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Professor Emeritus and UWI pioneer dies at 88

Professor Rawle Farley, noted economist and educator and a pioneer academic of the University of the West Indies died on November 6 in Rochester, New York at the age of 88. Dr Farley had been a professor of economics at the State University of New York, College at Brockport since 1966. He was the founder and first chairperson of the Department of Economics at SUNY Brockport, and was named Professor Emeritus in 1995.

A Guyanese by birth, Rawle Farley was Director of the Extra Mural Studies Department of the then University College of the West Indies and during over 10 years of pioneering outreach work for the fledgling University, helped shape the engagement of the department in public discourse and  public service. While serving as Resident Tutor in Belize he founded the Festival of One-Act Plays and the British Honduras National Festival of the Arts which eventually gained recognition as one of the most prestigious and longest-running arts festivals (1953-1979) in the Caribbean. In the 2007 cultural history “Breaking down the Walls” by UWI Open Campus academics, Howard Fergus, Lennox Bernard and Judith Soares, the authors described Dr Farley as “a visionary leader with the courage to challenge the existing system and its standards."

Professor Farley was himself the author of a number of seminal works on the economy of development, including “The Economics of Latin America: Development Problems in Perspective” (Harper & Row, 1972). His public service was as wide-ranging as it was ground-breaking. He was, inter alia, member of the Caribbean Public Service Commission of the Federation of the West Indies; Chairman of the Barbados Government Sugar Commission Enquiry into the Marketing of Sugar and the Finances of the Sugar Industry; a member of the Trinidad Government Commission on Leave Irregularities on the Docks; an invited consultant on Economic Planning to the Government of Guyana;  a United Nations consultant expert on economic planning and development in Libya; Chairman of the Jamaica Government Industrial Disputes Tribunal and for more than five decades was an invited expert speaker at numerous conferences at national and regional levels in the Caribbean on economic development matters and on education and management/labour issues.

The University of the West Indies acknowledges his sterling contributions to higher education and to public service in the areas of economic development, economic planning and labour. Professor Farley was recognised at the Special Awards Ceremony during the UWI’s 50th Anniversary celebrations.

The entire University community extends condolences to his family – his wife Ena, their sons Anthony, Felipe, Christopher, and Jonathan and several grandchildren.


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