Encaenia and Honorary degrees 2012
Eight honorary degrees were conferred by the Chancellor of the University, Lord Patten of Barnes, at Encaenia on 20 June 2012.
In a break with tradition, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was invited to give a speech at the ceremony. You can view a video of her full speech or read the transcript. A short film of the day is also available online.
The honorands were:
- Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, BA, MA
-
Degree of Doctor of Civil Law, honoris causaChairman of the National League for Democracy, Burma, and member of the Burmese parliament
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was born in Rangoon and educated at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi and St Hugh’s College. Her father, who was assassinated when she was two, was General Aung San, commander of the Burma Independence Army.
After graduating, she worked in New York and Bhutan, before settling in Oxford with her husband, the Tibet scholar Michael Aris. Her return to Burma in 1988 to care for her ailing mother coincided with a period of growing discontent with the military government. In August a popular uprising was violently suppressed; a month later martial law was imposed. That same month, the National League for Democracy (NLD) was founded with Daw Suu as its general secretary. 'I could not, as my father's daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on,' she said.
Fearing her influence, the military placed her under house arrest in July 1989 and barred her from standing in the elections of May the following year. The NLD won a landslide victory, a result which the government refused to recognise. Daw Suu remained under house arrest or in prison for most of the subsequent twenty years, during which time she received many awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and an honorary degree from the University of Oxford in 1993, neither of which she was able to accept in person. She was finally released from house arrest in November 2010. In April this year the NLD won 43 of the 44 seats it contested in a by-election and Daw Suu was elected to parliament to represent the constituency of Kawhmu.
She is an honorary fellow of St Hugh’s College and of St Antony’s College, and patron of the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall.
- Baroness Manningham-Buller, DCB, BA, MA
-
Degree of Doctor of Civil Law, honoris causaFormer Director General of the Security Service
Baroness (Eliza) Manningham-Buller read English at Lady Margaret Hall, of which she is now an honorary fellow.
After a period as a teacher, she joined the Security Service (MI5) in 1974. During her career she dealt with the full range of security threats to the United Kingdom, but her main focus was on counter-terrorism. As head of the section responsible for investigating international terrorism, she led the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. During the First Gulf War she was the Service’s senior liaison officer in Washington. On her return to London in 1992, she established and led a new section responsible for countering Provisional IRA activity in mainland Britain.
She was promoted to MI5’s Management Board in 1993, first as Director of the Service’s surveillance and technical operations, then as Director of Irish counter-terrorism, and finally as Director for IT and finance. She was appointed Deputy Director General in 1997, in which capacity she oversaw the Service’s operational work and relations with other agencies, at home and overseas.
She was appointed Director General in 2002, becoming only the second woman ever to hold that post, and led the Security Service through substantial change in the wake of 9/11 while dealing with a greatly increased terrorist threat. Under her leadership, the Service nearly doubled in size and opened a network of new offices around the UK. She retired in 2007. She was appointed DCB in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in June 2005 and took her seat on the cross benches of the House of Lords in 2008. She became a Governor of the Wellcome Trust in 2008 and in 2011 was appointed Chair of the Council of Imperial College London.
- Mr David Cornwell, BA, MA
-
Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causaAuthor
David Cornwell was educated at the University of Bern and Lincoln College, from where he graduated with a First in Modern Languages. He taught at Eton before joining the British Foreign Service, in which he spent five years, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg.
He began writing in 1961 under the pseudonym ‘John le Carré’, and has since published 22 novels which have been translated into 36 languages. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), brought him international acclaim and was described by Graham Greene as the best spy story he had ever read. Renowned for his intricate espionage and political fiction, he created one of modern literature’s most subtle and carefully crafted protagonists, the spy George Smiley, who features in many of his novels, most prominently in Call for the Dead (1961), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), Smiley's People (1980) and The Secret Pilgrim (1991).
Many of his works have been adapted for film, television and radio, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, dramatised for television by the BBC in 1979 and for a major film starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley in 2011; and The Constant Gardener, published in 2001 and made into a film starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. His latest novel is Our Kind of Traitor (2010).
He is an honorary fellow of Lincoln College and holds honorary doctorates from Exeter University and the universities of St Andrews, Bath, Plymouth, Southampton and Bern, and University College Falmouth. He was made Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2005, and awarded the Goethe Medal (Germany) in 2011. In 2011 he donated his literary archive to the Bodleian Library.
- Professor Drew Faust, AB, AM, PhD
-
Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causaPresident of Harvard University and historian of the American Civil War and the American South
Professor Drew Faust received her undergraduate degree in history from Bryn Mawr College and her master’s and doctoral degrees in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a member of faculty at that institution for 25 years, latterly as Annenberg Professor of History, before being appointed President of Harvard University in 2007, the first woman to hold the position. She is also Lincoln Professor of History and was the founding Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
As President of Harvard, she has expanded financial aid, called for increased federal funding for scientific research, broadened Harvard’s international reach, raised the profile of the arts, embraced sustainability, and promoted cross-disciplinary collaboration, whilst guiding the institution through a period of significant financial challenge. A historian of the American Civil War and the American South, she is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize. Her most recent work, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), won the 2009 Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was named one of the best books of 2008 by The New York Times.
She has been a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center as well as President of the Southern Historical Association, Vice-President of the American Historical Association, and Executive Board Member of the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004.
- Sir Howard Stringer, BA, MA
-
Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causaChairman of Sony Corporation
Sir Howard Stringer a native of Cardiff, read modern history at Merton College, of which he is now an honorary fellow. In 1965, six weeks after moving to America and accepting a job with CBS, he was drafted into the US army and served in Vietnam, where he was decorated with the Army Commendation Medal.
Returning to CBS, he worked as a journalist and producer on programmes such as CBS Reports and CBS Evening News. Under his leadership, CBS Reports won almost every major broadcast journalism award, including 31 Emmys, and CBS News took first place in the ratings for three consecutive years. He was appointed President of CBS News in 1986 and in 1988 became President of CBS Inc.
He left in 1995 to lead Tele-TV, joining Sony Corporation of America two years later. He was named Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in 1998, and Chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation in 2005, and President in 2009. He stepped down as CEO in April 2012 and will remain Chairman until the end of June, when he will become Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sony Corporation, subject to approval following the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting.
He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute and serves on the boards of a number of organisations including the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the American Theatre Wing, Teach for America and Carnegie Hall. He is also a member of the Dean’s Council of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His many media and philanthropic awards include nine Emmys, the UJA-Federation of New York's Steven J Ross Humanitarian Award (1999), the Distinguished Service Award of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (2006), the Paley Center for Media Visionary Award (2007), and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award (2011). He was knighted in 1999. He is an honorary fellow of the Welsh College of Music and Drama and holds honorary degrees from the University of Glamorgan, the University of the Arts London and the American Film Institute.
- Professor Charles Taylor, CC, FBA, BA, MA, DPhil
-
Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causaPhilosopher
Professor Charles Taylor born in Montreal, was an undergraduate at McGill University before coming to Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar in 1952. He read for a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and a DPhil under Isaiah Berlin and G E M Anscombe. He was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College from 1956 to 1961 before returning to McGill, where he spent four decades as Assistant Professor, then Professor, of Political Science.
Between 1976 and 1981 he was Chichele Professor of Political Thought and Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford; he has also spent time at other institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the University of Frankfurt and Northwestern University. He has been Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill since 1998. His publications include The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), Hegel (1975), Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1975), Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (2002), Modern Social Imaginaries (2004) and A Secular Age (2007), the latter being the publication of his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007–8 he served as co-chair of Quebec’s Commission de Consultation sur les Pratiques d’Accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles, which dealt with important issues of secularism and multiculturalism, on which he has also written.
His awards include the 2007 Templeton Prize, and the 2008 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada (the highest civilian award in Canada) and a Grand Officer of the Ordre National du Québec, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the British Academy, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An honorary fellow of Balliol College and of Blackfriars Hall, he has also been a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College since 1981.
- Dr Henry Barnett , CC, MD
-
Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causaNeurologist
Dr Henry Barnett was born in England and emigrated to Canada as a child. He graduated from the University of Toronto Medical School before undertaking postgraduate training in neurology in Toronto, London and Oxford, where he worked with Hugh Cairns and Richard Doll. He was a member of Toronto’s neurology faculty from 1952 to 1969.
In 1967 he founded the Department of Neurological Sciences at Sunnybrook Hospital and two years later co-founded the world’s first multi-disciplinary department of clinical neurological sciences at the University of Western Ontario. He was Chairman of that department from 1974 until 1986 when he co-founded the Robarts Research Institute, which he led for eight years. Dr Barnett oversaw the first randomised trial to establish the efficacy of aspirin in stroke prevention. This landmark study, published in 1976, not only showed that it was possible to prevent stroke but also demonstrated the necessity of robust methodology in such clinical trials. He subsequently ran two large stroke trials: the first disproved the value of cerebral bypass surgery to prevent stroke, at the time one of the most common surgical procedures in the United States; the second, in conjunction with a separate European study, established which patients were most likely to benefit from carotid artery surgery to prevent stroke.
He is currently Scientist Emeritus at the Robarts Research Institute and Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. His hundreds of publications include the standard stroke reference work Stroke: Pathophysiology, Diagnosis and Treatment. He is a Commander of the Order of Canada. His many other honours include the 2008 Karolinska Award for Excellence in Stroke Research, the highest award for stroke research, and honorary degrees from the University of Western Ontario, Dalhousie and Utrecht universities, and the New York Institute of Technology.
- Professor William Phillips, BS, PhD
-
Degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causaPhysicist
Professor William Phillips received his undergraduate degree in physics from Juniata College in 1970 before completing a doctorate at MIT. After two years as a Chaim Weizmann Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, he joined the staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – then the National Bureau of Standards – in 1978.
He is currently head of the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group in NIST's Quantum Measurement Division of the Physical Measurement Laboratory, and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He is also Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, a co-operative research venture of NIST and the University of Maryland. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and was George Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, working in Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, from 2002 to 2003.
Professor Phillips’s research group has developed some of the main techniques used for ultracold atomic gas experiments in laboratories around the world. Today, the group pursues research with quantum degenerate atomic gases, including quantum information processing, quantum simulation, and the study of cold-atom analogues to condensed matter.
In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. His other honours include the Albert A Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1996), the Arthur L Schawlow Prize in Laser Science (1998), a Meritorious Senior Professional Award (Presidential Rank) (2005) and the Service to America Award – Career Achievement (2006). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Fellow and Honorary Member of the Optical Society of America; a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences; and an Academician of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.