actually export our sentience. A Trini named Anil Kokaram studied engineering at Cambridge and helped develop software which made the visual effects of the Matrix movies possible.
He was awarded an Academy Award in 2007 for that. Another Trini, Stephon Alexander, is one of the leading physicists in the world. (Google his op-ed in the NY Times of February 4, 2013.) Malcolm Gladwell is of Jamaican parentage.Any of them could have gone to UWI. And I'll go out on a limb here and say that none of them could have been anything close to what they are now if they'd done that.
There are a few talented lecturers at UWI, who all report frustration, a desire to leave, and gradually succumb to apathy. The institution, one said to me, like the country, is ignorant and loves it. That should be our national motto.
