President (The College/University of the Bahamas)

With origins that date back to 1974, The College of The Bahamas (COB) today has approximately 5,000 students and offers nearly forty majors in its bachelor degree offerings and more than twenty at the associate degree level. In your opinion, what would you say has been the biggest strength of The College over the years?

One of our major strengths at The College is the academic preparation of our students. College of The Bahamas graduates or transfer students pursing international undergraduate or graduate programmes tend to be exceptionally well prepared to compete with students from these institutions. As a matter of fact, for those students who decide to remain in the United States (US) professionally they end up leading corporations, higher education institutions or even lead large research agencies as well.

Entrepreneurship and innovation are fundamental to any economy. How does COB promote these?

A lot of that takes place with public private partnerships. To give an example we will be moving towards building a strong programme on entrepreneurship in our Northern Bahamas Campus in Grand Bahama. We will also create a business incubator in partnership with the Grand Bahama Port Authority (GBPA) as well as the U.S. Embassy. In terms of innovation, we are getting ready to partner with The Bahamas Telecommunications Company Ltd., (BTC) we are also getting ready to break ground for the construction of the Small Island Sustainability Research campus. We will also partner with other campuses as The University of The Bahamas to create continuous research opportunities.

The College of The Bahamas is today a semi-autonomous institution. How are your operations funded and in what percentage?

We are semi-autonomous to the point where our governance structure is a Council, and it is mostly appointed by the sitting government. We are in the process of moving from The College of The Bahamas under this government structure to The University of The Bahamas, which will be under a Board of Trustees, giving us more internal governance. The current Bill that we are getting ready to present to Parliament is one that incorporates all of the core requirements for governance for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). That’s our first step towards the accreditation by SACS.

COB is in the process of attaining university status, which is expected by the end of this year. With the mission to “support and drive national development through education, research & innovation and service to the community,” The University of The Bahamas will be one the country´s most strategic actors. What impact will this move have on the educational landscape in The Bahamas and the country as a while?

The University of The Bahamas will have a significant influence on the development of the entire country. I say this because what we do here is see the entire country as a campus. We are not going to be developing all of the graduate professional programmes here in New Providence but rather we are going to expand into the other islands in The Bahamas and develop specific centres of excellence and residential campuses throughout the country, for example, one in San Salvador, Grand Bahama, Andros, Exuma and Eleuthera. Each of these campuses will specialize in a different area so when we start recruiting internationally as well as locally students might fly to Nassau and catch a plane to go to their campus on another island. This will force us to have a more equal distribution in terms of our population growth, and it will also stimulate the economy on other islands outside Nassau, so we will create college towns around the country.

What prompted this decision to transition into a university?

This was based on the realization that each country that is developing in the right direction and is strong has an university that will help guide the entire society, in terms of research, analysis, constructive feedback and providing information to the governance structure that is data driven rather than based on speculation. This realization took place quite a while ago, probably in 1973 when we acquired independence, but as I said this has been a gradual process and we are at the point now where we need to move away from the control of government.

The Bahamas is currently in the process of developing its first ever National Development Plan. In addition to being reporting on national key performance indicators, The University of The Bahamas will align its academic programming with the pillars of the National Development Plan (NDP). Can you explain to HBR the importance of this and give some examples of how you intend to do this?

The university is a part of the mission statement, which is to stimulate and support national development. The NDP will be a blueprint for the country moving forward and we at the university will use this particular blueprint to develop and expand our strategic plan including redesign our academic programmes moving forward. We will use that to develop and create our own tactical documents, which will be the basis of our annual operational plans so that all members in the institution move forward in the same direction. With this we must keep in mind that we will also be simultaneously going after the SACS accreditation and will have to continuously improve our planning efforts as well. We are expecting that these same methods are also going to have a strong role in restructuring the government public services. We expect to assist them to implement planning units based on the same concept so government agencies are no longer just responding to how much money is in the budget but rather conducting in project-based planning.

The main challenge for this is culture change. We have been an independent country for 43 years and inherited a colonial system of government administration. This system was design to do certain things, one of them being to keep people under control. We have perfected this system and in essence this makes us our own enemy, and so what the biggest challenge will be is how to help the country to believe more in itself and that we can do something different. We need to redesign our system to make our disadvantage one of our strongest assets.

COB has a number of partnerships with international colleges and universities, including Harvard University. What benefits do these partnerships bring and will your University be seeking more partnerships?

We have articulation agreements with several institutions around the world, mostly in Canada and USA but our relationship with them has not been reciprocal over the years. They have been using The College more for recruiting so we have begun talks with them to create a more balanced relationship. The biggest challenge for us is not having a residential building in our campus so we cannot really accommodate international students and provide them with the services they need but this will change.

We want to develop these and expand the relationships considerably because these kind of things will actually give us access to capital we don’t have here and allow us to expand our own intellectual capital on campus and our research capabilities as well.

We are currently developing an intellectual rights policy, which means that a lot of things will go out through The University of The Bahamas. We will have equal share and ownership in it as well because one of the things we don’t have in the country is a degree of control over the kind of research that takes place in the country and then leaves the country. There are institutions outside The Bahamas that know more about what’s going on here than we do because we have never had a university with strict guidelines about how the research most be done and who it belongs to.

How do you want your university to be perceived internationally?

I would like The University of The Bahamas to be perceived as one of the best in the world and doing high-class research. I would like to see colleges and universities such as Harvard or Princeton lined up to come here and do work and research in The Bahamas. I would like it to be at the point where every single student that comes through the University of The Bahamas has as part of their programme the opportunity to study at another institution at least for a year and then come back and graduate. This will enrich the country tremendously and expose our people but still make them want to stay home and develop their country.

Dr. Smith, on a more personal note, you have extensive experience in the education sector having served in several senior administrative leadership positions, including President of a public institution of higher education, President of a national tertiary education multi-campus system and as program coordinator of Harvard’s Institute for Educational Management. Now that you are back to the COB after 15 years of absence, what is the legacy you would like to leave?

I know I’m not going to be around forever, so the legacy I would like to leave is a very strong academic institution with all of the foundational pieces in place and having the culture change set in place. That is no longer a College of The Bahamas built from the integration of high schools and vocation training programmes, but rather a strong university highly recognized around the world with a cadre of officers whose mind are totally tuned to continuous improvement of the institution moving forward and who will give their best and train the individuals that will take their place when they are ready to retire as well.

As an alumni of Harvard University, you would fully appreciate that the readers of Harvard Business Review include many of the world’s most influential business and political leaders. What message would you like to send them about The Bahamas and COB?

I want to tell them they should really keep their eyes on the country. The Bahamas is actually 28 countries in one as we have 28 inhabited islands. Not even a fraction of the full potential of The Bahamas has been tapped. If you just travel to one different island every summer your lifetime will be over before you visit them all. That’s the potential we have, which is just unbelievable. People get shocked every time they visit a different island because of what they discover there. Our largest island, Andros, is the size of Trinidad and Tobago, and the next one is Abaco. The fascinating thing is that each of the islands has its own culture and some of them even have several cultures. A lot of people know Nassau and think that is The Bahamas, but this is just a small piece and I believe individual investors and business people around the word should look at the whole country.