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University Success and a Troubled World
10 December 2005
The last twenty-four hours has been an emotional
rollercoaster.
Yesterday I spoke to staff about the enormous progress being
made by them to put University of the Sunshine Coast on the map.
Next year's 'Power of Ten' celebrations for our first decade will
provide further opportunities to promote the value of our many
achievements and our promise. If staff and students support fully
those celebrations, along with community involvement, then we can
take USC to yet another level.
2005 has been a year of sustained successes and there is rightly
confidence about our future.
But on Thursday morning, after participating with Minister
Cummins in the opening of USC's Centre for Multicultural and
Community Development Conference at the Hyatt, I was approached by
a delegate who congratulated me on what I had said, but who also
handed me a leaflet on a 'kidz 2 kidz' project which she had
launched to promote peace, and children relating to children
internationally, across borders.
As a former Iraqi citizen, she fled the country when the Baath
regime assumed power in 1968 and suppressed freedom of speech. In
her leaflet she had written 'A recent survey revealed that 40 per
cent of Iraqi children under 14 could see little reason to continue
living. Twelve years of international sanctions have taken their
toll on the 13 million children of Iraq who today face an uncertain
future traumatized by war, demoralised by poverty and generally
reviled by the international community via association with their
former dictator. Five thousand years ago Mesopotamia was recognised
as the cradle of civilisation. It has now come to this…'
Those stark facts shocked me out of my feeling of pride in our
achievements at USC. Locally, and even in Australia as a whole, we
are almost cocooned from having to confront such despair in so many
young people in other countries with which we have so little
contact.
The day of the conference, 'Racisms in the New World Order',
ably organised by our own Huriyet Babacan and Narayan
Gopalkrishnan, was also the day, a quarter of a century ago, when
John Lennon was killed. Perhaps his most famous recording was
'Imagine' which ends with the hope that perhaps one day we will all
live as one.
Approaching Christmas, twenty-five years on, the world seems
more insecure. Racist tensions seem to be resurfacing in so many
parts of the word and seem to be more internationally pervasive. We
are told it will take generations to settle international relations
to somewhere nearer a base where we can again realistically
'Imagine'.
At the weekend, I leave the Coast for the UK and will spend
Christmas itself with my mother and sister in South Wales, after
going through numerous security checks at airports, where only a
relatively short time ago there were almost none of the kind we now
experience.
As well as focausing on the Coast's needs in 2006, the
University for its part will also continue to pursue its
connections with the world to, in some small way, contribute to
greater cultural understandings.
I look forward to 2006 and USC's greatest year of celebration of
progress and promise, but I'll also be keen to know the outcomes of
the 'Racism' conference that might help ameliorate the flight of
those who have almost given up on life, in whatever culture.
Professor Paul Thomas is Vice-Chancellor of University of
the Sunshine Coast