Queen’s College-The Institution That Forgot the Nation?

Last week, I published an essay about Clarence Trotz and Keith Wilson — about a laser beam that traveled one and a half million kilometers to a spacecraft in flight, and about the classroom in Georgetown where the man who sent it learned to see. The response was what I had hoped: warm, proud, wide-ranging. Former Queen’s College boys and girls from New York, Toronto, Washington DC, London and Atlanta wrote in. Scientists, teachers, lawyers, and doctors, all of them carrying some version of the same memory: a man at the front of a room, precise and unhurried, teaching them not just physics, but how to think.

And then, a letter arrived that stopped me and prompted a moment of deep reflection.

It was, in the manner of a certain kind of Guyanese intellectual, measured and exact. It came from Dr. Rory Fraser, a man whose biography I will let the essay introduce. Dr. Fraser said he had enjoyed the celebration of Mr. Trotz’s life and marveled at Dr. Keith Wilson’s journey. But the part that most intrigued him, he said, was the moment when I asked Mr. Trotz about Queen’s College’s return on investment for Guyana — and Mr. Trotz replied, with characteristic honesty, that he was disturbed and embarrassed by how many of its graduates had not seen fit to serve the country in any regard, for any length of time.

I want to use that sentence as the opening of this week’s essay. Because it is, I think, one of the most important things that has been said in this space in three years of publishing, and it deserves to be held up and examined with the full seriousness it commands.

The Charge

Let us be precise about the charge, because imprecision here would be a disservice to both the institution and the argument. Queen’s College did not fail to educate. It educated magnificently. The record of its graduates — in medicine and law and engineering and the sciences and the arts and the academy — is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary. Keith Wilson propagating laser beams to the edge of the solar system is not an exception. He is a representative. The list is long, and it is global, and it is genuinely impressive.

The charge is different, and it is perhaps more damaging: that the institution succeeded in producing excellent individuals, and failed to produce citizens. That it optimized, over generations, for personal attainment and not for national service. That the graduates it sent into the world carried with them its rigor and its standards and its particular way of thinking — and then, with remarkable consistency, deployed those gifts elsewhere.

Mr. Trotz said he felt embarrassed by this. Rory Fraser said it was a national failure. I think they are both right. And I think the failure is not primarily one of individual character — though it has a character dimension — but of institutional design. Queen’s College was designed, under British colonial administration, to produce a certain kind of person: cultivated, capable, English-educated in disposition and aspiration. It was not designed to produce the leadership of an independent republic, because no one who designed it imagined that an independent republic was coming, or that if it came, it would be theirs to lead.

Queen’s College was not designed to produce the leaders of a republic, and we never redesigned it to do so. That is the original institutional sin from which most of what followed descends.

The Colonial Architecture of Education

Fraser presses further, and it is worth following him there. He speaks of “intergenerational consequences manifested in deterioration of education standards and continued irrelevance to national empowerment.” That phrase — continued irrelevance to national empowerment — is, I think, the sharpest formulation of the problem I have encountered. Not decline, which implies a fall from some former height. Irrelevance, which implies a persistent misalignment between what the institution produces and what the nation needs.

We inherited, at independence, an education system designed for a colony. Its purpose was to identify and cultivate the small number of people who could serve the administrative apparatus — and to provide, for the rest, the minimum necessary to produce a functioning labour force. The Compulsory Education Ordinance of 1876, which governed education in Guyana for almost a century, was built on the traditional British view that the purpose of secondary education was to prepare the elite for its role in society. It was not designed to build a nation. It was designed to maintain one that had already been built, for someone else’s benefit, by someone else’s hand.

That question was never fully answered. It was gestured at, politicized, deformed by the pressures of ethnic competition and Cold War alignment and the particular pathologies of the Burnham years. And the result, as Fraser observes, is a system that has drifted further from relevance to national need with each passing decade, while the physical infrastructure around it — the school buildings, the examination boards, the curricula — has remained largely colonial in its bones.

Burnham did attempt to answer this question structurally with the establishment of President’s College in 1985. Conceived explicitly as a “school of excellence,” it was designed to break the colonial mold by operating as a fully residential boarding school, drawing top students from across all regions, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Its founding mandate was precisely what Queen’s College lacked: to forge a “special cadre” of leaders imbued with a deep sense of national pride and an explicit obligation to national service. Yet, despite this deliberate institutional design, President’s College ultimately failed to achieve its national purpose. Over the decades, it lost its exclusive residential character, suffered from political neglect and physical deterioration, and, most tellingly, saw its graduates follow the exact same trajectory as their Queen’s College peers — utilizing their elite education to emigrate and build careers abroad rather than remaining to build the republic.

The Land-Grant Argument

Fraser mentions that he had, independently, arrived at the same conclusion as Mr. Trotz and I regarding regional educational infrastructure: the Land Grant model, adapted for Guyana’s particular geography and social complexity.

The American land-grant college system — established by the Morrill Act of 1862 — placed at least one institution of higher learning in every state, with a mandate to teach agriculture, mechanical arts, and practical sciences tied to the needs of the regional economy. It was not designed to produce a cultivated elite. It was designed to produce a capable citizenry. The results, over a century and a half, have been extraordinary: land-grant universities today account for roughly half of all public agricultural research and development spending in the United States. National Bureau of Economic Research analysis shows that establishing a land-grant college directly increased local invention, agricultural yields, and the development of new crop varieties in surrounding counties. The University of California system — arguably the greatest public university system in the world — is a land-grant institution.

Fraser also mentions a conversation with Dr. “Cop” Perry — a significant figure in Guyanese educational thought — about the University of Guyana’s role in shaping educational policy consistent with national needs. Their conclusion was a greater need to indigenise the education system along the lines Trotz suggested: decentralization to increase access, diversification of learning and training, and the development of an appropriate pedagogy — one that begins from where Guyanese children actually are, in the interior, in the hinterland, in the coastal villages, and not from where a colonial administrator imagined they should be.

This is not a new argument. It has been made before, by Rodney and by Lloyd Best and by a generation of Caribbean intellectuals who understood that political independence without educational decolonization was only half a revolution. But it has not been implemented. And in Guyana’s case, the failure to implement it has had a specific and compounding cost: the regions have remained dependent on Georgetown, and Georgetown has remained oriented toward London and New York and Toronto. The circle of dependency has simply been redrawn at a larger scale.

The University of Guyana and the Void It Was Prevented from Filling

The University of Guyana was founded in 1963, three years before independence — an institution born, like the republic itself, in a moment of genuine hope. Its founding was an act of faith: that a self-governing people would need, and could sustain, a university of its own. That faith was not misplaced. The early UG produced scholars, scientists, and public intellectuals of real distinction. It had, in its first decade, the makings of the institution that Fraser and Perry and Trotz have been describing: a place where the nation could think about itself.

Instead, as Fraser notes, it was stymied. By the mid-1970s, the government had moved to bring UG’s governance firmly under state control, curtailing the faculty’s academic independence and bending the institution’s programmatic priorities toward political ends. Some of the most capable faculty — those least willing to subordinate scholarship to ideology — departed. Walter Rodney himself was barred from returning to teach there in 1974, a decision whose significance extends far beyond one man: it announced, clearly and early, what kind of institution UG would be permitted to become. The pattern that followed was not coincidence. It was policy. The institution that should have filled the void left by the colonial university became itself an instrument of political management rather than national development.

We are still living in that void.

The Autocrat’s Dilemma

Forbes Burnham articulated a vision that required strong institutions — a cooperative republic, a model for the Global South, a society that had found a third way rooted in its own land and values — and then governed in ways that prevented their emergence. The reason was, as Fraser observes, his own fears and ego: a refusal to build institutions strong enough to eventually act independently of him, because institutions strong enough to serve the nation are also institutions strong enough to constrain the man at the top.

This is the autocrat’s dilemma, and it is not unique to Burnham. It runs through the post-colonial Caribbean like a fault line. The leaders who were educated under the colonial system — who absorbed its values, its hierarchies, its deep assumption that authority flows downward and that the purpose of an institution is to serve its head — were not equipped, psychologically or intellectually, to build the kind of institutions a democracy requires. Institutions that are stronger than any individual. Institutions that outlast their founders. Institutions that hold the nation’s purposes in trust across generations, regardless of who is in power.

What the Oil Wealth Is Actually Testing

We now have, for the first time in our history, the fiscal resources to break that circle. The oil revenues that are flowing into the Consolidated Fund could, if directed with discipline and imagination, fund a genuine transformation: a University of Guyana campus in every region, or at minimum a high-quality tertiary institution with curricular authority appropriate to the needs of that region. Agriculture in the Rupununi. Marine science on the Essequibo coast. Engineering and technology in the mining belt. Health sciences distributed across all ten regions, so that a young man from Bartica who wants to be a surgeon does not have to travel to Georgetown to begin his education — and does not have to rely on a 92-year-old man’s generosity to learn physics over Microsoft Teams.

The question is whether there is the will. Mr. Trotz used that word precisely: not willingness, but will. Willingness is sentiment. Will is architecture.

If we build more school buildings without changing what happens inside them, we will have beautiful monuments to a missed opportunity. If we build a University of Guyana campus in every region without changing the curriculum, the pedagogy, and the institutional culture, we will have distributed the same irrelevance more efficiently across the territory. If we produce more Queen’s College graduates without asking what obligation those graduates owe to the nation that educated them, we will continue to send our best minds to JPL and MIT and the London School of Economics, and call it a success, and wonder why the republic still cannot govern itself.

The Offer We Should Not Refuse

The project before us is nothing less than the design of an education system for a self-governing people. It is sixty years overdue. We have the resources. We have the precedent — in the land-grant tradition, in the indigenization arguments of Rodney and Best and Perry and Trotz. We have, in the diaspora, a generation of Wilsons and others who built world-record institutions for other people’s governments and might, if asked properly and offered something worthy of their gifts, build one for ours.

What we have not yet demonstrated is the will.

Mr. Trotz asked, near the end of our conversation, whether there is the will to do what needs to be done. He said it twice. He said it the way a man says something when he already suspects the answer, but is not yet willing to give up on the question.

I am not willing to give up on it either. But I want to be honest about what the alternative means. The question is no longer whether we have the resources or the precedent. It is whether we are prepared to accept the consequences of continuing as we are — another generation of brilliant Guyanese building world-record institutions for other people’s governments, another decade of children in Bartica and Lethem waiting for a teacher who never comes, another oil boom that produces wealth without producing the human infrastructure to sustain it.

Inaction is itself a decision. And we have been making it for sixty years.

That is the kind of offer a nation should not refuse twice. I intend to take him up on it.

The Guyana Business Journal welcomes responses, reflections, and continued argument. The Sunday Essay series is published weekly. Write to us at guyanabusinessjournal.com.