The Public University of the North in Cap-Haïtien: A Fine Example of Open-mindedness to Follow
At a time when many students, forced by insecurity and various hardships, seek refuge in our provincial towns, it has become essential to further open the doors of our university institutions to offer them new future perspectives.
I learned through social media and the columns of the daily Le Nouvelliste about a decision filled with hope: that of the leaders of the Public University of the North in Cap-Haïtien (UPNCH) to triple the number of students admitted to the institution.
This choice deserves to be applauded. It represents a beautiful manifestation of open-mindedness, intellectual generosity, and social responsibility. One must be particularly conservative not to recognize the significance of such an initiative and appreciate it for its true value.
I therefore extend my congratulations to the academic and administrative leaders of UPNCH for this courageous and future-oriented decision.
Haiti needs more young people attending university, acquiring scientific knowledge, and equipping themselves intellectually to participate in the transformation of their society. Our country needs brains, skills, and a youth capable of thinking, innovating, and building. It especially needs fewer desperate young people condemned to see their ambitions crumble in front of closed doors to higher education.
For when a young person is deprived of the possibility of pursuing university studies, due to a lack of financial means or simply due to a lack of available places, it is much more than a personal project that collapses: it is a part of the collective future that is compromised. Delivered to despair, exclusion, and a lack of prospects, part of this youth becomes more vulnerable to social deviances, delinquency, and criminal networks that plague our towns, particularly the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince.
In this 21st century, university should no longer be considered a privilege reserved for a minority, much less a luxury inaccessible to families with modest incomes. Access should not constitute a path strewn with insurmountable obstacles that can shatter the dreams of thousands of young people and kill, even before they take flight, ambitions that are nonetheless legitimate.
The leaders of UPNCH seem to have understood a fundamental truth: university must be a space of emancipation, equal opportunities, and social promotion. It must enable youth to equip themselves with scientific knowledge, professional skills, and intellectual tools to face the challenges of their time, rather than leaving some young people to seek elsewhere, particularly in criminal networks, the means to give meaning to their existence.
Thus, the expansion of access to university is not merely a question of accommodation capacity. It is also a societal choice, an investment in human capital, and a concrete response to the multidimensional crisis that Haiti is going through.
The decision of the leaders of UPNCH should inspire the leaders of other public universities in the country. I invite them to engage in the same dynamic of openness and generosity, broadening, to the extent of their capacities and with the necessary support, the possibilities of access to higher education.
But this effort must also call upon the Haitian state
It is time for public authorities to fully recognize the necessity of truly decentralizing higher education, particularly medical training. I advocate for the creation of medical schools in provincial towns with university hospitals and health infrastructures capable of hosting such institutions. Gonaïves could, for example, provide an interesting framework for the realization of such a project.
The state has already made efforts to promote the presence of training institutions in law, agronomy, and other disciplines across the national territory. Medicine must also benefit from this decentralization policy. Our healthcare system desperately needs it. Our regions need local doctors, and our youth deserve to access this noble profession without being systematically forced to go to the capital or turn to private institutions that are often financially inaccessible.
Decentralizing medical training also contributes to reducing regional inequalities, strengthening the capacities of our health structures, and bringing health services closer to the populations that need them most.
The initiative of UPNCH thus reminds us of an obvious truth: opening the doors of the university is opening the doors of hope. Training more young people is giving Haiti a better chance to emerge from the deadlock.
Let this decision not be an exception, but the beginning of a true culture of openness within our university institutions. For a country that closes the doors of its universities to its youth compromises its future; a country that opens them invests in its own rebirth.
Martenson Métayer
President-founder of ACHA
Initiator of the Gold Feather Literary Prize
