Founding President and Chief Executive Officer
James Maraj, educator, diplomat, international civil servant died in Australia on April 3, 1999
Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1930, and educated at the University of Birmingham, England where he obtained his doctorate in education, his career really took off when he was appointed head of the Institute of Education at the University of the West Indies in 1965. His talents soon caught the eye of Hugh Springer, mentor and friend, later to become Sir Hugh Springer and Governor-General of Barbados, whom he succeeded as Director of Education at the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1970 when Sir Hugh assumed the Directorship of the Commonwealth Foundation. Dr. Maraj very soon rose to become Assistant Secretary-General, but left the Secretariat to become Vice Chancellor of the University of the South Pacific from 1975-1982. After a short stint at the World Bank,1982-1984, he returned to Fiji to serve, first as High Commissioner to Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and India, and then as Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister's office and subsequently in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1989 Dr. Maraj assumed the mantle of first President of the newly established Commonwealth of Learning, and served in this capacity with distinction until his retirement from the post in 1995. During 1995-1997 he took on the assignment of Executive Director of the Tertiary Education Commission in Mauritius. In 1997 he took up duties as Special Adviser to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Africa and as Consultant to the Federation of Open Learning Institutions of South Africa. He was honoured with doctoral degrees from the Universities of Birmingham, South Pacific, Andra Pradesh, Sri Lanka, Hull, Indira Gandhi and West Indies; and was awarded the Medal of Merit First Class (Trinidad and Tobago) and the Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (France).
James Maraj was a renaissance man. Education may have been his specialisation (although he rarely revealed this side of his background to the public), but he had the uncanny ability of coming to a new subject or field of endeavour from the outside and quickly absorbing its essential elements and building on them. As Assistant Secretary-General of the Commonwealth his imagination was as fertile and his intellect as creative when dealing with health matters and youth affairs as it was with issues of education. He saw the Vice-Chancellorship at USP as a challenge to create an institution that was not just a poor relation of the traditional U.K. University, but one that was rooted in the culture of the South Pacific and relevant to its developmental aspirations. The clarity of the mind of the man, his ability to think through a problem dispassionately, his unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom uncritically, and the gift of coming up with original ideas, sometimes almost effortlessly, were nowhere more in evidence than in his term as President of COL. For him the future of distance education lay in its integration into mainstream education, and it was towards this end that he tried to shape the ethos of the organisation.
Different persons saw James Maraj through different lenses. To some, his friends, he was a steadfast and loyal ally always willing to go that extra mile. To others, mainly those who worked under him, he was a perfectionist and sometimes autocrat, forbidding if not wholly aloof. Some found him hard and difficult, others who knew recognised him as a "soft touch". He was implacable in defending 'righteous' causes and often used his excellent command of English to persuade opponents to his way of thinking. He was a teacher to those who wanted to learn, a man ready to acknowledge, and gracious in commending, the contribution of others, and a gentleman in the truest sense.
James Maraj the scholar and James Maraj the man will be missed by all those who knew him, and by countless others who have benefited and continue to benefit from the legacy of his ideas and his work.
- Dr. Dennis Irvine
7 April 1999
