Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

With just days to go be­fore fi­nal ex­ams take place at the UWI St Au­gus­tine cam­pus, stu­dents have been as­sured that the work to rule ac­tion by staff will not se­vere­ly af­fect the flow of the ex­ams.

Staff, led by the West In­dies Group of Uni­ver­si­ty Teach­ers (WIGUT), have been protest­ing since Feb­ru­ary over the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer’s fail­ure to sub­mit a re­mit to kick­start the wage ne­go­ti­a­tion process. WIGUT had been warn­ing that fi­nal ex­ams set to be­gin on April 24 could be af­fect­ed if there was no progress made.

How­ev­er, Cam­pus Prin­ci­pal Pro­fes­sor Rose-Marie Belle An­toine not­ed that most of the ex­am pa­pers have been sub­mit­ted and she re­mains hope­ful that the re­mit will be giv­en be­fore ex­ams be­gin on April 24, paving the way for the oth­er pa­pers to be put for­ward.

In the event this does not oc­cur, she said those ex­ams will be resched­uled, but with­in the ex­am pe­ri­od which ends on May 15.

She then urged stu­dents to look out for any up­dates on the dates of their ex­ams.

An­toine made the com­ment to the me­dia af­ter greet­ing dis­grun­tled WIGUT mem­bers dur­ing their protest in front of her of­fice on the cam­pus yes­ter­day.

The cam­pus prin­ci­pal ex­pressed her dis­ap­point­ment over the stalled ne­go­ti­a­tion process but asked the mem­bers to re­main op­ti­mistic and con­sid­er an­oth­er form of in­dus­tri­al ac­tion to en­sure ex­ams are con­duct­ed as sched­uled.

Pres­i­dent of WIGUT, Dr In­di­ra Ram­per­sad, re­spond­ed to her re­quest as­sur­ing her that it was not their in­ten­tion to dis­rupt the ex­am but not­ed that it is a bar­gain­ing tool.

“You must ad­mit now that this is wor­ry­ing be­cause it is the 20th of April and we still do not have a re­mit and the ex­ams is next week. It is wor­ry­ing for every­one, even my mem­bers are con­cerned for the ex­ams and con­flict­ed about the col­lec­tive cause,” Ram­per­sad told An­toine.

“I re­main hope­ful and trust that they are de­lib­er­at­ing se­ri­ous­ly the re­quest and com­pre­hen­sive pro­pos­al that you have made so I wouldn’t doubt that they are look­ing at it close­ly. You did point out that UWI is usu­al­ly the first to get a re­mit and it has been a long time. But, I will con­tin­ue to hope and do what I can to get that re­mit,” An­toine re­spond­ed.

Act­ing pres­i­dent of the UWI St Au­gus­tine Guild of Stu­dents, Kyle Bis­nath, and pres­i­dent-elect Aish­warya Ma­haraj, told Guardian Me­dia that stu­dents are un­com­fort­able with any plans to resched­ule ex­ams.

“Many of them al­ready have ex­ist­ing anx­i­ety be­cause of the ex­am it­self and this gives a lot of un­cer­tain­ty, which is why we have been ad­vo­cat­ing at every meet­ing so we can get an­swers,” Bis­nath said.

“We don’t be­lieve the stu­dents should be col­lat­er­al in this is­sue. Yes, we un­der­stand the rea­son for the protest but the stu­dents should not be the ones af­fect­ed by this, be­cause at the end of the day ex­ams are crit­i­cal­ly im­por­tant,” Ma­haraj added.

WIGUT not­ed that there are no plans to back down un­less a re­mit is put on the ta­ble. Ram­per­sad said WIGUT will reach out to the new guild ex­ec­u­tive as part of their promise to en­sure the lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion re­main open.