“USP is not just a place where we went to school, our alma mater, or a place of employment. It is more than that. This is our intellectual home, a place where some of us grew up and with which we are deeply connected … where we learned to navigate the academic ocean; where we tried out ideas; where we made mistakes and learned to correct them; where we met, got to know and befriend people from other parts of Oceania; … Even years after leaving USP, every time I go back there it’s like going home. This is why many of us are sad and angry about how a few people have selfishly and disrespectfully desecrated this institution, a place that many of us are deeply connected to.” — Professor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka (Director of Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Hawai’i).
Part I: The bad news and the good news about USP
OVER the past 15 years, the management of the University of the South Pacific (USP) has been in the news in Fiji and the region, for all the wrong reasons, breaking the hearts of many of us who devoted our entire working lives to this august and unique regional university owned by 12 Pacific member countries.
It is important that the bad publicity be not allowed to overshadow the enormous positive contributions of USP to the region, far more important than “world rankings” according to irrelevant publications in unread international journals.
This account also brings out many emerging problems that were being faced by USP vice-chancellors — many exposed by me as USP’s director of planning and development — many brushed under the carpet. I suggest that these problems are inevitably also afflicting the newer universities in Fiji, Samoa and Solomon Islands.
The undesirable USP publicity
For more than five decades there were few questions about the importance of USP and its contributions to the region. Until a former vice-chancellor surrendered all the lofty principles of academic freedom to the illegal Bainimarama regime and imposed censorship of academic staff and students. He made redundant many senior academics who USP badly needed and fostered his chosen few. He converted a once collegiate university Senate to a personal fiefdom, strictly controlling all communication with the governing council.
It was only natural that the USP staff and student associations welcomed and gave support to the new vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia, whose appointment was beset with difficulties because of the reluctantly departing previous vice-chancellor. But the many unseemly conflicts between the former vice-chancellor — and his proxy committees — and the new vice-chancellor saw scandals being alleged and revealed on both sides, all eventually brushed under the carpet.
There then followed the illegal expulsion of the current vice-chancellor and his wife from Fiji by the Bainimarama Government, following which Prof Ahluwalia then took up residence in Samoa. Despite being invited back at the end of 2022 by the new Coalition Government of Sitiveni Rabuka, Prof Ahluwalia strangely declined to return to the Laucala Campus, preferring to spend enormous USP funds on travel to the Laucala Campus and elsewhere, with generous per diems exceeding UN rates. Samoa has miniscule USP enrolments while the Laucala Campus has most of the staff, students and facilities.
Most recently, there have been serious disagreements between the vice-chancellor and USP Staff Association and the student union eventually leading to the termination of a senior staff member for allegedly breaking some “confidentiality” rule most reasonable people would consider inappropriate for a publicly and regionally owned educational institution. Many staff feel that USP has returned to the dictatorial days of the previous vice-chancellor. For more details, readers can read my article “USP in Crisis: another NBF” (The Fiji Times, 16 June 2020).
This article suggests USP can be so much better because it has been better.
The USP region needs the good news
With all this bad publicity about the recent managers of USP, lost from public consciousness are the great contributions made by many senior staff members, regional and expatriate, academics and managers, who have helped to make this university a wonderful place to work and serve the people of the region for more than 58 years.
The depth and breadth of relationships was of course easier in the early days of USP when everyone knew everyone else working at USP, on the Laucala Campus or the wider network of regional centres we all frequented on our teaching and research trips. An excellent overview of what USP represents in the region and internationally may be had from Professor Vijay Naidu’s article “A Commentary on the 50-Year History of the University of the South Pacific” in a publication Understanding Oceania, edited by Stewart Firth and Vijay Naidu (ANU Press, 2019).
In this article I acknowledge just a few who were part of my personal circle at USP and who have now passed on. But there are also dozens of senior staff members and couples who have retired and have contributed to the region’s development, such as Professor Vijay Naidu and Dr Claire Slatter and Professors Konhai and Randy Thaman.
The many wonderful students
This article cannot cover all the wonderful students who I have personally taught over the years, naturally more from Fiji than others. From Fiji there have been the outstanding students such as Professor Satish Chand, Anil Kumar, Professor Biman Prasad, Dr Ganesh Chand, Fay Yee, Dr Subash Appana (a prolific The Fiji Times OpEd writer these days) MP Jone Usamate, Malakai Nayaga, Thompson Yuen, Epeli Waqavonovono, Markand Bhatt and too many others to mention.
From Tonga were great students such as Dr Aisake Eke and Dr Hala Hingano. From Solomon Islands was Cliff Bird. A brilliant student I remember was James Lin from Taiwan. I apologise to the many who I have left out for reasons of space.
But there were many others who continue to make their mark in the Pacific such as Professor Steven Ratuva and Professor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka who I call on at the end of my Part II.
The wonderful campuses
It would be remiss not to mention that our work at USP took us on teaching and research trips all over the Pacific member countries with many locations being incredibly memorable for me for all kinds of diverse reasons. I am sure other USP stalwarts have just as rich if not richer memories.
There was Niue the “Rock” in the middle of the ocean, with free junglee murgi running around; Nauru the “moonscape” whose phosphate enriched the farmers of Australia and NZ; remote Solomon Islands with an abundance of the cheapest seafoods in the world; Tonga with enormous yams not to be seen even in Fiji.
I remember Vanuatu as a snorkeller just off Vila being able to see beautiful green sea horses; or standing on the edge of a huge live volcano on the southern island of Tanna famous for the John Frum movement and coffee; or visiting Pentecost Island where the sacred initiation ritual of bungee jumping with frightening natural vines, originated the global sport with safe modern equipment.
Fifty years ago well before the world panicked over climate change and marvelled at the Tuvalu Prime Minister speaking to the world knee deep in the Pacific ocean, we USP lecturers were going to the Kiribati chain of atolls, never higher than three metres above sea level; driving along roads with the Pacific Ocean on either side; marvelling at a land without rivers or creeks; with just coconut, breadfruit and pandanus trees, and a taro babai painfully grown in pits into which children daily raked in the leaves after school.
I also learnt about the incredible iKiribati seafarers who navigated thousands of kilometres by studying the light waves reflected beneath the waves, more accurately than modern sailors guided by their GPS (immortalised in a National Geographic feature). The iKiribati were also the heart of the best Marine Training School in the Pacific, with graduates servicing the German shipping lines and their remittances being the highest export revenues. An iKiribati High Commissioner — a former USP student — also took my advice and Kiribati bought a large block of land in Fiji as an insurance policy against the ocean submerging Kiribati. Unfortunately, while the plantation they bought had a hundred times more arable land than all of Kiribati, it was on Vanua Levu. But even this investment may come good if an international airport is built there.
USP also had a centre in the distant Marshall Islands originally set up by Professor Konhai Thaman and myself when I was USP’s director of planning and development in the early 1990s.
The many distinguished vice-chancellors
Over the years I have personally had dealings of one sort or another with all USP vice-chancellors except Tony Tarr and the current one (Prof Ahluwalia). Many were renowned in their own fields which we then knew little about.
USP’s first vice-chancellor was Dr Colin Aikman, one of New Zealand’s most distinguished international jurists, whose role as constitutional adviser to the Samoan Government was recognised in 1993 when they awarded him their highest decoration, the Order of Tiafau. He later became New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal between 1975 and 1978. But in his early years as USP vice-chancellor, we staff and students were part of demonstrations against him for not defending Professor Theo MacDonald who had been banned from Fiji for alleged political activities. What I also remember is that led by Colin’s daughter (the late Helen Aikman and later partner of early USP graduate Jone Dakuvula), we used to raid Colin Aikman’s fridge for wine and beers late at night for the student parties I had to monitor as a part-time “warden”.
Then came Trinidadian VC James Maraj who was a strong advocate of regionalisation at USP. At age 40 he had become the Director of Education at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. After his stint at USP’s VC he became Permanent Secretary at the Fiji Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Head of the Prime Minister’s Office and High Commissioner of Fiji in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and India. He also became renowned for fostering distance education, a skill he acquired in fostering the same throughout USP member countries spread in the vast Pacific Ocean. In 1998 he was appointed the first President of The Commonwealth of Learning fostering the concept of “open university” and distance education.
But what I remember most was being harangued by him in his office for not having good advisers when I insisted in the mid-’70s on doing my Masters Degree in Economics at UWI (Jamaica) against the advice of USP’s Professor of Economics (Ashok Desai) who had got me a place at London School of Economics. I later found out that my supervisor would have been the great Nobel Prize winner, Lord Amartya Sen.
The next vice-chancellor Geoffrey Caston had been Registrar of the University of Oxford. Following a great career in education he was eventually appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. But while he did not look kindly on my radical leanings, he took me into his office to prepare his triennial University Grants Submission That experience also led to my being seconded to a massive six-country World Bank study on education in the Pacific, which experience in turn led to my becoming USP’s director of planning and development for three years in the ’90s. Caston was a strong defender of academic freedom and his home became a safe haven for some staff member being pursued by the military at the time of the 1987 coup, when many USP academics were being terrorised by Fiji’s police and military personnel.
Then there was vice-chancellor the late Esekia Solofa (who I write about below) who I served as director of planning and development between 1992 and 1995.
Totally outstanding was vice-chancellor Savenaca Siwatibau, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Fiji and Head of ESCAP, probably the best vice-chancellor USP has ever had, a beacon for good governance in Fiji and the Pacific. On principle he declined to become Interim Fiji Prime Minister after the 2000 coup. I briefly also served as his director of planning and development before ignominiously resigning to return to academia. I was honoured to put together a monograph of his writings (A Voice of Reason: The writings of Savenaca Siwatibau). This Volume 4 of my writings also has my obituary honouring Savenaca Siwatibau’s life.
But there were great memorable academic teaching staff as well.
The many wonderful teaching and support staff
During my 40 odd years teaching at USP, I came across wonderful fellow academics of all nationalities. While teaching mathematics, I was thrown into the company of a Professor Ross Renner who was not just an expert snooker and billiards player at the Union Club, but also an expert of the iTaukei languages. I used to be astonished Ross would correct that old senior chiefs of Fiji, like Sir Edward Cakobau in their native languages. I was often also in the company of fellow mathematician and neighbour at staff quarters Akuila Talasasa, a Solomon Islander who often made midnight demands for supplies when his frequent social gatherings ran short.
While teaching economics I was often in the company of the dour Scottish Professor David Forsyth and the late Dr David Williams, both engaging in conversations covering every conceivable topic under the sun, in our frequent after work jaunts to the pubs of Suva. I have fond memories of the gentle Dr H.M. Gunasekera, a Sri Lankan who always sided with us junior regionals even if it meant being denied promotion by expatriates who were in control in the early years of USP.
There were wonderful academic friends some of whom I have already written about in Volume 4 such as my obituary to the late Dr Ropate Qalo. But there were also friends (student and teaching colleague) such as the late Dr Simione Durutalo and Dr Jo Nacola. For both of them, late at night after the usual socials, I provided transport to their respective villages in Bukuya and Ra, with many associated adventures there such as pig hunting in the highlands.
There were dedicated long serving couples such as the New Zealander, the late Professor Ron Crocombe, married to Cook Islander Marjorie Crocombe. Prof Crocombe was a great mentor and publisher through the Institute of Pacific Studies of the writings of many Pacific Islanders, unfortunately defined by him to exclude Indo-Fijians and Asians (who crossed swords with them in the ’70s and ’80s).
I remember also my wonderful final ten years as Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Business and Economics headed by Professor Biman Prasad when we ran regional Development Dialogues in six member countries, a most successful regional Population and Development Conference (together with the regional UNFPA headed by Dr Annette Robertson), and an incredible number of workshops, public lectures and panel discussions. Until the censorship by the Bainimarama Government descended on us. You can watch some of the public events here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/hhWrRsOg7_Q;https://www.youtube.com/embed/NqqPmFYL6pg;https://narseyonfiji.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/the-2009-rev-paula-niukula-lecture-15-april-2009-marine-studies-lecture-theatre-usp-suva/
While the public will know most of the individuals I write about in this article because they were academics often in the public eye, there have been hundreds of dedicated persons also quietly working away for decades in other essential parts of the university.
I personally remember those who led the USP Library, the engine of academic research before the age of internet: the late Harold Haldsworth, Dr Esther Williams, Joan Yee, Elizabeth Reade-Fong. But there were also dedicated staff in the Computer Centre, Community Services and Extension Services, without whom USP would not have been the quality regional university it has been.
Here in this article let me write briefly about a few former colleagues who I was personally close to and have passed on – two Tongans, a Rotuman, a Briton, and a Samoan. All of them enriched my life and USP in myriads of ways the USP region should not forget.
Professor Epeli Hau’ofa (1939 to 2009)
This wonderful character is brilliantly described in the book Remembering Eeli Hau’ofa: his life and legacy edited by Professor Eric Waddell, Professor Vijay Naidu and Dr Claire Slatter (Eds) and published by the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Press, University of Canterbury and the University of the South Pacific Press, Fiji 2024.
There are more than a dozen essays by some of the most creative academics in the Pacific from a wide variety of disciplines, all inspired and challenged by Prof Hau’ofa, in so many different ways. It is not possible to do justice to their rich accounts nor to capture the essence of Prof Hau’ofa’s life and work in a book of essays, as Winston Halapua (archbishop Emeritus, the Anglican Church of Aotearoa and Polynesia) noted in his Foreword.
Winston Halapua acknowledges, as do all others, Prof Hau’ofa’s seminal essay “Our Sea of Islands” (1993) by encouraging Pacific Islanders to not think of themselves as tiny land masses and populations but “as part of the vast pulsating and generous ocean” which could successfully oppose climate change, pollution, deep-sea mining and imperialism in the Pacific. To those who would say that this is a great illusion in the vicious world of global politics, I would reply that humans are only as strong as their imagination.
Prof Hau’ofa’s early fiction, Tales of the Tikongs and Kisses in the Nederends were astonishingly rich pieces of work, metaphors for developing countries and people struggling against exploitation in the modern neocolonial world where expatriate often had no idea of the complexity of the Pacific societies they came to as saviours. As Winston Halapua wrote “Epeli’s storytelling is penetrating. It exposes truth, often with earthy humour… He identifies and critiques exploitation in different forms: colonial domination, postcolonial attitudes, and Pacific cultures”.
The editors of the book were panellists in a 2018 gathering at USP on the 10th anniversary of Prof Hau’ofa’s passing to remember his work and legacy. The editors saw Prof Hau’ofa’s work as a critique of the neoliberal path that USP was then being led down (misled thought the editors) by USP’s managers who valued total enrolments, academic output and KPIs narrowly defined in the disciplines of management, accounting, economics, business, competition, all depending on the quantitative measurement of performance.
In contrast, the Editors saw greater value in Prof Hau’ofa’s focus on culture and the past as a guide to the future in order for people to “live decently and to honour their ancestors”. My personal view was that there need not be a binary division between the two world views — that both were useful in good measure.
The editors felt that Prof Hau’ofa’s story needed to be told to a Pacific audience: to students, educators, social and environmental activists, church leaders, theologians, development practitioners, writers, journalists, politicians and planners, and to the reading public in general, “in order to find their rightful place in the coming world”.
I first met Prof Hau’ofa when he was appointed controversially as head and reader in sociology over another resident USP academic — a sociologist and political economist who had been in an acting position already. Vijay Naidu comprehensively covers the details around the controversial appointment in his essay “Navigating Troubled Waters”.
He also described how Prof Hau’ofa settled into life in SSED. Not forgotten was Prof Hau’ofa’s compulsory lunch time card playing with cleaners, secretaries and other academics, an economist sometimes included.
Vijay also relates how at an Auckland conference when a Maori activist demanded that the pakehas leave the room and Vijay and I had got up to follow Croz Walsh out, Prof Hau’ofa grabbed us and forced us to stay. Prof Hau’ofa made a principled stand against IndoFijians being treated as vulagi or non-indigenous by Pacific Islanders.
Prof Hau’ofa soon made his mark in the School of Economic Development where he was seen as a uniting force between conflicting groups of Fiji academics who were then feeling victimised by a powerful group of expatriates and non-Fiji Pacific Islanders.
He was eventually appointed as Head of School, an administrative post I believe he was totally unsuited for, with many chuckling that his Secretary Lillian was the substantive head while Prof Hau’ofa snoozed his afternoons away.
Prof Hau’ofa eventually drifted into being the first Director of Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture (OCAC), far more suited to his talents and informal working temperament. Many of the essays in the Volume edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Claire Slatter document Prof Hau’ofa’s immense contribution as a catalyst for the creative artists he fostered at OCAC.
It is fascinating to read the collection of essays most incredibly positive about their professional 10/19/24, 5:22 PM The Fiji Times https://edition.fijitimes.com.fj/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&pubid=e4fad093-33c6-4e8c-8f9d-b19c68c8b31a 9/10 relations with Prof Hau’ofa although a few were also quite critical, such as Dr Vilsoni Hereniko. He succeeded Prof Hau’ofa as Director of OCAC and built it up further.
•�Part II: The USP Stars in the Firmament (next week) USP as a university was defined by teaching staff at all levels, senior and junior, some well known publicly and others quietly working away behind the scenes, some with skills not academic at all. – Lionel Gibson (1964 – 2014)
•�PROF WADAN NARSEY is one of the region’s senior economists and a regular commentator on political and economic issues in Fiji. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times.
