Guyana Teachers Union (GTU) President and Member of Parliament Coretta McDonald has delivered a searing critique of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government’s decision to close the Bertram Collins College of the Public Service and replace it with the online platform Coursera, calling the move a reckless act of political spite disguised as policy.
President Irfaan Ali formally announced the launch of the Coursera initiative at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre on November 10, 2025. Speaking at the event, he described the programme as a “foundational pillar of the new public service we are fashioning,” saying it would equip public servants for both national responsibilities and “global opportunities.”
McDonald argued that the closure of the Bertram Collins College, established on November 23, 2016, was not a step toward reform but a politically motivated dismantling of an institution that trained public officers in ethics, discipline, and ministry-specific expertise. She said the College offered immersive, supervised, and locally contextualised training that prepared public servants to uphold the integrity of Guyana’s institutions.
In a blistering letter, McDonald wrote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” describing the College’s closure as “naïve, myopic, vindictive, and spiteful,” not reform but a calculated effort to erase an institution created under a different administration. The result, she said, is a leadership vacuum in the public sector, which the government is now attempting to fill with “a caricature of the College itself.”
McDonald described the College as one of the country’s most visionary public-sector initiatives, built to instill discipline, ethics, patriotism, and administrative competence. Its in-person, ministry-specific training shaped cadets into public officers capable of serving all Guyanese with professionalism and national pride. The graduation of 56 cadets in 2019 demonstrated the College’s impact and potential.
“But instead of strengthening a national institution designed for nation-building,” she argued, “the government chose destruction over development.” The closure in February 2021, she insisted, did nothing to address the structural weaknesses the College was created to solve—“only the College was closed; the need remains.”
McDonald sharply criticised the government’s embrace of Coursera, calling it an insult to Guyana’s sovereignty and intelligence. Founded in 2012 as a commercial online platform, Coursera offers generic, unaccredited content designed for mass consumption—not the structured, contextual, ethics-focused training public officers require. “Coursera cannot produce public servants,” she said. “It produces users.”
She slammed the comparison between an immersive national institution and a platform reliant on pre-recorded videos and automated quizzes. “To equate Coursera with a public-service college is to confuse exposure with education, and certificates with competence.”
McDonald argued that public officers responsible for procurement, governance, crisis response, or hinterland administration cannot be trained through detached online modules designed for foreign contexts. “A cadet of the Bertram Collins College could be placed immediately within a ministry and function with relevance and responsibility. Coursera cannot prepare anyone for that.”
She said the government’s approach reflects a deeper pattern of “ideological contempt and political vindictiveness”—a willingness to dismantle national institutions if they were conceived by a political opponent. “This was not reform,” she wrote. “It was retribution.”
McDonald warned that outsourcing public-service formation to a foreign tech company is not modernisation but abdication. “The Bertram Collins College was accountable to the people of Guyana. Coursera is accountable to shareholders.”
She concluded that if the government is serious about governance, national development, and a capable public service, it must re-establish a national college equal to or greater than the Bertram Collins College. “Coursera was never designed to deliver discipline, patriotism, or public-service excellence,” she said. “Guyana must build servants of the state—not subscribers to an online platform.
