Alma Mockyen was one of the first students to read for the Diploma in Mass Communication at CARIMAC, University of the West Indies. As CARIMAC celebrates its 40th Anniversary, in this article Mockyen reflects on the year she spent at the Institute.

IN the MassComm classroom, we sat at large tables, newsroom style, facing a large blackboard on the northern side of the wooden structure. The board loomed over us like an immutable guard checking 31 prisoners in a war against ignorance.

Beyond that northern boundary was an open area, used as an unofficial playing field. It separated the MassComm ‘hut’ from the next building on the same side of the road (joining the post office entrance to the exit near Taylor Hall leading to Papine). That next building was the Trade Union Education Institute (then called TUEI, but now known as the Hugh Lawson Shearer Trade Union Education Institute).

The late Professor Rex Nettleford’s office was in the TUEI building, and there we trekked twice weekly for his sessions on Caribbean government and politics.

Professor Nettleford had an unusual method of marking our assignments. He would assess them in a sweeping range of alphabetical scores, from the highest A++ (which our Guyanese colleague Frank Campbell once earned) to A+, A, B+++, B++, B+, B, B-, B–, B-, C+++, C++, C+, C , and so on. I do not recall that he ever gave a D or an F. No doubt he did not have to, what with the array of grades he elected to assign.

Dr Elden Rawlings, who taught the print journalism sequence, was an American professor who joined the MassComm staff from the outset. A real ‘double’ for movie star Rock Hudson, he came to UWI from (I think) Texas Christian University in Forth Worth, Texas. He insisted that each of his journalism assignments be submitted on a single 8 1/2 x 11 (letter size) sheet of paper.

We were obliged to submit a one-page assignment for every day of the entire course. If you missed an assignment, for any reason, you got grade ZERO. His grading system was vastly different from Professor Nettleford’s.

He marked out of 10, but his favourite grade was the number THREE, so much so, that one day, just before he arrived for his session, I wrote on the blackboard, “Professor Rawlings represents the Ministry of Agriculture. He deals only with t[h]ree’s.” If ‘Mr Rock Hudson double’ was amused, he did not let it show.

Professor Roy Augier expressed his pleasure at working with an experienced group whose dialogic parry and thrust kept him fully engaged. For example, one day, students William ‘Billy’ Hall and Frank Campbell were discussing with Prof Nettleford his book titled Caribbean Cultural Identity. Hall challenged Prof Nettleford to explain a phrase he used in the book, namely ‘Jamaica and the Caribbean’.

Hall posed the question, “Where, then, is Jamaica?” Professor Nettleford laughed after an awkward pause, but years later, when the noted professor was republishing his tome, he changed the phrase to read “Jamaica and the wider Caribbean”. Hall noted the change with some amusement as he reviewed the new version for the Daily Gleaner, for which he was then one of the official book reviewers.

MassComm’s first director, Dr Peter Pringle, regrettably, did not respond well to the barrage of questions facing him from the group, none of whom, I imagine, was younger than 23/24 years of age, with most of the group being older persons who had worked in various areas of mass communication for years.

For example, the group included a Belizean journalist who was the author of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article on that country, as well as one who, right after acquiring the Diploma, became his country’s chargé d’affaires to Cuba.

I myself had been in radio since 1953, a full 21 years of experience. As a result, we were critical and questioning, although an altogether ebullient group.

Those were the days of Michael Manley’s leadership, with democratic socialism and workers participation in full bloom. Those were also the years when a ‘ghetto youth’ named Bob Marley was taking the cultural spotlight away from ‘uptown’ arrogance. I will not attempt to describe how lively were the inter-student discussions with perspectives on such topics varying widely and passionately.

From time to time, we benefited from the wise words of such guest lecturers as the late Hugh Cholmondeley, renowned broadcaster from Guyana, and Professor Ed Arnold, world authority on typography, whose lectures were absolutely fascinating.

We were fortunate to have the Radio Education Unit (REU) studio nearby for practical radio exercises, but for hands-on television work, we travelled to Half-Way-Tree, where we were allowed limited time in the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) television studio.

As for our expected scholarly output, there was much grumbling and groaning about the quantum of work loaded on us, although in truth, much learning did take place.

At the end of the course, Frank Campbell came first of the 31-strong batch. I think, William ‘Billy’ Hall and Clare Forrester filled the remaining top three places. In spite of the demands of my working student status, I ended up in the upper 15. One student, a Jamaican, failed, but 30 of us proudly collected our diplomas on the first day of August, 1975.

Apart from the intellectual upgrade, friendships were forged, regional contacts were made. As an earlier UWI alumnus from another discipline put it: “We came to Mona as Jamaicans, we left as West Indians.”

We all hoped — indeed more than hoped, expected, that our experience of the MassComm Diploma programme would redound positively to media in the Anglophone Caribbean.

Best of all, I remember the friends I made, and particularly one. I was about to leave the programme because I was heavily in debt, burdened by an overdue mortgage. This colleague, who shared my table in the classroom, noticed that I was out of sorts. On finding out what the trouble was, I was supplied the very next day with the full amount to clear my indebtedness. The money had been loaned, interest free, by a Christian charity organisation to which my colleague belonged.

Years later, I was able to assist the same person to help someone else in financial need. But I shall never forget the sensitivity and kindness of that MassComm colleague. We have remained friends over the past 40 years, an ‘extra’ I had not anticipated when I walked nervously through the doors of the renovated old hut to join the first group of students of the Diploma in Mass Communication Studies, a group that included a policeman, a photographer, and a paraplegic.

Today, it is known as CARIMAC, housed in a two-storey concrete structure, sited, as the crow flies, roughly a kilometre-and-a-half from the space that, for those of the 31 MassComm pioneers who are alive, still holds cherished memories.