Floods of memories

Address by Sir George Alleyne Chancellor the University of the West Indies

* Your Excellency Sir Howard Cooke Governor-General of Jamaica and Lady Cooke
* Ministers of Government
* Mr. William Clarke, Chairman of Campus Council
* Our Honorary graduands and to all of whom I offer my most sincere congratulations
* Lady Alleyne
* Mr. Vice Chancellor
* PVC Hall, Pro Vice chancellor Deans and members of the Academic Staff
* Parents and relatives of the graduating class
* Members of the graduating class of 2003
* Distinguished guests
* Ladies and gentlemen

MY FIRST observation is on the physical appearance of the campus. With every visit I am more impressed by the enhancement of its natural beauty and I must congratulate PVC Hall on what he has done recently!

Let me begin with a bit of allegorical fantasy. I was invited to give the address at the ceremony marking the Fiftieth Anniversary of our University, and as I sat in the Assembly Hall and looked out upon the audience, I fell into a reverie. I imagined that I was in the vale of Mona through which ran a mighty river and I could see a boatman whose name was Charon paddling furiously upon it. I had no penny with which to pay my fare, so he would not take me across, so all I could do was watch what was happening on the other side. I could see a motley throng of my friends - Ken Hamilton, Ronnie Melbourne, Manno Raymond, Vernon Royes dancing and singing behind Wilfred Cartey who was waving a flag and singing "Drink your rum and your poncho cremo-drink your rum". There were also bystanders - Thomas Taylor, Aston Preston, Arthur Lewis, Francis Bowen and Sydney Martin, all of whom were nodding and tapping to the music. I shouted across the river to Fred Cartey, "Oriens Ex Occidente Lux". He paused, dropped the flag, the singing stopped and he shouted back, "No! No! The light has risen. The light has risen". And I awoke from my reverie with the clear and certain knowledge that the light of this University had indeed risen.

You will forgive me if I am sentimental on this first occasion I am addressing you as Chancellor. There will be another time when I will say more of how I will seek to discharge my stewardship, but at this moment there are floods of memories of fifty-two years of association with this institution and this place. There are memories of our first principal Sir Thomas Taylor whose farewell address I read again recently. Having seen the college well on its way, he felt he should leave and among his last words were some that have served me well. He abhorred the dilettante but said

"One must be trained by the thorough study of a subject or range of subjects; that is essential. What I am urging assumes that. It goes further than that and says that a well educated person is good at something and intelligent about a large number of other things".

There are memories of Sir Philip Sherlock whose calm and quiet demeanour hid a steely spirit and resolve that stood us well in days of trial. And sometimes today when we reaffirm the Caribbean reach of the university, we forget the strong and solid extra-mural programmes of which he was the father and in which our current Vice Chancellor played such an important role. These were programmes that made the university known throughout the Caribbean.

These are memories of my own graduation, receiving my diploma from the hands of Princess Alice and listening to the vice president of the Ford Foundation affirm that mankind was on the march and the universities must lead. I am still partial to his statement that

"It is one of the paradoxes of education that teachers at their best strive to make students better than themselves, recognising that there are important problems we teachers cannot as yet even formulate, and important contributions to knowledge which we cannot as yet even imagine, but which we hope we can prepare our students to formulate and explore"

As my Professor Cruickshank would say

"He serves his teacher ill who remains a student still".

There are memories of the several graduation addresses I have heard and none finer than one given 24 years ago by Robert Moore, one of our own graduates who in Ciceronian style proclaimed how we had moved