Dear Editor,

It was 42 years ago that 115 students of the former Jamaica School of Agriculture (JSA) were expelled en bloc by the then Minister of Education Mavis Gilmour for their street protest in Port Antonio of a hastily and unplanned relocation of the prized institution from Twickenham Park, St Catherine, to Passley Gardens, Portland, to make way for the police academy.

The current students are now involved in two days of protest to bring attention to their plight of an equal lack of planning on the part of the school authorities to accommodate them and the resultant lapse in security which led to a female student being abducted and assaulted.

After 42 years one must wonder whether there were any lessons learnt from the governmental authorities, who, at the time, like now, was a Jamaica Labour Party Administration.

The current students are being warned to be extremely careful as, like their colleagues of 1980, they can be seen as being disruptive, resulting in the mass expulsion of an entire year group of students whose parents have made untold sacrifice to get them enlisted and whose personal dreams are to lift agriculture to modernity and contribute to the critical agricultural subsector.

In this regard, the current students will do well to heed this warning since the former students are still reeling from the devastation caused by the most massive dislocation of one’s career path.

For years the 115 expelled and displaced students faced unparalleled stigma and rejection by the society because they dared to agitate for their plight.

So final was the act of expulsion that it was quickly followed by an order of certiorari and mandamus hastily put in the Jamaican court, effectively taking the esteemed regional institution out of existence.

This was the very group of students who were being nurtured to enter the agricultural discipline as agricultural science teachers at secondary-level schools, agricultural researchers, and eminent scientists of the future.

Needless to say, the local media were astonished and up until a year after the ‘tragedy’ articles were still appearing in the dailies pleading with the Government of the day to reverse this callus act of high-handedness and to realise that the country stood to be inflicted a great loss to its labour force by the expulsion of these students.

We hail the late journalist and attorney-at-law Morris Cargill, who wrote copious articles urging the Government to rethink its actions, which, according to him, had all the trappings of being unconstitutional.

The fact of the matter is that in 2022 there are still members of this ill-fated batch of students who still have to be realigning their lives as a direct consequence.

Whether they will come forward at this time to be identified for the purpose of testing the legality of this 42-year-old travesty or whether the statute of limitations is rightly applicable is yet to be determined.

But, notwithstanding, it should interest organisations like the Office of the Public Defender to take up the matter and establish if there is any basis or locus standi for compensating the students, a few of whom have actually suffered and died.

The Ministry of Education and Youth is believed to have retained documents and files from both JSA and the College of Agriculture, Science and Education (CASE) which will be facilitatory to legal research into this sordid matter.

Derrick D Simon

Derrickdsimon@yahoo.com