The UWI St Au­gus­tine Guild of Stu­dents has urged staff to con­sid­er the im­pact of their protest ac­tion is hav­ing on them.

The West In­di­an Group of Uni­ver­si­ty Teach­ers (WIGUT) has re­ject­ed a two per cent re­mit for the pe­ri­od 2014 to 2017 and have with­held ex­am pa­pers un­til a new of­fer is put on the ta­ble.

Guild Vice-Pres­i­dent, Tyrese St Louis, lament­ed the re­luc­tance of lec­tur­ers to at­tend the re­cent grad­u­a­tion cer­e­monies, as part of WIGUT’s protest ac­tion.

“A lot of lec­tur­ers just did not at­tend,” he said.

“These were the peo­ple who were there for us. Some­times some of these lec­tur­ers be­came our sec­ond par­ents be­cause we al­ways ap­proach them for all the ser­vices, they are now deny­ing us. At the end, you ex­pect to see them at your grad­u­a­tion. You look for­ward to say­ing, ‘Oh, there is my lec­tur­er who helped me when I al­most failed this as­sign­ment.’”

Oth­er stu­dents are not sure what is hap­pen­ing with their ex­ams next month.

“We em­pathise with the sit­u­a­tion that the WIGUT is in, how­ev­er, we have a man­date to our stu­dents, and we should not be used as a bar­gain­ing chip,” guild pres­i­dent Aish­warya Ma­haraj said.

Stu­dents said the ear­ly clo­sure of the cam­pus li­brary has been pre­vent­ing many of them, es­pe­cial­ly those stay­ing on cam­pus, from prop­er­ly study­ing for next month’s ex­ams. In ad­di­tion to this, stu­dents said course­work and stu­dent ma­te­ri­als are not be­ing up­loaded for them to ac­cess.

The guild is con­cerned about the “ir­repara­ble” dam­age these ac­tions, es­pe­cial­ly de­layed ex­ams, could have on their fu­ture stud­ies.

Ma­haraj said they met with WIGUT mem­bers and urged its over 200 mem­bers to di­al down on their ac­tions so that stu­dents were not ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed. How­ev­er, she said, they had no luck.

“The last meet­ing was held the week be­fore and ba­si­cal­ly what we dis­cussed is that we recog­nised cer­tain ap­proach­es to try to get the mes­sage across but what if you all could lessen the ap­proach­es so you (WIGUT) are still do­ing what you need to do but you could just take less dras­tic mea­sures so that the stu­dents are less im­pact­ed be­cause you say that you care for the stu­dents and that we are not be­ing used as col­lat­er­al so we told them we want to see how much they re­al­ly meant that,” she said.

“So, in­stead of clos­ing the li­brary be­tween 4 pm and 4.30 pm you could close at around 6 so it still clos­es ear­ly but it gives those stu­dents who have class­es late or those stu­dents who are work­ing, the op­por­tu­ni­ty to use the li­brary.

“We told them it is okay if you don’t want to share your slides on MyE­Learn­ing but do not hide the in­for­ma­tion that is al­ready there be­cause stu­dents al­ready have ac­cess to it so why are you hid­ing it,” she sug­gest­ed.

The guild is ask­ing the au­thor­i­ties to bring a new re­mit or so­lu­tion to the ta­ble.

Cam­pus prin­ci­pal Rose-Marie Belle An­toine said she em­pathis­es with both the stu­dent pop­u­la­tion and staff. She en­cour­aged the stu­dents to not lose hope, ex­press­ing op­ti­mism that the mat­ter will be re­solved be­fore ex­ams be­gin next month.

“Well, you know there is al­ways a plan B, and we did have a con­tin­gency last time and it worked out okay in that we were able to shift ex­ams. These ex­ams are very spe­cialised ex­ams, and they are ad­min­is­tered by high­ly spe­cialised peo­ple who are ex­perts in their own field. If the worse comes to the worse I do not think any­body wants us to have a dif­fer­ent kind of ex­am be­cause it is in the in­ter­est of stu­dents to have their lec­tur­ers ad­min­is­ter their ex­ams,” An­toine said.

She said while there has been no fur­ther progress on the ne­go­ti­a­tions, she has been in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with both the union and the Gov­ern­ment.

She ad­mit­ted she was con­cerned about the long-term im­pact of the mat­ter on the in­sti­tu­tion as the UWI can­not af­ford to help the state fund the in­crease the staff are seek­ing or lose any more of them, not­ing that the at­tri­tion rate is al­ready at a wor­ry­ing lev­el.