Establishing the international recognition of USM.
Pond Island:--- Past and contemporary Sint Maarten heroes, L.B. Scott, Charles B. Hodge, Claude Wathey, Lasana Sekou, and Nicole de Weever, have been included in “The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin Biography” edited by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Dr. Franklin Knight, towering intellectual giants at respectively Harvard University and John Hopkins University.
The reason for their inclusion in the 2000 articles on people of African descent, as well as people who impacted the history of the Black Diaspora from the colonial era to the present, (published by Oxford University Press), has to do with the role played by the University of St. Martin (USM).
The tertiary institution on Pond Island had the privilege, via Dr. Francio Guadeloupe role as the member of the editorial board supervising all the entries of the Dutch Caribbean and Afro-Europeans in the Netherlands. The book that is now available in the libraries of all Ivy League Colleges in the USA and the wider academic world, includes Dutch Caribbean notables such as, Frumencio da Costa Gomez, Cola Debrot, Frank Martinus Arion, Otto Huiswoud, Pierre Lauffer, Betico Croes, Tula, Elis Juliana, Patrick Kluivert, and Ranomi Kromowidjojo.
Dr. Guadeloupe mentioned that what is most impressive is that USM lecturers, Dr. Maria van Enckevort Cijntje and Mr. Pedro de Weever, also contributed articles in this publication. Together with our inclusion on the Editorial Board of the top ranking academic journal, The American Ethnologist, (where you find only encounter representatives employed by billion dollar universities such as Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Melbourne, just to name a few,) and the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin Biography is symbolic of the USM’s efforts to also make its mark internationally.
