PEOPLE
When Cave Hill marked its 60 th anniversary last year, one of its earliest students came back to the institution that shaped her remarkable journey.
by Marie-Claire Williams Joyous Homecoming for Pioneering Student
L ilith Haynes was among the trailblazers who studied at the campus’s original site at the Old Trade Fair Site at the Deep Water Harbour in Bridgetown. She was one of 12 students who travelled from other countries to join the College of Arts and Sciences, as it was then known. On a recent trip to the campus, she shared her memories of her long and distinguished career in higher education that started when she was a young graduate at Bishop’s High School in her native Guyana. “Guyana had pulled out of The University of the West Indies to start the University of Guyana , and there was no way I was going to take my grandmother’s hard-earned money to go to a university starting in Guyana that I didn’t know
anything about. The UWI was actually 15 years old at the time,” she said. Her group comprised 18 full-time students and 100 part-time ones. She signed up for French, Spanish and Latin. “The equivalent of the French Peace Corps sent a young man to be our French teacher; Dr. [Richard] Allsopp came from Guyana, he did all kinds of stuff [including] the use of English and some French; we had Charles Hollingsworth coming from Mona … to teach Spanish; and for Latin, we had Arthur Sealy who taught at Combermere. And that was the core,” she said. “We had no library, but I lived in a convent which had a library and which had French students from Martinique and Guadeloupe. It was a boarding school back then. They had Spanish students from Venezuela, including the President’s
children; nuns who taught French and Spanish … I could speak in French and Spanish at home,” she said. The students at the new institution faced a challenging curriculum: “When we started, the Caribbean was gaining independence … It was decided, very wisely, that we would all have to do theses in our second and third years, which had to do with Caribbean life. You could choose whatever you wanted to choose, but it had to do with Caribbean life,” she said. Haynes graduated with honours and went on to read for a Master’s in Linguistics at the Mona campus, from which she graduated in 1971. Two years later, she earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University . At a time when Linguistics was not a popular field of study, Dr. Haynes carved a path that led her to universities in the
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