You hardly ever encounter a commencement address at a graduation ceremony that is data rich, but moving, scholarly yet practical, perfect in its rhythm with national regional and global conversations, honest about dark challenges but brilliant in its offer of solutions, motivational, engaging and highly entertaining and complete with a galvanizing appeal to positive action and personal responsibility. These boxes are seldom ever checked together – especially these days, when public speakers have to struggle with the conflict between meaningfulness and reel-worthiness. Harvard University Professor, Dr. David Williams – a compatriot of luminaries of the Nobel ilk like the late Derek Walcott and the late Sir Arthur Lewis – gave the perfect commencement address at the main auditorium of the University of the Southern Caribbean last Sunday. Invited by his alma mater to deliver valedictory counsel to the 445 members of the Class of 2023, the St. Lucian born professor began his address by declaring that “I am proud to be an alumnus of the University of the Southern Caribbean…it is USC/CUC that has made me who I am today.”
Dr. Williams pointed out that the graduands were now part of the 7 percent of the world’s population that has achieved the minimum of a bachelor’s degree. He further stated that the Class of 2023 was graduating at an unprecedented time when the Caribbean region and the world is faced with great challenges and enormous opportunities to make a difference. It is here that this renown sociologist, public health expert and black studies scholar went to crime obesity and the consumption of alcohol as ‘for-instances’ to concretize some of the challenges that confront us and to recruit conscious change agents to face them with courage passion and perseverance.
Describing homicide and violent crime as a serious public health crisis in the Caribbean region and a problem that attracts a none-trivial spend of the limited financial resources our governments have, Williams pointed to a 2023 study that revealed that the rate of violent death in CARICOM member states is almost 3 times higher than the average for the rest of the world. Professor Williams also shared that research indicates that children of the incarcerated and those who are struggling in elementary school and devoid of positive role models are likely to commit more than 50 percent of future crimes according to some estimates by criminologists. He pointed to a successful long term prevention strategy that has shown promising results in the US. The US Dream Academy, established 25 years ago by Trinidad-born pastor and musician Dr. Wintley Phipps, focusses on inspiring and investing in children of the incarcerated and those struggling academically in elementary school. Believing that “a child with a dream is a child with a future”, the US Dream Academy has developed a robust curriculum of academics, social values enrichment and mentoring to at risk children in underserved communities in 10 cities in the US.
Turning to the epidemic of overweight and obesity, professor Williams revealed that the rates of overweight and obesity ranged in our region from 19 percent in the population of Antigua and Barbuda to a high of 32 percent in the Bahamas. More alarmingly, our region also grapples with increasing rates of childhood obesity. In the population of children aged 5 to 9, the overweight and obese ranged from 26 percent in St. Lucia to 40 percent in the Bahamas. Referring to what he called the “obesogenic environment” in which we live, Williams averred that merely going with the flow puts us at risk for gaining weight in an environment where unhealthy choices easier to make than healthy ones.
Like he did when he discussed crime, professor Williams also identified innovative solutions that are available to fight overweight and obesity and encouraged the Class of 2023 to use their resolve and creativity to join the fight.
Alcoholism is another global public health challenge that confronts us. Professor Williams shared that alcohol consumption is strongly associated with more than 200 diseases and injury conditions. In 2016, 2,8 million deaths (an average of almost 8000 per day) were related to alcohol consumption. Drawing on 2020 consumption patterns in Latin America and the Caribbean, Williams showed that Uruguay, St. Lucia, Argentina and Barbados were the nations with the highest rates of consumption, with Trinidad and Tobago showing a 25 percent increase in per capita use in recent years. Professor Williams also presented numbers and percentages that showed that frequent heavy or binge drinking was very far from uncommon and there was a very high correlation between alcohol consumption and road accidents (1:3 for men and 1:5 for women).
Professor Williams called out the wines and spirits industry – whose profits depend on alcohol consumption – for dishonestly highlighting research data that support their interests but being silent with the data that does not. He further pointed to a raging debate in the scientific literature on the apparent benefits to health of moderate alcohol consumption and showed that these benefits are more confounding than causal. Moreover, he revealed that current research now shows that alcohol consumption had no identifiable benefits to persons under the age of 40 – who make up a large proportion of the market for wines and spirits.
Professor Williams then counselled the graduating class and his wider audience to “treat each child of humanity with dignity and respect”. On this matter he courageously pronounced that Christians may need to apologize to the LGBT community. “They have not experienced the love of Jesus in the way we treat them” he said.
Conceding that making a positive difference is often expensive in financial terms, he submitted that money ought not to be an obstacle to pursuing purpose. Find out what God wants you to do and God would hold Himself responsible for your success he advised, with a quality of conviction that could only come from personal experience. He shared that he graduated from USC/CUC in 1976 and left for Canada with only US$15. He was determined to further his studies. With his mother’s wise words that “no honest work is degrading” encoded in his mind he worked hard in sometimes difficult conditions and God never let him down. He confidently declared that “what God has done for me; He is prepared to do for the Class of 2023!”
Finally, he encouraged the class to own, their world with the good and the bad in it. Learn lessons from it, understand, struggle, invest, improve, rectify, eradicate, heal, serve, love and preserve it. Do not be discouraged by naysayers or paralyzed by tradition, he warned.
Go Class of 2023… create solutions, meet the needs of suffering humanity, turn dark nights into bright tomorrows, transform communities of despair into new oases of hope. You can make a difference. You have an extraordinary future. May God bless each of you and may God bless USC.
View the full video of Professor David Williams’ address here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eQWPv6I6eA