Elsa Leo-Rhynie dedicates a life to education

Professor Elsa Leo-Rhynie may well be most well known for becoming the first female principal of a University of the West Indies (UWI) campus, but in truth, her contribution to nation building in Jamaica is much more far reaching.

Leo-Rhynie’s story includes, at the forefront of its telling, a lifelong commitment to education.

A student of the St Andrew High School for Girls, Elsa Leo-Rhynie, had every intention of making education her life, as her further studies seem to indicate.

Her first foray into further studies took her to bachelor’s degrees in Botany and Zoology.

Unsurprisingly, Leo-Rhynie was not satisfied with that, later completing a graduate diploma in education and a PhD in educational psychology.

Her foray into giving back to education what it had given her began, interestingly, in England where she was a secondary school teacher, plying her trade at Haverstock School.

She would not leave the sense of responsibility she had to giving back to Jamaica for long though, returning to the island where she taught at the Meadowbrook High School, before taking up a role with the UWI in 1977.

Leo-Rhynie would take up a post as lecturer of educational psychology, spending the next 11 years in that capacity, of course, earning tenure and becoming a senior lecturer in the department of education.

But Leo-Rhynie needed new challenges, leaving the UWI in 1987 to become executive director of the Institute of Management and Production.

Her four years there saw the institute being integrated into the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean, but her love for the UWI was not to be denied.

She would return to the UWI in 1992 as Professor and Regional Coordinator for Gender and Development Studies.

The position was new, and her task was to be difficult. Her job was to institutionalise gender studies at the UWI.

The job took her another four years, but by the time she was done, the Centre for Gender Studies at the UWI had become the Institute of Gender Studies.

There were also publications as well.

In 2001, there was ‘Gender Mainstreaming in Education: A Reference Manual for Governments and Other Stakeholders (Gender Management System Series)’, All the way back in 1993 there was ‘The Jamaican family: Continuity and change (Grace, Kennedy Foundation lecture)’, and there were also collaborations like ‘The UWI Gender Journey: Recollections and Reflections’ with Joycelin Messiah as well as ‘Gender: A Caribbean Multi-disciplinary Perspective with Barbara Bailey’.

By 1996, Leo-Rhynie’s good work had led to her appointment as deputy principal of the UWI and six years later, she was made pro-vice chancellor and Chair of the Board of Undergraduate Studies.

Another four years would pass before Leo-Rhynie would be appointed the first female principal of a campus.

But unlike many academics, Leo-Rhynie refused to be tied to the University in ways that made her talent inaccessible to other areas of life.

She was the Chairperson of the Dudley Grant Memorial Trust, which works to improve early childhood education. She also sat on the Caribbean Examinations Council and was a member of the University of Technology, Jamaica’s council.

She has also sat on the boards of the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica, the University Hospital of the West Indies, the University Council of Jamaica, the United Way of Jamaica, and the Insurance Company of the West Indies (ICWI) Group Foundation. She also served as Chair of the GraceKennedy Foundation from 2008 to 2017 and was a member of the Jamaica Privy Council for 10 years.

Of course, her dedication to nation building, especially through education and the understanding of gender issues, brought with it numerous accolades.

There was the Pelican Award in 2002, In 2007 when Leo-Rhynie retired, she was granted Professor Emerita status by the UWI. The university she loved and played no small part in developing, also dedicated one of its halls of residence to her. Before the 2013 dedication, Leo-Rhynie earned the Order of Distinction Commander Class in 2000 and after it, in 2015, the Order of Jamaica. In 2017, Leo-Rhynie became the first woman to earn the Chancellor’s Medal.