The administration building of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona was recently dedicated in honor of former principal Sir Kenneth Hall evening during a toast to a lifetime devoted to regional development.
Before resigning and assuming the role of governor-general, Hall led the Mona campus for ten years as pro-vice-chancellor and principal from 1996 to 2006.
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Dr. Donovan Stanberry, the campus registrar, stated that Hall’s name should be honored in the building since, when he was principal, he was adamant about consolidating all of the Mona administrative branches into one location rather than dispersing them over the campus as it had previously been done.
“I think Professor Hall has the distinction of being the only principal in the last 30 years to serve two full terms here at The University of the West Indies. That takes a lot of tenacity, a lot of patience, a lot of perseverance, and I hope that he would have set a trend, certainly an inspiration for our current principal, who has just taken on the mantle,” Stanberry noted.
He praised Hall for his vision in building the administrative complex despite the challenging financial circumstances the institution faced when he was in charge.
“And those of us who are here would know that that situation has lasted for a while,” Stanberry went on to say that he was happy with the existing arrangement and that he was now a benefit of the move.
Pro-vice-chancellor and head of the Mona campus, Professor Densil Williams, praised Hall as a giant in the local, national, and international academic communities.
“He’s a visionary, but not just being visionary, he’s a practical visionary, and he was able to balance vision and action in order to accomplish results … It’s a very rare characteristic, and for him to actually have displayed it, we say the heartiest of congratulations to Sir Ken,” Williams noted.
He continued by saying that Hall’s ideas and efforts have a larger context.
Williams informed the assembly, “It draws me back to Peter Evans, who has a still fairly underdeveloped concept called ’embedded autonomy’, but despite the underdevelopment of the concept from a very academic perspective, he made, in my view, a very germane observation, and this is what Peter Evans said, ‘In order for countries to progress economically, institutional design plays a strong role in the success of most transitioning economies’.”.
The celebrant for the night thanked the university for the honor, noting that he was left speechless despite spending most of his life as a professor, being able to speak without notes, and preparing three versions of what his response would have been on Thursday evening.
Hall thought back to the “ origin of that building started then – my first week at this campus … The building came about mostly from a question I asked in my naivety, let me be clear. I noticed when there was a negotiation with the UAWU (University & Allied Workers Union), headed by then Dr. Trevor Munroe, it was held off-site in a building somewhere, and I just couldn’t understand it, so I asked one day quite naively, ‘Why is this so?’.”
“The idea of having a center, which would be orderly, which people could come and there would be the use of technology [was born],” he noted. “And so this building is really a monument to the student-centered concept, but also a monument for the human resource side, and, for my side, it was the UAWU because when I heard you couldn’t have a negotiation meeting with a large number of the staff on your campus in a place set out for them, I was just not able to absorb [that].”
Present were retired officials and dignitaries, including Dr. Peter Phillips, the former leader of the opposition, and former prime minister P. J. Patterson.
