|
2008-04-07 |
Speech of Prof. Armando Rocha Trindade
Magnificent Rector
Illustrious Trustees
Colleague Professors
Esteemed Members of Staff
Dear Students:
I am, of course, extremely honoured and most grateful by receiving this
prestigious distinction from the Asia International Open University
(Macau). I thank you warmly and I shall treasure the memory of this
occasion within my heart.
However, I think that I do not deserve your precious gift for, as a
matter of fact, you must assign whatever Worthy I did to pure
happenstance or, if you would put it another way, to the intervention of
the goddess of fate and chance.
For those of you who do not know the circumstances surrounding the
foundation of the AIOU I shall tell you the whole story.
It starts at the beginnings of the nineties in the last century. I was,
at the time, the Rector of the Portuguese Open University and I was
suggested to present myself to election of the International Council for
Open and Distance Education, the worldwide organisation for institutions
dealing with the mode of teaching and learning.
As a part of the procedure, I wrote a Manifesto, stating my intended
objectives and policy and I sent it to all ICDE members around the
world, together with a letter wherein I stated my availability to
discuss the terms of this Manifesto with members who would require it.
I received many letters of support but a special one came from New
Zealand, inviting me to visit them and to discuss my intentions face to
face. I think this was intended as a joke, or as a challenge, for they
must have known that New Zealand is as far or Portugal as can be at the
face of the Earth: its capital city, Wellington, is just the antipode of
my own city of Lisbon, some 20 000 kilometers away.
I must tell those who do not know me very well that I cannot resist a
good challenge and I decided to accept it. The trouble was, I had just a
narrow window of opportunity in the agenda of my commitments: just 5
days to travel from Lisbon to Wellington and then back to Europe, to the
city of Tangier, in Morocco, where I was expected to deliver an invited
speech.
So I went to New Zealand and had my conversations with the local
representatives of this Distance Education School and I think that I won
their vote?
This was when fate came into the picture. At exactly that time, there
was a delegation of visitors coming from Hong Kong and I had the
opportunity to meet three gentlemen, of names KK Wong, Edward Wu and
Peter Ng. We came to discuss general problems related to higher
education in Southeast Asia and I learned that they were having
difficulties when trying to establish a distance education University in
Macau. At the time, Macau was under Portuguese administration and the
local educational authorities were not favorable to the idea of letting
a private university ?using only English and Chinese languages and not
at all the Portuguese one - to be installed in the territory.
From my own point of view, this was a very interesting situation: I was
responsible for an Open University that just used Portuguese language in
its teaching programs and, furthermore, it was a public institution. It
seemed that a partnership was in order, should the Macau authorities and
the local representatives of the People𠏋 Republic of China agree to this
initiative.
They did: it took about one year of rough negotiations, but at the end
it succeeded ?and the AIOU was happily created.
It is a very singular institution: a mixture of public and private
initiatives; a blend of Chinese and Portuguese influences; the
coexistence of two or three different educational models. So you see:
chance good luck were mostly what happened in all this process and I am
most happy for the small role I was able to play.
On the other hand, I am very proud about the success of the institution,
due to the inspired leadership of its trustees, its high officials and
the hard work of its teaching and administrative staff. I give you, my
dear students, the example of all these persons as a guide for your work
which will lead, I am sure, to very significant achievements in the
future.
|
|
