RESUMO
Since the mid-1970s proprietary medical schools have spread throughout the Windward & Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. In some cases, these transnational educational corporations have made commitments to enhance education and health care resources of host countries. In all cases, the presence of hundreds of students and faculty, and the associated local spending, represents significant additional foreign exchange and employment. This dissertation seeks to learn how proprietary medical schools have affected development in Eastern Caribbean microstates, to assess what role, if any, they might play in local development, and to discern their implications for the complex array of regional agreements comprising the fourteen-nation Caribbean Community and its associated educational regime - whose institutional pinnacle is the University of the West Indies - to which all host microstates subscribe. The central focus of this study is Grenada and St. George's University School of Medicine. St. George's is the oldest such establishment, and is the archetype for all that followed in the region, Using an historical approach rooted in international political economy, public policy and area studies, this dissertation utilizes unpublished and recently declassified documents, newspapers, personal interviews, and other primary sources to reconstruct the complex relationship of school and state through four distinct political periods. At every stage of the analysis, regional events and implications were also considered. The study concludes that the incentive to allow proprietary medical schools was rooted in historic insecurities deriving from unequal power relations among member states of the educational regime, combined with ongoing perceptions of distributive bias. Host states viewed proprietary medical schools as an opportunity to augment both capital and human resources, and therefore acted alone, despite implicit norms against such independent action. The Grenadian case demonstrated that proprietary medical schools could, given sufficient encouragement, provide host microstates with certain developmental benefits affecting educational development, health care, and economy. However, the extent that these benefits are realized was found to be largely dependant on entrepreneurial awareness within the political leadership, institutionalization of collaborative/coordinating mechanisms, quality of medical school management.(AU)
