UniFiji launches 2025 academic year with a pledge to achieve greatness

The University of Fiji has launched its 2025 academic year with a promise to achieve greatness through education.

In a festival atmosphere, staff and students happily greeted each other yesterday morning with new year good wishes as they mixed and mingled in the university's Great Hall at Saweni Campus before signing up for formal courses and meeting their lecturers and Academic Advisors.

UniFiji says students also signed up for extra-curricular activities through clubs and associations organised by the University of Fiji Student Association, UFSA.

While speaking to an assembly of thousands of staff and students at all it's campuses, Vice Chancellor, Professor Shaista Shameem in her orientation address says in 2025, as a pledge, the university has vowed to deliver greatness for students and staff and, through them, to their families, their communities, their nation and the planet.

She says the secret of the university's success lay in its human values foundation.

Professor Shameem says as with all the sustainable philosophies in the great books, it is integrity, ethical conduct, compassion for people and nature, fairness, just deeds, selflessness, generosity, and the ability to face up to our weaknesses and try to rectify them, that makes the University of Fiji simply the best in the higher educational space in Fiji.

She further says they are proud of the fact that they attracted a diverse range of staff and students to its teaching and learning landscape.

Professor Shameem says the demographics speaks volumes about the university's principle of inclusivity across the spectrum of diverse cultures, genders and ages in Fiji and the region.

She says the university had registered a record number of regional students this year, showing that its unique holistic higher educational focus was gaining traction in the wider Pacific.

The Vice Chancellor says the university's comprehensive perspective on education in all its facets is distinctive.

She says it means they have an innovative combination of both rigorous intellectual inquiry as well as extra-curricular programmes designed to train future leaders in discipline, character building, advocating for the public good, to know the difference between right and wrong, to develop an exemplary personal code of conduct and to be utterly sincere in all that they do and say.

Professor Shameem adds students are our future and, if their education is founded on all these fundamentals, their full and fulfilling employment, as well as their path to greatness in the world world, is assured.