TOMORROW AND TODAY: A VISION
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES
I. Our Caribbean society needs a Faculty of Philosophy at the U.W.I.
II. A Faculty of Caribbean studies with professors of different nationalities publishing a multilingual journal.
III. Distinguished West Indian authors teaching one or two year courses at the University, or one of its colleges, on such subjects or subject as they propose and are accepted by the University authorities. Instinctively, I add, an independent newspaper at least once a week. We are accursed by the colonialist tradition that advertisements start newspapers. This is entirely colonialist and entirely false. Great newspapers have been born and flourished in defiance of advertisers. Some bold journals have even attracted unlikely advertisements. You need to begin with only one sheet, tabloid size, two pages, and a passion, however threatened, which remains unshaken and wholly devoted to the interests of the Caribbean people.
Closely allied to the independent journal is an independent publishing house. The absence of such is characteristic of our British Caribbean society, a population more trained (and ready) for information concerning itself than any in the former colonial world. Instead, the society is fed on information distinguished by its intellectual poverty, its dishonesty, sometimes slick, quite often crude, and its general remoteness from the interests of the people.
And finally, public subscription to allow, for example, Sobers and Kanhai to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it, as long as they are not playing cricket for the West Indies.
Colonialism versus independence
Slavery versus freedom
That is still the issue.
