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This chapter discusses the Government of Barbados’s 2014 introduction of partially student paid tuition fees for Barbadians attending the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus. This introduction of a student paid tuition component came after fifty years of state-funded education at the local UWI campus. In this chapter I assert that this introduction of fees altered the existing postcolonial “social contract” that has developed in the country and that has been integral to Barbados being presented as a “model” for small developing states in the Caribbean and beyond. In the chapter I argue that the social contract in the country was altered in light of the alleged demands of financial crisis and that this crisis climate allowed for “decision-making by surprise” in a country in which collaborative education governance has grown to be accepted as the norm.

In their introductory chapter, Augello and Guidi pose a number of questions related to the institutionalization of economics in what they have called “The Liberal Age.” The questions (p. 5) may be generalized to the following two. First, what were the forces of history leading to the rise of economics in the informational environment of a particular set of Western nations, and what resulting form did its institutionalization take in those nations? Second, what were the consequences for the content of economics of its being institutionalized in this way? That is, did institutionalization itself generate a recursive force of history competing with other external forces shaping economics?