15 receive honorary degrees at UWI grads

The Mona Campus will honour a total of five persons, while six persons will be similarly awarded during double ceremonies at the Cave Hill Campus.

The St. Augustine Campus graduation ceremonies saw the conferral of three Honorary Doctor of Laws degrees and one Doctor of Science degree.

Kittitian Queen’s Counsel, Joseph Samuel Archibald has served in many capacities and jurisdictions of the Caribbean -- as High Court Registrar, Magistrate, Senior Crown Counsel, Director of Prosecutions, and Attorney General in St. Kitts, in Nevis, in Anguilla as well as in the British Virgin Islands.

He was president of the BVI Bar Association from 1986 to 1994 and the OECS Bar Association from 1993 to 2002.

He has also served as member of the London Court of International Arbitrators and as a Justice of the Court of Appeal of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court, attesting to his international reach.

He will receive the LLD degree.

The degree of Doctor of Science was conferred on Professor Raymond Gosling, a biophysicist of British nationality.

Professor Gosling has had a distinguished career as a researcher, administrator, and educator.

He played a vital role in assisting the work of a team of scientists in the discovery of the structure of DNA over 50 years ago.

He chaired the Examining Board of Intercalated Degrees in Radiological Sciences, University of London, from 1984 to 1991 and served on the Executive Committee of the Neurosonology Research Group of the World Federation of Neurology from 1993 to 1997.

Professor Gosling also had a 10 year stint on the UWI staff from 1955-1965 as a Lecturer in Physics.

Tajmool Hosein, S.C., a native of Trinidad, has had a distinguished career in the field of law, for which he was honoured with the high national award of the Trinity Cross.

His other professional honours include that of Queen’s Counsel in 1964 for the Trinidad and Tobago jurisdiction and Queen’s Counsel for the Associated States, conferred by the Governor General of Antigua in 1982.

Mr. Hosein was also associated with the establishment of a second newspaper in Trinidad in 1967 and served for 30 years on the Board of the Express Newspaper.

He served as member of the Judicial & Legal Services Commissions from 1973 to 1988.

The University of the West Indies has also benefited from his expertise as he served as a member of the Campus Finance and General Purposes Committee for two years and was also a member of the St. Augustine Campus Council.

Mr. Hosein was conferred with the honorary LLD degree.

The degree of Doctor of Laws (LLD) will also be conferred on Guyanese historian Sister Mary Noel Menezes.

Since the age of 17 years, Sister Mary Noel has been a member of the religious Order of Sisters of Mercy.

She is founder and manager of the Mercy Boys’ Home in Georgetown, providing care and shelter for boys aged over 16 years.

For 35 years until 2003, she also was in charge of a large orphanage for boys in Plaisance, Guyana.

Sister Mary began lecturing in History at the University of Guyana in 1967 and over the next 25 years helped to build that institution.

She founded the MA Programme in Guyanese History during her tenure, while serving on many national and international bodies. In 1978, she became the first woman to hold the post of President of the Association of Caribbean Historians.

She has produced extensive publications on the Amerindians in Guyana from the early 19th Century and on the history of the Portuguese in Guyana.

Sister Mary Noel was conferred with an Honourary Doctorate from the College Misericordia in Dallas, Texas and was also recipient of the Golden Arrow of Achievement from the government of Guyana as well as the Outstanding Guyanese Women Award.

The Cave Hill Campus, Barbados had granted six honorary doctorates at its two graduation ceremonies on October 22, 2005. Belgian national, Dr. Peter Piot was honoured for his contributions to the region.

Piot was one of the signatories of the Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV/AIDS and has been particularly attentive to the needs of the Caribbean and supportive of initiatives in this area.

He will be conferred with the Doctor of Science (DSc) degree. Maryse Condé is best known for her historical novel, Ségou; however, she has written several plays which have been performed in Paris as well as in the West Indies and published children’s books, critical booklets and numerous articles on Caribbean literature and cultural studies.

She was conferred with the Doctor of Letters (DLitt) degree.

Dr. A Cecil Cyrus is not only a surgeon but founder of a private hospital, the Botanic Hospital at Montrose, and a Museum of which he is the curator, in St. Vincent.

He has also published a remarkable atlas, illustrating a wealth of clinical and pathological information.

He was conferred with the Doctor of Science (DSc) degree.

Wes Hall is acclaimed throughout the cricket-fanatic West Indies as one of the game’s most outstanding pace bowlers.

Less well-known is the fact that he started out as a wicket-keeper/batsman and only later discovered that bowling was his strength.

Since his retirement from first-class cricket, Hall became an ordained minister of religion and also served the Barbados Government as the Minister of Tourism and Sports and in 2001 was elected President of the West Indies Cricket Board.

Wesley Hall was conferred with the Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree. Harold Fitz-Herbert Hoyte is a journalist and publisher of international repute and is currently President and Editor-in-Chief of the Nation Publishing Company Limited. Recipient of the 1984 Maria Cabot award from Colombia University for his contribution to journalism in the Caribbean, Mr. Hoyte is Director of the Eastern Caribbean Press Council, member of the Commonwealth Press Union and the International American Press Association.

Since 2003, Mr. Hoyte has served as Honorary Fellow at the Cave Hill Campus.

He will be conferred with the Doctor of Letters (DLitt) degree. Professor Keith Patchett was largely responsible for the establishment of the Faculty of Law at Cave Hill and the Law Libraries and was the first Dean of the Faculty.

In collaboration with former Vice-Chancellor, Sir Roy Marshall, he undertook the first systemic research into law in the West Indies and helped to institutionalise the teaching of law within the Caribbean.

He will be conferred the Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree.

At the Mona Campus, Jamaica graduation ceremonies, will be held on November 5 and 6, 2005 and five eminent persons will receive honorary degrees.

Heading the list is Ambassador the Hon. Patricia Durrant -- a veteran career diplomat and currently, United Nations Ombudsman.

She served in the Jamaican Foreign Service for 30 years, from 1971 to 2001 and was recognised for her outstanding service with two national honours, the Order of Distinction (Commander Class) in 1992 and the Order of Jamaica in 2000.

She will be conferred with the Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree. Lawyer/Trade Unionist Richard Hart will also receive the LLD degree.

Richard Hart’s long involvement in political and trade union activities went far beyond his native Jamaica to embrace not only the English-speaking West Indian countries but the wider Caribbean region.

He was legal advisor and Attorney General to the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada during the years 1982-1983 and became in 1989 an Honorary Life Member of the Society for Caribbean Studies.

Another recipient of the Honorary LLD degree will be Jamaican businessman, the Honourable Karl Hendrickson, who has been Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Mona School of Business since 2003. Until his retirement in the mid 1990s the Hon Karl Hendrickson was Chairman of the National Continental Corporation (NCC) Group of Companies which he had founded.

The NCC embraces the bakery, packaging and tourism industries and is one of the leading commercial operations in Jamaica.

In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the field of business, he was awarded the Order of Distinction in the rank of Commander in 1997 and the Order of Jamaica in 2003.

Jamaican diplomat and UWI graduate, Ambassador Stafford O. Neil will also be conferred with the Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree. Ambassador Neil is a career diplomat, rising to become Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade from 1997-2002.

He was High Commissioner to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago as well as non-resident Ambassador to several countries during the period 1987-1997 and currently is serving as Jamaica’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. Justice Patrick Robinson, a distinguished graduate of the University of the West Indies, has been a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia since November 1998 and is currently President of the Panel.

He began his public service in 1968 as Crown Counsel in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Legal Advisor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.

He then served for 25 years, from 1973 to 1998 in the Attorney General’s Department during which time he chaired a number of international bodies and was CARICOM’s lead negotiator on Dispute Settlement in the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations.

He has been honoured by the Government of Jamaica with the Order of Distinction (Commander Class) for services in the field of International Law and by the UWI Alumni Association with the Pelican Award.

He will be conferred with the Doctor of Laws (LLD) degree.