Finding certainty from within: alum and former Ethiopian education minister, ambassador speaks at PSU graduation

PLYMOUTH — “Examine the wisdom of others in light of your own discovery. That is what counts most.”

This was the advice of Dr. Genet Zewide, former Ethiopian Minister of Education and Ambassador to India, to Plymouth State University’s undergraduate class of 2022 at their commencement on May 7. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate in public service by the university for her efforts to provide better education access for women and girls in Ethiopia.

Ambassador Genet — it is Ethiopian custom to use the first name in almost all personal address — graduated from Plymouth State in 1973. The sole university in Ethiopia at the time, Haile Selassie University (now Addis Ababa University) mainly educated men and foreigners. Genet was selected through an Ethiopian initiative to develop its education system by getting young Ethiopians trained abroad as teachers and attended PSU through a USAID scholarship. 

Genet was a student of PSU’s education program, a centerpiece of its curriculum since its 1808 founding, and upon graduation returned to Ethiopia to work as a teacher. She was a lecturer at Haile Selassie University from 1973 to 1991. Genet then served as Ethiopia’s minister of education from 1992 to 2005, when she became ambassador to India. She retired in 2016, only six years after receiving a doctorate in political thought and comparative politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. 

Though many things have changed since Genet was last in Plymouth nearly 50 years ago — at the time there were fewer shops on Main Street and only four students of color — many of her core memories about the university still shape the experiences of its students. Genet described what it was like, as a young Ethiopian woman from an intensely patriarchal culture, to become involved with the debates about civil rights and the women’s movement that buzzed through campus — much as they do today. 

She also observed firsthand the power of popular demonstration and the defense of inalienable rights for all people. 

“I know that challenges continue even today, but I saw your freedom to protest, to force a President to step down through democratic means,” the former ambassador said. “Soon, I would experience the opposite in Ethiopia.” 

The path to progress in her work has been laid with obstacles, but over the arc of her career Genet helped Ethiopia reach new heights in its primary education rates and access to education for women and girls. 

Only a year after Genet returned to Ethiopia with her degree, the Derg — a military dictatorship that violently suppressed dissent — took power in Ethiopia. From 1974 to 1978 the Derg jailed, exiled and killed many of Ethiopia’s young students and academics. Genet and thousands of others were imprisoned and tortured. 

“The reign of terror left many of us with the stark choice of either turning a blind eye or speaking truth to power,” Genet said. “Some, including myself, chose the latter by secretly joining the organized opposition to the military regime… But my activity in the opposition came at a terrible personal price.”

The Derg fell in 1991 and, as she took her role as minister of education in the new government in 1992, Genet played a role in the efforts of the new government to bring development and prosperity to Ethiopia. 

Genet described her time as education minister as “the most edifying and the most productive years of my life.” It was difficult, up against a society with deep structural roots in patriarchy, to get her colleagues to include specific reforms to equalize education access. 

“The gendered prejudice I encountered only stiffened my resolve to prove their absurdity,” Genet said about the male colleagues who disapproved of her work. “After much tussle, an affirmative-action provision was inserted to compensate disadvantaged female students as well as pupils of disfranchised national backgrounds.”

Today, primary school enrollment approaches 100% in Ethiopia, and there are 43 state universities where women work as instructors and graduate students. 

Genet credits her sense of mission and resolve with her mother and her education in the United States. Most young women in Ethiopia during her childhood married and bore children very young and had scant opportunity for education. Genet’s mother prevented her from young marriage and prioritized her education, which she said is at the foundation and inspiration of her accomplishments. 

She also expressed gratitude towards PSU for the impact its professors and courses had on her personal growth 

Achieving her doctorate just a few years before her retirement — or as she described, getting “a doctorate in one hand and retirement papers in the other” — Genet’s view of education as a lifelong practice and a vehicle for social empowerment is something she said she learned at Plymouth State. She was inspired to pursue her PhD relatively late in life by one of her college professors, who told the class that, “Learning is done from the womb until death,”  and that education is the “great equalizer” of segregated societies. 

Having retired from government work, the former Ambassador continues her personal mission of gender equality through education and within education in her work with Women’s Strategic Development Center, a non-governmental organization in Ethiopia. 

During the ceremony, student and faculty speakers acknowledged the unique struggles the class of 2022 faced in its four years at PSU and described a world of uncertainty and opportunity it faces entering the workforce. 

For these young graduates, Genet models that the strength to achieve despite a preponderance of forces against you comes from within: resolve in one’s inner mission and service-based definitions of personal success can be the best tools to face adversity and uncertainty.

“You are the one who has to make your life certain,” Genet said in an interview. “Certainty comes from your work. There are so many challenges in the world, but it is up to you, you who face those challenges, to make it work.”