Excerpts from Ian Randle's address to UWI graduates of Engineering and Law faculties, UWI St Augustine campus, on October 24. Ian Randle is a Jamaican publisher, and received an honorary doctorate from UWI this year. A pioneer in Caribbean publishing, he founded the first commercial scholarly publishing company in the Anglophone Caribbean, Ian Randle Publishers Limited (IRP). Randle is a founding member of the Caribbean Publishers Network.
Many of you, like myself, are the first in our families to go to UWI. Being a part of that elite comes with responsibilities–to your families, communities and your respective nations. But I want to suggest that it also carries responsibilities towards the wider Caribbean nation of which we are all a part. And why is this so?
Firstly, you are graduates of the UWI which continues to represent the ideal of that Caribbean nation. The UWI much more so than any other institution, be it the vaunted West Indies cricket team or the nebulous Caribbean Community (Caricom), is the genuine glue that continues to hold this region together as it has done for the 60+ years since its inception.But how much longer I ask, can the UWI continue to provide this unifying force in the face of the challenges that confront it?
http://www.guardian.co.tt/digital/new-members