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November 2011
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HONORARY GRADUATE Let virtue guide youProfessor Anantanand Rambachan
The central purpose of this Ceremony, however, is to celebrate the achievements of our graduates from the Faculties of Science and Agriculture. I rejoice with your teachers, your families and your friends in your scholarly success and join them in congratulating you. I am proud to belong to, and to welcome each one of you into, the community of graduates of The University of the West Indies. This is a community that has achieved excellence and distinction in all of the fields of human endeavour. You will now enrich this community with your own special talents as you devote yourselves to your careers. Along with our membership in this community, I share with you also a profound sense of gratitude. Human success is never solitary and individual. Human potential is realized only in a community of human beings. The list of those to whom we are indebted for our achievements is truly unfathomable. With you today are those who dreamt of and imagined this day soon after you were born, planned a way to your graduation and worked daily to make it a reality. Their hearts were united with your own, delighting in your success and supporting you through disappointments and failures. They were anxious about your safety and your health and woke up each day with a hope and wish for your wellbeing. Such love is not ordinary. Our celebration of success must always be infused with the grace of gratitude and the gentleness of humility. Those whose generosity with their love and resources make our flourishing possible must always be in our hearts. The journey of life is always more delightful for those who travel with gratitude and humility. You are the recipients of one of the finest educational experiences in the world. In your disciplines of Science and Agriculture you have received a body of knowledge acquired through the diligent labours of distinguished researchers. You are trained also in the empirical methods of inquiry that are appropriate to discovering new knowledge in your fields and I hope that some of you will enrich your field with your own discoveries. Your academic discipline however, does not specify the core ethical commitments that determine the use to which its knowledge and methods are employed. This is a critical choice that you must make. It is one that goes to the very heart of the person you understand yourself to be. I urge you to be thoughtful and intentional about your choices. You will most certainly, use your education to find and perform work that enables you to satisfy decently the legitimate needs that every human being ought to have opportunities to secure. I know that these are difficult times to find good work and wish you well in this search. But will the fulfilment of personal needs and desires be the only concern in the use of your learning? And even so, what are the core ethical values and commitments that will guide your choices and decisions in your work?
May the use to which you put your learning and training be guided always by virtue. When in doubt, return to gratitude, and remember those who considered your wellbeing and gave of themselves with extraordinary generosity for your flourishing. If you do so, you will make this institution, your teachers, your families, your countries and yourselves proud. May your lives be filled always with the happiness that I see on your faces today. Thank you for the honour of addressing you and thank you for the honour you have so generously bestowed on me. |