UCWI

by Suzanne Francis-Brown, UWI Museum Curator
One of my bucket list items this past few weeks was tracking early documents relating to the UWI’s lost Charter – the first Royal Charter, granted in 1949 and lost in a plane crash en route to the founding Mona campus in Jamaica. Some of those documents are on deposit at the UK National Archives, and they include  explanations of why a Royal Charter was considered the best option as the nascent university developed its governance and administrative structures.

The UWI often talks about its first students – the fabled 33 students from across the Caribbean, 23 men and 10 women, who in 1948 were the pioneers of a tertiary education product that would grow to reach tens of thousands at a time.
But there is another group of pioneers – the first students to graduate from the then University College of the West Indies (UCWI).