Dear Editor,
Introduction and Context:
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Those immortal words capture the moral disarray and intellectual decay that now underpin the dismantling of the Bertram Collins College of the Public Service, an institution born out of vision, patriotism, and national excellence. Its closure was not an act of prudence or progress, but a naïve, myopic, vindictive, and spiteful decision wrapped in bureaucratic rhetoric. It was not reform, it was retribution. It was not strategy, it was spite disguised as governance. The College may have been closed, but the void it was visionary-created to fill remains wide open. And in a cruel twist of irony, those responsible now seek to fill that void with a caricature of the College itself, the online platform Coursera, which, by its own admission, was never designed to fulfil the mandate or moral purpose for which the Bertram Collins College stood.
The College: Purpose, Records, and the Unmet Need:
Established on November 23, 2016, the Bertram Collins College of the Public Service emerged as a bold national experiment, a crucible of discipline, leadership, and administrative excellence intended to professionalise Guyana’s public service. The College’s founding mission was to shape a new generation of public officers grounded in ethics, efficiency, impartiality, and patriotism, capable of serving every Guyanese citizen regardless of race, party, or creed.
It was conceived not as a political appendage, but as a state instrument of nation-building, cultivating a service culture that would transcend divisions and embody national unity. Its cadets received in-person, contextual training, immersive, supervised, and ministry-specific, designed to reflect Guyana’s unique administrative, legal, and socio-economic landscape. From its inaugural cohort to the graduation of 56 new public servants in December 2019, the College demonstrated both purpose and performance.
Yet in February 2021, this institution of excellence was abruptly shuttered. The void for which it was established, the deficit in professional public-service formation, was not closed, only the College was. The need remains as real and urgent as ever.
The Caricature of an Alternative: Coursera:
To now offer Coursera as a substitute for the Bertram Collins College is an affront both to intellect and to patriotism. Coursera, founded in 2012 by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, is a global online platform offering mass-produced courses in partnership with foreign universities and corporations. It was never designed as an instrument of public-service development; rather, it is a commercial enterprise built for scale, subscription, and superficiality.
Its courses are unregulated, unaccredited, generic, cursory, and externally oriented, useful perhaps for hobbyists or global learners seeking surface-level exposure, but wholly inadequate for cultivating the academic, ethical, cultural, administrative and ministry-specific identity, capacity and capability required of the Guyanese public servants. Coursera itself makes no claim to national contextualisation. Its “learning experiences” consist largely of pre-recorded videos, automated quizzes, and peer-graded assignments, detached from any institutional framework, field supervision, or ministerial relevance/need.
To equate Coursera with a national college of public service is to confuse exposure with education, information with formation, and certificates with character and credibility.
Why Coursera Cannot Replace the College:
- Divergent Purpose and Mandate:
The Bertram Collins College was a national institution with a constitutional and cultural purpose to develop professional civil servants who understand and embody the ethos of the Guyanese state. Coursera is a private, commercial platform designed to deliver universal access to surface-level, unaccredited and unregulated content, not to prepare public officers for local governance, national integrity, or constitutional responsibility.
- Modality and Pedagogical Depth:
The College employed structured, cohort-based, face-to-face instruction, integrating case studies, leadership simulations, situational ethics and ministry specific training and education. Coursera delivers surface-level fragmented, asynchronous online modules that may impart knowledge but cannot cultivate institutional culture, discipline, or ethical comportment.
- Contextual Relevance:
The College’s curriculum was institution-specific, ministry-specific, and country-specific, addressing the administrative systems, legal frameworks, and social realities unique to Guyana. Coursera’s programs are generic and global, entirely devoid of the national and situational context that defines effective public service in Guyana.
- Formation of National Identity and Service Culture:
Public-service excellence is not achieved through mere technical learning; it is forged through shared experience, discipline, mentorship, and civic pride. The College’s cadets learned not only how to administer but why they serve to uphold the dignity and development of Guyana. Coursera cannot replicate this communal formation; it trains users, not patriots.
- Accountability and Sovereignty:
The Bertram Collins College was a sovereign national institution, accountable to the people of Guyana. Coursera is a multinational corporation, accountable to shareholders and investors. Its purpose is not national advancement but corporate profitability. To replace the former with the latter is to outsource national responsibility to an algorithmic marketplace.
Concrete Illustrations of Incompatibility:
A cadet trained under the Bertram Collins College could be assigned to the Ministry of Communities or the Ministry of Natural Resources, equipped with precise understanding of Guyana’s procurement laws, public-sector accounting systems, inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms, and local government structures. That knowledge cannot be transmitted through a detached online module designed for a global audience.
Similarly, public officers responsible for hinterland administration, crisis coordination, or community development require experiential training on the ground, in the field, under guidance not digital lectures from institutions thousands of miles away. The College enabled that. Coursera cannot.
The Principle and the Plea:
The closure of the Bertram Collins College represents not administrative efficiency but a moral and intellectual regression, a retreat from the sovereign responsibility to cultivate excellence within our own borders. Its destruction was driven not by necessity, but by political vindictiveness, ideological contempt, and unpatriotic disdain for anything conceived under a different administration or associated with a particular demographic.
But truth has its own endurance. The College’s founding spirit still stands as a testament that public-service formation must be national, contextual, and principled. The void it once filled remains open, and no caricature, however glossy or global, can close it.
If the PPP/C is serious about governance, meritocracy, and integrity, then it must restore or re-establish a national institution of equal or greater potency, one that reaffirms the values of duty, discipline, and patriotism that Coursera was never designed to deliver.
Respectfully submitted,
Coretta McDonald
