Graduates at Western's Fall Convocation were told how the precious gift of choice is one that, if done properly, will enrich their lives for years to come.
"There will be hundreds of people out there making their living the same way as you will, but what you make of your life is your responsibility and yours alone," Shanthi Radcliffe told the first of 1,800 students graduating this week.
Graduating Thursday afternoon were students from the Faculties of Graduate Studies, Don Wright Faculty of Music, Education, Engineering, Health Sciences, Law, the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and the Richard Ivey School of Business.
Western conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on Radcliffe for contributions to the fields of health policy and administration, community and public health, and international education and multiculturalism. Born in Sri Lanka, Radcliffe founded the London InterCommunity Health Centre in London in 1988. Until 2002 she was Executive Director of the organization, which provides varied social and medical programs to approximately 3,000 people a year.
Radcliffe received an honours degree in Economics from the University of Cambridge in 1958 and a Masters degree in 1961. She worked as a teacher in Northern Nigeria and Malaysia and as a Research Associate at the Faculty of Economics, University of Wisconsin in Madison before coming to Canada in 1969 where she worked at the Office of International Education at Western.
Radcliffe noted that education does not consist merely to adorn the memory and enlighten understanding, its main business should be to direct the will.
"It is my belief that choosing to direct a part of that will to serving your community can enrich your life in ways that not only make a difference to others, but can also prove delightful, and surprising," said Radcliffe, a past recipient of the Queen's Jubilee Medal from the Government of Canada.
With her choice in life being one of exploring and involving herself in many facets of the life of London, Radcliffe said the opportunities for volunteer involvement for Western's latest graduates are without limit.
"I hope that for you, as for me, the greatest learning still lies ahead, and that you will learn to love the journey as much as the destination you seek," said Radcliffe.
Thanking her husband of 45 years, David, Radcliffe told graduates to never lose sight of their family, for which she owes a tremendous debt for their support, tolerance and encouragement.
"I have had the enormous advantage in my life of being able to do whatever interested me, to take risks and never have to fear that failure would leave me without food and shelter, or love," she said. "There is nothing more precious than family."
*****
The following is the prepared text of the address by Shanthi Radcliffe on receiving an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.
Chancellor Labatt, President Davenport, distinguished faculty, my family and friends, and most especially my fellow graduands, your families and friends. My warmest greetings and thank you for allowing me the pleasure of sharing in this special day.
Thank you particularly to the University for the very great honour you have bestowed on me. I am truly humbled and moved, and this is an unforgettable day.
At this point in my life I would not claim to have a specialized field of expertise - as you do in Graduate Studies, Education, Engineering, Health Sciences, Law, Medicine, Music, and Business - which puts me at something of a disadvantage as I talk to you today.
At my graduation, I did however have my Master's degree in Economics from The University of Cambridge in England. I was certain that my degrees would guarantee me a job of my choosing pretty much anywhere I chose to settle. They were from a prestigious university, as yours are, and I knew that it was the university itself, and not necessarily the fact that the degrees were in Economics, that would open doors for me. And there's the first difference - the march of specialization since that time guarantees far greater career choices, especially for women, but perhaps not as much certainty as we had in the future.
I continued the tradition in my family of receiving a Cambridge education. My father and his siblings had all been educated there. He was a brilliant man; a Cambridge wrangler in mathematics - unhappily, the gene did not transfer! He was also a devout Buddhist and reveled in the language of Shakespeare and Milton - particularly Milton.
My mother was one of the first five women to be admitted to the University of Ceylon. She was active in social issues, organizing campaigns for drought relief, flood relief, and she ran initiatives of the Anglican Church of Ceylon most ably with the help of a couple of bishops! The difference in religion between my parents caused no undue distress or confusion in the family. There was a culture of acceptance at that time that now seems almost mythic. Following marriage to a fellow student from Cambridge, the serious part of our education began.
What I wish to speak about today is the precious gift of choice. Today you begin the rest of your life, and in the course of it you will be called upon to make dozens of those choices. There will be hundreds of people out there making their living the same way as you will, but what you make of your life is your responsibility and yours alone. It was Joubert who said "Education does not consist merely in adorning the memory and enlightening the understanding. Its main business should be to direct the will." It is my belief that choosing to direct a part of that will to serving your community can enrich your life in ways that not only make a difference to others, but can also prove delightful, and surprising.
My first job was as assistant private secretary to the Governor of the Central Bank of Ceylon - my main function was to decode the top secret messages that arrived each morning from the Bank of England and other Central Banks around the world. The codes were changed daily. My next job was a world away in the north of Nigeria, on the edge of the Sahara desert, this time as Secretary to the Manager of Barclays Bank DCO, Katsina Branch. Once again, the use of my shiny degree was hardly critical - my function was to weigh the groundnut crop brought in by the local Muslim Hausa farmers, and ensure they were paid in bags of coins - paper money did not survive long, and no-one trusted Banks.
My only volunteer service in those years (albeit by royal command!) was as official scorekeeper at polo matches for the Emir of Katsina, himself a fine polo player, and my role was to stand my ground in the swirling dust of the Sahara as the horses thundered by, counting goals. My next job was yet another world away, as a teacher of University entrance level students in Taiping, Malaysia. Fuelled by long national and cultural traditions of commitment to education, my Chinese, Malay and Indian students soaked in learning like so much blotting paper - it was a challenging and stimulating environment in which to work.
In experience, in history, in language, culture and religion, none of these encounters could have been more different to our pasts. And the experience of finding that in spite of all this external disparity we were able to establish friendships based on understanding and shared goals and values was a powerful one, never forgotten. Vaclav Havel talks about the need to locate "sources of a shared minimum that could serve as a framework for the tolerant co-existence of different cultures within a single civilization." Although it is indeed the base of negotiation and understanding that brings cultures and individuals together, it is the joy and fun of the discovery process that stay with me.
We were able, as you see, in our world, to make the choice to follow the call of interesting jobs in interesting places, and with hindsight it was, you might say, the making of us, although we never gave that a thought at the time.
It was at the end of October in 1969, perhaps on this very date, that we crossed the bridge at Windsor into Canada from the United States. We had spent four years in Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and traveled with pretty much all we had - a Plymouth Valiant car, a toddler of two, some dreams and aspirations, but most critically for the future, the offer of a job at Western for my husband.
My first job in Canada was as a member of the staff of the Office of International Education at Western - an innovation at that time in Ontario universities, and a brilliant time, when everything seemed possible, and we worked about 60 hours a week because we wanted to, for $10,000 a year, and felt we were overpaid. A different world indeed. We trained all Canadian university volunteers for overseas work for CUSO on this campus, and developed the Cross Cultural Learner Centre, an innovation in self-directed learning that is still doing good work in the community.
For me it was then a short step to turn that focus to Canada, and London in particular, and the immigrant experience of those coming into this city. I found that many newcomers to our province live both intellectually and financially on the margins of metropolitan life, as do many of the urban poor. Those margins are widening, as is the complexity of need. When is a margin no longer a margin? If the first rule of the social fabric is the protection of the vulnerable in times of crisis, we need to bring our best thinking and energy to bear on the issues, and to do it before we run out of something essential, like money or time or life. Need we look further than New Orleans?
"My London" is a rich, sometimes dispiriting, sometimes astonishing place for it has been my good fortune to have seen it through many eyes: those of former members of the Russian Academy of Sciences who clean houses as they hope for credentialing; those of the Ethiopian taxi driver desperate to discuss deconstructionism; the eight-year-old Middle Eastern boy who spoke fluently and eloquently in a language he had invented, and he alone understood; the women of the "sybaraki" who spent lifetimes on a forced march to labour camps in Siberia from their native Poland, in a journey that ended in safe haven in Canada via the Black Sea, Tanzania and Britain. We heard similar stories of hardship and resilience in Iqaluit when the National Forum on Health conducted public consultations on health issues in the Canadian North. It is possible, in such encounters, to quite suddenly have the feeling that one has lost not just the day and the year, but even the age in which we live.
Health in the broad sense was and is a large issue, and then it was another short step to the realization that many of the experiences of immigrants were hardly exclusive. Contrary to popular perception not all the Canadian born can access the health and social services, and there are often insuperable barriers to participation, both systemic and personal. That disenfranchised part of the Canadian population is another segment that is now increasing both numerically and in the complexity of the barriers encountered. These include the working poor, the homeless, those being discharged from psychiatric hospitals, those with lifestyle issues such as the addicted, the low income and the low literate, refugees and single parents, primarily women. In parenthesis, is it not ironic that a drunk driver contributes to growth in our GNP, while the unpaid work of women, on which our society depends, does not?
The InterCommunity Health Centre was conceived as an institution of last resort for those who are too often left out or left behind. Providing interdisciplinary care to such a diverse population presents huge challenges and huge rewards. Given the right people and the right supports it can be a stimulating environment for unique program development, as witness our Diabetes Project which earned the national Peter Drucker Award for Innovation by combining traditional medicine with comprehensive and effective community support for lifestyle modification to high risk groups.
Service to the refugee claimant population is particularly challenging: by the end of 1990 Canada was taking in 70% of the world's claimants, the average of the 15 other leading refugee intake nations was 14%. Our open border is without reference to literacy, to training, to skills, and we do not provide sufficient time or support for basic learning of the language or for increasing employability.
Among the most vulnerable among us are, of course, the children. Two of the six key areas identified by the province in its fight against crime in Ontario relate to children. I remember the intelligence of the boy of 12, going on 40, who had been identified as the victim of a child pornography ring. He asked to see me, I think because I was neither the police nor the social services, and therefore without power. He was indignant that he had been termed a 'victim' - he felt, and said, he had assessed the risks and benefits, made decisions, and was in total control of his life, indebted to no-one. And indeed he was in control, much more so than the adults around him. One could only regret, in Marlon Brando's famous line that he "could have been a contender." How much more potential is out there?
You may find these figures as startling as I did - provincial statistics indicate that fully 50% of our children do not go beyond high school, and that of that 50%, 25-32% (depending on the area) drop out prior to graduation. So we in this hall are indeed a minority group! And surely, much has to be expected from those to whom so much has been given.
My choice has been to explore, and involve myself in, as many facets of the life of this community and beyond, as I am able. 'Community' as you know is as you define it, beyond the obvious geographic one, and the most aware will have many such communities to which they can relate. Currently, an eclectic mix of Londoners is engaged in developing a model of international co-operation that is rather different, based on an extraordinary event that occurred on a very ordinary day.
On Boxing Day, 2004, out of a clear blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds, a tsunami killed 40,000 people in 20 minutes in Sri Lanka alone. Incorporated as C2C, our perspective is based on a community to community approach, linking people and skills in the two countries, with a focus on building long term relationships rather than on emergency relief. It is endorsed by the City of London, and the academic component is led by the Research Western, with the active participation initially of medicine and engineering but with the potential of becoming a multi dimensional, multi partnered international project. Under the direction of our Sri Lankan partners we have identified distinct areas in which we will work, including restoration of livelihood through rehabilitation of micro businesses and enhanced skills training, reconstruction of housing utilizing new materials and building styles, and provision of medical care and training.
However, the opportunities for volunteer involvement are without limit. If you would know how much can be done for so many with so little, engage with almost any community agency; if you would wish to engage in impossible decision making, join the funders, who know their resources can never match the need, or reward the commitment. If it is systemic change that excites you, there are many opportunities for engagement at various levels, and perhaps gain some understanding as to why we never seem to emerge from a state of 'critical morass' on many issues. George Pederson, a former President of Western, was once quoted as saying "Living in the times we do, anyone who is not confused doesn't know what's going on around them."
I think, for me, a most valuable part of my experience is that I have achieved a level of comfort in whatever environment I happen to be in. In my exploration of 'community' I have discovered interests I did not know I had, and met people I would never otherwise have met. With the teachers and exemplars I have been privileged to meet in my travels, with their generous acceptance of me whoever I happened to be at the time, I have learned that, at the end of the day, our common humanity is stronger than our obvious and superficial differences, and that our relationships are infinitely negotiable.
I have had the enormous advantage in my life of being able to do whatever interested me, to take risks and never have to fear that failure would leave me without food and shelter, or love. For this gift I owe my parents and my Aunt Ranee, whose birthday it is today, and especially to the unfailing support, tolerance and encouragement of David, my husband of 45 years, and our daughters, Sara and Anjali. To those of us who live so far from our roots, there is nothing more precious than family, and I thank the members of my extended family who are here today, some of whom have made the journey from the far reaches of this continent to be with us: Malathi, Hiro, Naomal, Dayani, Udaya, Aneeka and Sancho.
Congratulations again on your achievements, you have an exciting future ahead, and preparation for it from one of our finest universities. I hope that for you, as for me, the greatest learning still lies ahead, and that you will learn to love the journey as much as the destination you seek. That as you reach, and inevitably change, you will remember today, and this beginning.
I would like to end with two quotations. It was Thomas Szasz in "The Second Sin" who said "People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates."
And it was Philip Larkin who said "Nothing, like something, can happen anywhere." I wish you all the best for the future, and the best that I can wish for your future is that it will contain many 'somethings' created by you.
Thank you.
