LETTER: More Than a Number: What the Class of 2026 Tells Us

By Professor C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus

On Saturday, October 10, 2026, the UWI Five Islands Campus graduated its largest class ever as over 200 graduates crossed the stage. That milestone deserves celebrating, and we celebrate we did but as anyone in that hall knows the headline number was not the real story, the real story was in the faces, the families, and the firsts.

Two lives, one lesson

This year our university and campus awarded honorary doctoral degrees to two Caribbean icons who belong in the same sentence, Drs Thea LaFond and Don Rojas.

Thea LaFond won Dominica’s first Olympic gold medal, in the triple jump in Paris, with a national record leap of 15.02 meters in 2024.

She told the audience that she had her Olympic debut at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics where she competed in the women's triple jump and finished last in the qualification round. Her 2024 gold medal proves that where you start does not decide where you finish. For the young people in the audience, she is a living example that excellence from a small island is not an exception it is a possibility.

Don Rojas, a son of St. Vincent and the Grenadines , has spent more than half a century using words as tools of liberation, from the Grenada Revolution to the front ranks of the Black press across the diaspora. For the older generation, his is a story of conviction kept across a lifetime and a history lesson for the younger ones present.

Side by side, they show what a Caribbean university is for, connecting generations. As one spoke to what we can achieve now while the other reminds us of what was struggled for and is still unfinished.

Our first public health graduates

For the first time, the Five Islands Campus graduated a class in the Master of Public Health. For years, senior health professionals in Antigua and Barbuda hit a ceiling. They had the experience, but promotion required a qualification that meant leaving home, work and family and many simply could not.

Now they can earn it here, and several are now eligible for promotion into leadership roles in our health system which is not only good for them but for the health care system. I was especially pleased to see a practicing doctor in this first cohort; we need more doctors focused and public health and equipped to lead in the sector.

Our first MBA class

We also graduated our first MBA class, professionals who studied while running departments, businesses and households. A country that wants to own more of its economy needs people at home trained to build and lead its enterprises.

Teachers who never had to leave

Once again, we graduated experienced teachers who are now fully certified, without having to leave their classrooms or their children. Among them was a class valedictorian, Chemique Harris-Benjamin. That a working teacher can top the graduating class tells you about the calibre of the people we have been asking to wait.

Behind many of these graduates stood someone the programme booklet does not name, the grandmother, aunt or neighbour who minded the children through evening classes and exam weeks. Caribbean progress has always been financed by these unbooked transfers and these degrees belong to them too.

The gap we cannot ignore

One more thing was plain on that stage. Our graduates were overwhelmingly women. We are not alone in this as across The UWI, roughly 70 of every 100 students are female.

We celebrate every one of these women. Caribbean women never entered the workforce, because they were never out of it, and they have walked boldly through the door education opened. But a degree earns a seat, not yet the chai as our boardrooms are still chaired mostly by men. The work for our daughters is not yet finished.

The question for our sons is different. The anthropologist Peter Wilson observed that Caribbean societies run on two value systems. The first is respectability, earned through school, church and work. The second is reputation, earned among peers on the street corner. We raise our girls towards the first and our boys towards the second. A degree is a slow investment in respectability, with years of discipline before the dividends arrive. Too many young men are being offered faster, riskier returns elsewhere, and too many of those offers end badly.

The men who graduated on Saturday show the other road, they chose the long road, and it paid. So here is my request. Look at the men and boys in your life, your sons, brothers, nephews, partners and colleagues. Talk to them about what further study could do for them. Not as a lecture, but as an invitation and if cost, time or confidence is the barrier, we want to hear about it, and we want to help.

What comes next

The largest class in our history is a beginning, not a finish line. To the Class of 2026, you have made your families and your campus proud, now go and make your country proud.

And to those still thinking about it, especially the men, the door is open, right here at home.