Ten years before Professor Andrew Spencer walked onto the campus of the Caribbean Maritime University (CMU), his Ph.D. thesis on tourism strategy, completed at the School of Tourism at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, earned formal recognition from the Institute for Travel and Tourism Education and Training Committee (ITT). The ITT named the Jamaican academic its 2011/2012 Ph.D. Student of the Year.
With B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Tourism Management from the University of the West Indies, Spencer became the first UWI academic to be appointed full Professor of Tourism. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Director of the Centre for Hotel and Tourism Management, University of the West Indies, Nassau Bahamas. And, by the time he took office at CMU, he had already authored more than 50 scholarly works, including three books. Beyond this, he often served as consultant to regional governments on matters related to tourism development, and had been a director of 12 public entities in Jamaica.
Spencer arrived at the CMU in Kingston in September 2022 with the drive, passion and perspectives of an educator, along with the wisdom gained from years
of teaching, study and analysis of the Caribbean’s leading industry – tourism. This unique of combination study and experience has underpinned his initial decisions and informed strategies which are already yielding positive returns in the complex process of development of CMU and, by extension, the Caribbean maritime sector. It was against this backdrop and the CMU’s current and future role in the development of the peoples of the Caribbean that my one-on-one conversation with Professor Andrew Spencer in October 2024 began.
MJ: How did your relationship with the Caribbean Maritime University begin?
Prof. Andrew Spencer: After being appointed professor, I was in the running for a few universities but had a conversation with someone about the potential of the Caribbean Maritime University, because of the niche and the impact of what it does.
I’ve always taken on tasks that seem challenging. And I think the biggest challenge in this role was not any previous ill that the reputation of the university might have suffered, but more the role of getting the wider society in the Caribbean to understand the importance of the maritime logistics port space. People see it but they don’t get it. It’s lost on them. Even when watching primetime news, someone reports on trade deficit and trade surplus and, every time, the backdrop visual is a wall of containers or some cargo ship, but no humans. Even that subliminal messaging doesn’t work.
So, my having come to CMU was to get people to understand that everything – even the little treats they like on the shelves in supermarkets – once they’re not made here, they are a feature and a product of the powerful work being done by the people in this maritime industry. And also, the fact that the CMU has to provide exceptional talent to drive such an industry.
So, having arrived at CMU, one thing was immediately very clear to me: despite all I had heard and all I had seen, what I got here was a set of phenomenal individuals who owned the product and who want to see it do well. And they’re all very talented. Indeed, all the place required – and we are happy that we were able to put some structure to that – was some order; a proper governance framework, and systems.
Among the first things I said to the team when I got here was: every practice must have a policy. If a policy does not exist, we must write a policy, otherwise the practice must cease to exist. And we have lived by this.
So, the first document we wrote was our S.G.I. strategy. The institution never had a strategic plan and I thought that was the most important thing we could do. So, we went into retreat. We decided not to go with consultants. We wanted it to be organic.
MJ: When you say “we”, who d’you mean? The Board of Directors?
Prof. Andrew Spencer: No. The President, Vice Presidents, the Director of Quality Assurance and the Director of Graduate studies. This was the core team. And then, having come up with the concept, it was then shared with the Board, referred to as the Council, in our case.
We got the go-ahead and took it to the next level, refining it. The Board actually said that this initial step was such good work that we did not need to now hire a consultant. The consensus was: do your cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis; do everything that you need to do, and bring the document to closure.
MJ: Explain your S.G.I. strategy
Prof. Andrew Spencer: The S.G.I. strategy is … the S is for stability; G is growth; and, the I stands for innovation.
And that stability component was so crucial because it is a five-year plan and we decided that we would, in the first two years, create some stability. And that was the clean-up. That was ensuring that all of the missing pieces – the hygiene factor that Herzberg (i.e., Frederick Herzberg, American psychologist) spoke of; the things that don’t excite you or satisfy you, but their absence will utterly destroy you – those are the things that we focused on fixing in those two years.
The growth component – and we did not want to have growth as a blip or as something that was sporadic, but we wanted sustained, steady, managed, and manageable growth.
We are entering that growth phase now. That is why you are seeing all this talk now about how we’re expanding.
The innovation bit is an undercurrent for us right through. And when we get to programmes, I will say a little bit more about how we ensure that innovation is a thread throughout everything we do, but let me get back to growth for a minute – the G in our SGI strategy.
As I said, we are entering that growth phase now and addressing areas we are desirous of growing according to our SGI strategy. We are naturally interested in growing the student numbers. We’re coming from an institution of 30 students, and Mike, you are familiar with the Jamaica Maritime Training Institute (i.e., the entity from which the CMU evolved) to a university now of more than 3,000 students. In fact, enrolment had gone as high as 4,000 in the past. Well, how did we get here?
Driven by the euphoria of gaining university status in 2017, the highest student numbers were in 2018. That makes sense. The following year, 2019, followed pretty closely behind. The challenges surrounding the brand followed immediately by COVID-19 sent the (enrolment) numbers almost catastrophically low. But what you also had happening while the numbers fell as low as 200 to 300 new students coming in, you had the high numbers of students from the previous years – 2017, 2018 and 2019 – graduating in 2020. So, we saw a massive contraction in the student population in 2021 to 2022.
We started to see an uptick in 2022, when new student numbers started to increase. And that’s very deliberate in our strategy plan. We saw a 35% increase in new student numbers in 2023. But what we have seen this year (2024) is close to a 20% increase on top of that 35% increase in 2023.
So, if we have that kind of steady growth, we think that’s something we can maintain and we’ll get to our targets. Now the other area that we need to grow is research. We have been lagging in that regard despite all the talent we have in house. And so, what was established was a Research Implementation Committee. That committee has been phenomenal in its approach. I’ll share one little anecdote with you.
There were a series of seminars which were intended to build capacity for researchers. A number of them had their terminal degrees, etc., but they were not as productive as they could be. But something struck me when I looked at a particular ranking of universities based on the citation of people’s work. It’s one thing to write, but it’s another thing for people to use your work, right?
Having looked, I found that we were ranked sixth out of 12 institutions locally. That made absolutely no sense to me. I said to the Committee we should obtain a copy of all the publications, search for them online, and help our people to create a Google Scholar Profile. Many didn’t even have that. Having created that profile and curated all that existed before, we jumped immediately from a sixth ranking to being ranked third.
Only behind the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the University of Technology (U-Tech). But allow me to put that in context for you: UWI, on size, we’re talking about a full-time faculty of about 2,000 people at the Mona Campus (Jamaica). For U-Tech, you’re talking about a faculty of more than 1,000 employed full time. CMU in third place was not a distant third from U-tech, yet we had just over 100 full-time faculty. The overall CMU team is 300-plus, but the faculty members – the ones who are expected to research – number just over 100. So, think about how way above our weight we’re punching when we can come in third with citations, having not written one single additional piece; just from pulling together work that people had already done, but didn’t know how to properly document. So that’s the point I was making when you asked me what I saw. I saw excellence that needed to be channelled, needed to be fuelled, needed to be positioned accurately.
Another area of growth that we’re looking at is Advocacy and Consultancy and being the voice for maritime policy. My view is that there should be no emerging policy position throughout the Caribbean region where the only IMO white-listed institution does not have a voice in shaping it.
So those are the key growth areas. But on the expansion, we thought that in growing the student numbers, we should not take the approach of saying that we are located in Jamaica and therefore we ought to simply have more Jamaican students. We have no difficulty with that, but here is a challenge that some of our supporters were having as well. The American Caribbean Maritime Foundation in Florida, as well as the Caribbean Shipping Association, are providing scholarships for
Caribbean students. So, make no mistake, we are unabashedly maritime. We own our maritime space.
In 2017, we took on the sophistication of a university and we’ve been doing that quite well. Where we were weakest was the Caribbean outlook. So, we are a Caribbean Maritime University. Yet, even though we could claim that 11 Caribbean countries were represented in our student body of 3,000 students, when you look at the absolute numbers, it was only just over 30 students who were not from Jamaica. You understand what that is as a percentage. Our SGI strategic plan also speaks to increasing our numbers of international students. And we have employed a few strategies to make that happen.
We have had students here from China and the rest of the world, but we didn’t see the kind of Caribbean representation that we wanted. And so, we’ve come up with what you may call a CARICOM tuition rate. Before, if you’re a Caribbean student, you would pay the same international rate as, e.g., a student coming from Asia.
That made no sense to us, an institution dedicated to serving the Caribbean region. So, we’ve come up with a “preferential rate”, if you may, for Caribbean students.
The other thing is that we’ve taken on a model of not trying to reinvent the wheel in every location where we have a partnership. So, e.g., last year, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Guyana where we are rolling out a programme in chemical tank operations, as well as a course, in liquefied petroleum operations, in order to meet their needs in their oil and gas sector. But we’re not setting up shop in Guyana. We’re partnering with an existing institution there to make that happen.
We did the same in Saint Lucia with the Sir Arthur Lewis College, where we are rolling out our Logistics and Supply Chain Management degree as well as our Engineering degree, using their associate degree as a feeder into our degree programmes. Again, we are not setting up shop. We are establishing partnerships in that way. And we’ve done that in a number of locations. But, for Suriname, something became particularly interesting to us.
Suriname has been in the oil and gas space for a while onshore, mainly, looking now at their own offshore explorations. They needed the technical strength and capacity of the CMU. So, it was the government of Suriname that had the idea. They have this Suriname Maritime Institute, which is doing lower level – almost high school equivalent – programmes. And they wanted to up the ante, but they didn’t want to do that by reinventing the wheel, so they wanted to invite the CMU there to “absorb” the Suriname Maritime Institute. And then the new facilities that they’re moving into; they are giving them new facilities that’s being offered to us to come and occupy.
MJ: What kind of facilities?
Prof. Andrew Spencer: Buildings. We have had two offers actually.
The Vice President of Suriname has offered us land in the remote areas. But we’re doing this on a phased basis. And the current President has offered the building that is now being occupied by the Maritime Institute. And they are now moving to a larger building with classroom spaces and offices. And, of course, the land we are going to occupy comes at no cost to us. What we bring will be the technical competence of the human resources.
A shared agreement is emerging to look at equipment because you understand that our quality standards here at CMU are heavily dependent on our use of artificial intelligence. All of the simulation CMU has been doing – bridge simulator, crane simulators, truck driving simulators, the Festo laboratory with its fantastic pneumatics, hydraulics, mechatronics, Industry 4.0 Labs – is driven by artificial intelligence.
Anywhere that we’re setting up shop, we would want to have equivalent quality. And so now the discussion is about how do we finance in a shared way between the CMU and the government of Suriname, the kind of technology that we need there. But the building is being given by the government of Suriname so the physical facilities are not a challenge for us. We won’t have to go there and erect anything. We may have to do a little bit of retrofitting for the classrooms and the spaces the laboratories for the equipment to go into, but I’m not too perturbed by that, because we’ve identified areas of easy rollout. And our intention is to have soft offerings there by January of 2025.
The subject areas that they have identified as most critical for them include roll-out a course in Bill of Lading; and, International Maritime Organization - Convention Requirements. Neither require laboratory space. They want us to roll out courses on manning ports, terminals and harbours in the post-COVID-19 era. We are designing that especially for Suriname. And they also want us to roll out a course we already have, our Port Facility Security Officer Training and Certification.
MJ: The courses ARE to be delivered in English?
Prof. Andrew Spencer: Yes, in English. One of the interesting things is, of course, they speak Dutch, but it’s also mandated that they learn English in the classroom. So, I met with some students who are already at the Surname Maritime Institute, and they are quite conversant and they are learning in English actually.
MJ: What’s the timeframe you’re working with as far as Suriname is concerned?
Prof. Andrew Spencer: The four course areas I mentioned are scheduled for January 2025. The full rollout will be the technology. The tension is between when we roll out the soft programmes and when we go in hard and full. We’re looking at another 12 months. So, in another 15 months in total, we should be fully occupying the space.
MJ: So, in your movement across the Caribbean right now, we are talking about Guyana, Saint Lucia and Suriname.
Prof. Andrew Spencer: And Antigua as well – Antigua State College. There’s also a conversation to be had – not yet finalised – in Barbados. We have always had a good batch of students from Barbados. And we have rolled out our master’s degree in Logistics and Supply Chain Management. The first time we did that online was in Barbados so there’s track record for us to have the conversation now with the community college there as well for a feeder system.
MJ: In the context of growth, expansion and establishing a presence for the CMU across the Caribbean, what do you have to do to bring physical spaces up to grade?
Prof. Andrew Spencer: What we are doing is arranging a feeder system.
In Saint Lucia, e.g., where students to come to the CMU Jamaican campus for the tactile components of what they are studying e.g., someone who is doing engineering and who has done an associate degree in engineering in their home territory. We are not seeking to utilise engineering labs there. Instead, we are seeking to transition such a student here. And that’s why I’m saying the Suriname model is slightly different. The model for other territories is more of a feeder arrangement in which students have access to the technologies in the state-of-the-art systems in Jamaica.
MJ: As regards the academic courses that CMU now offers in Jamaica, are new courses being added to the curriculum?
Prof. Andrew Spencer: Yes, so very excitingly, what we did was restructure the university last year, and we were able to go to Jamaica’s Ministry of Finance and the Public Service to get an organisational structure approved for the university. The first time this happened was in February 2023. A part of that process was right sizing the spaces. So, we had all these centres operating in isolation and these discrete units that we had to bring under the umbrellas of faculties. So, we now have three, and the three faculties are: the core faculty, that is the faculty of Marine and Nautical Studies, which is how we started, in partnership with the Norwegians. There are two degree programmes offered in that faculty which have always existed: Marine Transportation and Marine Engineering. However, because the CMU prides itself on not doing more of the same, we do things slightly different. A new programme has just been written which we’re about to roll out. So, in September 2025, we will roll out Naval Architecture.
So, you see? We didn’t just go for architecture because everybody’s doing architecture. We looked at what is unique to our space. So, in the faculty of Marine and Nautical Studies, there is about to be a third degree programme offered.
But I should point out also that it is also in that faculty that all our STCW (i.e., Standards of Training certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers) courses are offered. So, the professional certification unit resides in that faculty.
The next is our Innovation faculty. That’s the faculty of Engineering and Applied Technology. This faculty has some exciting programmes. For example, Industrial Systems degree students are being absorbed not only in the maritime shipping logistics sector, but also in the manufacturing sector. Between the Industrial Systems and the Mechatronics programme, the only such degree programmes in the Caribbean region – Carib Cement and Cemex (companies) want them all.
Also, in that faculty of Engineering and Applied Technology, we are the only ones offering a degree in Marine Biotechnology. Again, see what we did there? The University of the West Indies offers Marine Biology our degree is Marine Biotechnology – a very different focus on the solutions for our marine environment. So that faculty we consider to be our “innovation faculty”, and it houses the Festo Didactic Centre as well, to which I made reference earlier.
The faculty of Shipping and Logistics is our third faculty and our largest. This is the faculty that has the most programmes. It offers a degree in Cruise Shipping and Marine Tourism.
We (had) mastered the cargo space. What we were lacking was that cruise shipping partnership. And since coming here, I am happy to say that the team and I have been able to seal the deal with Carnival Cruise Lines. We have a solid memorandum of understanding wherein they’re taking 15 CMU students every year – sea time plus employment. We’re getting scholarships. And they’re about to assist us with some of our tech upgrades.
Every time there’s a Carnival ship in Ocho Rios, we can send a group of students and faculty down there so that they can benefit from understanding the inner workings of these massive vessels.
Disney is now about to sign with us as well. Royal Caribbean has a partnership with us and I could go on and on. So that was kind of the nexus for me bringing the softer side of shipping to this space and making it congeal.
As our conversation continued, I thought about a recent graduate of the CMU, Nyshauna Strachan whose story is featured in this edition of the Portside Caribbean journal.