Reply on behalf of the St. George's College Hall of Fame inductees for 2000
by Professor Terrence Forrester


September 2, 2000
        
Your excellency Sir Howard, and Lady Cooke, Reverend Father Dziak, President of St. George's College, other Reverend Fathers, faculty of St. George's, students past and present, our friends and relations, and finally, fellow members of the Hall of Fame.........

I am truly delighted to have this opportunity to deliver a short address on behalf of my fellow members of the Hall of Fame.

In the 4 or 5 minutes available to me to do this, I intend to address two issues only:
The first is to give credit where credit is due.
The second is predicated on my receiving your permission to regard myself as giving the valedictory address at a graduation ceremony, howbeit a spectacular graduation ceremony. If I have it, then I would like to assume the valedictorian's privilege in choosing the specific exhortation to fellow graduates. I will propose that the St. George's Community, here marking our 150th anniversary, commit to reducing inequality and inequity in our society.

First, credit where credit is due.

Many, many Georgians before me have explicitly acknowledged our gratitude to the Jesuit Fathers for creating and maintaining St. George's College. I would like to add our thanks tonight. In doing so, I wish to highlight the success of the Fathers in providing the environment in which young men develop two particular attributes. The first is a functional philosophical framework with which to engage life successfully. The second is a commitment to excellence in all endeavours. The provision of these two attributes to 150 successive cohorts of Georgians has enabled us to contribute significantly to human development in this society, and in many others. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

But while attribution of credit properly begins with the Jesuit Fathers, it must go immediately to the other partners who collaborated to create a unique educational environment. To my mind, the uniqueness of that environment resides in the ethos of positive reinforcement which was created by the interaction of Clergy, Lay Faculty and Students. All of us can recall with ease, the consistency with which students who excelled, for example at soccer, track and field, cricket, and secondary level examinations were the object of school-wide admiration and encouragement. In my wanderings since then, I have yet to experience an environment such as the George's one which so promoted human development. Thus to the 150 consecutive cohorts of young George's men, I would like to say thank you for this unique contribution.

And now to my Valedictorian exhortation.

Inequality and inequity are currently subjects of intense academic and social scrutiny. Social Inequality is commonly taken to mean an unacceptably wide divide between the top and bottom of a distribution of human attributes critical for human development. Such attributes, unequally distributed in our society include, health, education, knowledge, information, the quality of justice available, physical environments, socio-political environments, and economic opportunity. Wide disparities of such attributes in other societies have been causally associated with intractable poverty, poor economic growth and environments inimical to human development.

Inequity carries with it the additional connotation of injustice; that is, given the resources available to a society, inequity in distribution of the goods and opportunities is associated with an even wider disparity between the extremes. Inequity rubs salt into the wounds of inequality.

The consideration of these issues is not new. Scholars, politicians, International Agencies like the World Bank, Think Tanks and many other individuals and organizations have been analyzing and commenting on them.

In the Caribbean, concern with inequality and inequity is at least 500 years old: Bartolome de las Casas, a Franciscan Monk, documented, and inveighed against the inequality and inequity so vulgarly evident in his Conquistadorial society. The succeeding forms of social and political organization in the Caribbean have tended to exacerbate and to deepen these divides: these forms include the sugar monoculture societies supported by the enslavement of some 10 million Africans, the post-emancipation societies, and the colonial societies leading up to independence in the 20th Century.

So why would I propose for our commitment an intractable 500 year-old problem?

Well, Political Independence, coming as it did some 30 years ago for the majority of the Commonwealth Caribbean, has not been associated with any significant reduction in the divides in countries like Jamaica, though this is certainly not the case in countries like Barbados. So the problem is not intractable: solutions are possible. Second, this is the first time in the recorded history of the Caribbean that there have been truly legitimate societies, in the sense of societies which are owned and operated for themselves by themselves. This legitimacy, and the associated responsibility of our newly independent societies to maximize human development, combined with successful object lessons in the Caribbean, create an urgency for us to address inequality and inequity in Jamaica. Lastly, if we wish to have decent societies we have no choice but to reduce inequality and inequity. For, apart from the stultifying effects of these disparities on social and economic development, there is the predictable association with excess morbidity and mortality from epidemics of intentional injury.

Epidemics of intentional injury: I have deliberately used dry, epidemiological jargon to describe the frightening social situation we find ourselves in today, and have done so primarily to emphasize the predictability of the association. Interpersonal violence and statal violence have been very clearly associated, cause and effect, with inequality and inequity of the mammoth proportions that we nurture in our society.

So for these three reasons, the availability of object lessons at home and abroad, the responsibility of legitimate societies to promote human development, and our desire to avoid unpleasant and dangerous social aberrations, I wish to commend to you as a worthwhile job, the reduction of inequality and inequity in Jamaica. I will not presume to prescribe solutions, because this is outside of my competence. However, I will, with your indulgence, ask that the men of St. George's College, equipped as we are with an appropriate philosophical framework, and a commitment to excellence, engage this age old problem and contribute to its solution.

After all, at a very fundamental level, est Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.

Thank you.

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