From Jennings to Geneva: Sri Lanka's tortuous decline
Rajan Philips- March 15, 2014
There have been quite a few news reports and nostalgic commentaries on Sir Ivor Jennings inspired by the visit to the Peradeniya campus by his granddaughter, Catherine Watson. Sir Ivor's pioneering contribution to university education in Sri Lanka has not been sufficiently honoured and appreciated. For several decades, honouring Jennings was a one-man mission for the late HAI (Ian) Goonetilleke, the venerable bibliographer of Sri Lankan scholarship. Ian fought a lone battle against powerful odds and without any official resources to remember and honour Jennings, to preserve his writings and to publish some of them. It was not just the establishment for, as has been duly noted by the popular "People and Events" columnist Nan, even the student population at its boorish worst spurned the efforts in the 1970s to honour Jennings with a statue or monument on the campus he founded. Perhaps a better way of honouring Jennings today, than statues or street names that are no longer a mark of distinction, would be for the universities to offer (seminar or reading) courses on Jennings, his work and his contributions to Sri Lanka.
