Ryan’s Greatest Influence

THE EDITOR: I read several tributes to the late Prof Selwyn Ryan. He influenced generations of scholars of all stripes from the 1970s till now. He wrote on many topics including on African nationalism.

He was the most eminent influential Africanist scholar who trained many budding academicians. We met several times at ISER, St Augustine campus, talking about ethnic politics in Trinidad and opinion polling. The country looked forward to his weekly political commentaries and his polls relating to elections. Ryan was very impressed with and praised my work as a pollster.

He was a giant scholar. There is/was hardly any scholar like him at UWI or at any other academic institution in the Caribbean. Those of us who studied social sciences relating to the Caribbean would have read and cited his works in our research.

No doubt Ryan made an enormous contribution to academia and to sociopolitico analyses in TT. What I credit Dr Ryan for most was his introduction of polling in Trinidad. (I don’t recall him ever conducting polls in Tobago; I conducted many there although I did many more in Trinidad.)

Ryan influenced pollsters like me and survey researchers in Trinidad and throughout the Anglophone Caribbean. We took our cue from him as a leading pollster in the region (apart from Carl Stone of Jamaica). We consulted him on polling. He was supportive and encouraged us to conduct polls – the more the merrier.

Because of his pioneering work on opinion polling in Trinidad, pollsters like me pioneered polling in Guyana (introduced by the work of Prof Dr Baytoram Ramharack), Dominica, St Lucia, St Kitts, Grenada, Antigua, Barbados (Peter Wickham), and several other countries. (Carl Stone confined his polling to Jamaica and Ryan to Trinidad.)

We were/are able to assess popular support for political parties and candidates for office and project an outcome, allowing politicians to plan or reorient campaigns. The public in Guyana and the smaller islands have been most grateful for our reports on quantifiable support for parties or candidates.

I am most appreciative of Ryan’s work as a pollster. We will miss the polling in Trinidad of Prof Ryan. The country is all the more poorer without his political insights on electoral outcomes.

DR VISHNU BISRAM

pollster/political analyst