Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee
Presentation address by Mr Stewart Ross
Vice-Chancellor
To have one Olympic medallist in the family is truly remarkable. To have two is an extraordinary achievement which will be remembered for generations.
Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee have reached the very pinnacle of the sport of triathlon and made Olympic history in 2012 as the first British brothers in more than a century to stand side by side on the podium.
Both have been crowned world champions, represented Great Britain at all age groups in international competitions, and are the dominant force in the sport. The 2012 Olympics overflowed with incredible moments, but I believe those seconds when Alistair secured Gold and Jonathan claimed the Bronze were the most memorable of all that glorious summer.
In awarding honorary degrees, the University honours individuals of real achievement and eminence in their respective fields. Tri-athletes swim 1.5km in open water, cycle 40km and then run 10km. This sport is technically and physically beyond the vast majority and to even compete is an achievement. But Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee do so with guile, tenacity and a competitive aggression which leaves their rivals literally trailing.
And yet, when not competing, the brothers are friendly and engaging. Brought up in the Leeds suburb of Horsforth and schooled in Bradford, Alistair and Jonathan are fiercely proud of Yorkshire. Both are graduates of this University; Alistair with a BSc in Sports Science and Physiology and Jonathan with a BA in History.
How did they come to dominate their chosen sport? Certainly, the steadfast support of family provided the bedrock upon which Alistair and Jonathan’s natural sporting prowess could flourish. The drive from competing against each other day after day and the compulsive focus on endless practice and training and vital. Like all true champions, they have suffered injury and had their share of disappointment, but returned all the stronger from it.
Yorkshire’s wonderful countryside has provided a natural training ground for them and has a part to play in their success. Both have made a conscious decision to remain in Leeds; they train twice a week in the University’s sports centre and their presence here attracts world-class athletes to the city.
The achievements of these two young men will, like the Olympic Games, endure. We will watch their continued development and will cheer them on towards further success.
Vice-Chancellor, I am honoured to present to you for the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa, Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee.
Claire Cashmore
Presentation address by Professor Vivien Jones
Vice-Chancellor,
A medallist not just at three consecutive Paralympic Games, but in all the international competitions she has entered since 2004, Claire Cashmore is an outstanding athlete. Equally importantly, throughout that time she has been a role model for young people and people with disabilities, always looking for ways in which she might use her success to inspire others.
Claire was born without a left forearm – though she enjoys telling new acquaintances that she lost it in a close encounter of the Jaws kind. That humour and resilience are characteristics of young woman who has always treated her disability as a means, rather than a barrier, to success. As she puts it,’I have never seen myself as disabled’.
A Linguistics and Phonetics graduate, Claire was one of our first Sports Scholars, working for her degree alongside the punishing training schedule needed to maintain her international swimming career. At the beginning of Olympic year, Claire spoke inspirationally – and movingly – at our Student Education Conference on the theme of ‘Achieving Excellence’. She reflected on how crucial her Leeds Scholarship had been in helping her manage her two demanding lives, as a student and as a swimmer, and how her commitment to these two complementary disciplines helped her achieve more academically and as an athlete – a wonderful example of our Leeds commitment to a holistic, rounded education.
At that time, we knew about Claire’s bronze Paralympic medals from Athens and Beijing, and her five gold, nine silver and six bronze medals from other international Championships. We knew, too, about her other awards: as Npower Young Female Achiever, for example; or W-A-S-P Disabililty Personality of the Year. What we couldn’t yet know was that she would go on to win two silver and a further bronze medal in London 2012 – and that she would be chosen as one of the faces of Channel 4’s ‘Meet the Superhumans’ campaign.
Claire’s athletic prowess might put her in the ‘superhuman’ category; but her modest reflections on her achievements and her readiness to support others make her also wonderfully human, whether acting as Equalities Champions for a social enterprise providing housing in her home town of Kidderminster, or working in secondary schools as an Athlete Mentor, under the Living for Sport initiative.
It’s this commitment not just to personal achievement but to giving back that makes us particularly proud of Claire as a Leeds graduate. We wish her continuing success, most immediately at the IPC World Championships in Montreal in August and, ultimately, in her ambition to become a Blue Peter presenter – which would, I think, be another Leeds first.
Vice-Chancellor, I am delighted to present to you for the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Claire Georgina Katie Cashmore.
Linda Pollard
Presentation address by the Vice-Chancellor
Three distinct but interwoven strands run throughout Linda Pollard’s distinguished professional life: a devotion to public service, an ideological belief in women having the same opportunities as men in the workplace, and a deep affection for Yorkshire, its places, its people and its potential.
An alumna of Bingley Grammar, Linda began her career in the private sector, and founded two successful companies – one in retail fashion, the other providing marketing services. She is now Regional Chair of Coutts Bank.
Linda’s entrepreneurial flair was surely based on her profound interest in people, and her appreciation of the importance of the informal networks which help communities to cohere and organisations to thrive; it was perhaps no surprise therefore that Linda added another string to her bow in the 1990s, when she became a member of the Bradford Family Health Service Authority. This was the first in a long series of public appointments. She went on to chair two health trusts in Bradford and then the West Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority, and this year was appointed Chair of the Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust – I suspect her most challenging appointment yet, which saw her plunged immediately into a furore about children’s heart surgery.
Linda’s service to the people of her native Yorkshire is not confined to health. She has dispensed justice as a magistrate; promoted regional development as Deputy Chair of Yorkshire Forward; and encouraged education as regional chair of the Learning and Skills Council. Linda is also chair of An Inspirational Journey, an organisation which seeks to increase the participation of women on boards, and the Two Per Cent Club for Yorkshire. A Deputy Lieutenant, she was appointed a CBE last month.
Determined to ensure that every organisation with which she works is a successful one, Linda has brought to all of her roles great personal style, a tireless energy and a passion to get things right. We have been enormously privileged in the University to experience all of these qualities for ourselves: a member since 1997, Linda has chaired our governing body for the last six years. A fantastic ambassador for the institution, she has proved a model non-executive, striking a confident balance between support and challenge, and avoiding interference whilst drawing the best out of people.
Linda Pollard: in your time here you have many truly outstanding individuals receive honorary graduates of the University of Leeds. I am delighted to welcome you into their company, and to admit you to the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
Martin Wainwright
Presentation Address by Ms Vanessa Bridge
Vice-Chancellor
‘The best journalists go into situations with open and absorbing minds. Their great virtue is curiosity – a constant interest in what makes people tick, what’s going on, what’s the truth. And enthusiasm, and wrting – the ability to tell stories interestingly and coherently.’ Add to these talents a boundless passion, optimism, energy, joy, a sense of fun and wonder, infinite kindness, generosity of spirit, a fierce intellect worn lightly – and the ability to generate sparkling prose as fast as he can type – and we have Martin Wainwright, one of the finest reporters of our times.
His life’s purpose, he says, is to explain the north through the media; no-one has done more to undermine the clichés of poverty, grimness and squalor. In 37 years with the guardian, 16 as northern editor, he revealed things as they are and showed us how the ordinary is anything but – an art simple to describe, so difficult to achieve. Rather like Dorothea in Middlemarch, one of Martin’s favourite novels, his life’s work – six million or so words – has trickled through countless lives for ‘the growing good of the world’, exploring from every angle his trio of northern virtues: innovative thinking, cosmopolitan people and the extraordinary beauty of the countryside.
Infinitely generous with his time, Martin habitually accepts invitations to speak to meetings right across the north; and once commandeered a people carrier to transport five work experiencers around that day’s newsround. Colleagues recall boundless fun, endless wheezes, legendary Christmas parties and lunches were he’d ‘drip feed beaming joy’. Creatively practical, he turned his garden into a place of wonder, creating an elaborate three-storey tree house of many rooms and floors, a grotto for parties and storytelling.
Equally at ease in the shareholders’ meeting at Morrisons – where he startled financial correspondents with questions about the availability of bilberries – and on the Lower Grange Estate in Bradford, Martin is a consummate interviewer, whose skills shine through BBC radio programmes, a bevy of books on mountains, the countryside, the Morris Minor and Mini.
Art in public spaces is another passion; Martin gifted to Leeds the statute of Arthur Aaron, a boules court and numerous rejuvenated roundabouts, and was responsible for Kenneth Armitage’s celebrated hands in Millennium Square.
He published many discoveries by the north’s venerable universities, including the duck density league table. Speaking of which, Martin took two new technology like the proverbial, genuinely welcoming the chance to interact directly with readers – using his mobile to post audio news reports, tweeting on beetroot and chronicling his lifelong passion for moths on a dedicated blog.
‘Some of my most interesting days have been spent in the north’s dark places and discovering how brightness shines there too’. We are privileged to have shared Martin’s magical and erudite voyages throughout his beloved True North; and I am privileged, Vice-Chancellor, to present to you for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Ancient Guardian person living with Penny happily ever after: Martin Scurrah Wainewright.
Samuel Kargbo
Presentation address by Professor Timothy Ensor
Vice-Chancellor,
For more than a century, the University of Leeds has celebrated achievement by awarding honorary degrees. Each recipient has excelled in their chosen field, but only a few could claim to have improved the health of a nation. Dr Samuel Kargbo, who has devoted his professional life to the wellbeing of women and children in Sierra Leone, is one such.
Samuel kargbo was already a leading figure in healthcare in Sierra Leone when he came to Leeds in 2004 to study for a Masters in Public Health. He initially studied medicine in Tashkent and returned to Sierra Leone where he remained throughout a brutal civil war which left public services in ruins. While many colleagues left, he chose to repay the debt which he felt he owed his country. One of his tasks was to help provide services to children trapped in rebel-controlled areas.
After graduating from Leeds he returned to a nation only two years out of civil war. At the time, more women died during childbirth every year in a country of 6 million people than died in the previous three decades in England and Wales. Samuel Kargbo was determined to make a difference to his nation’s health. As District Medical Officer for Koinadugu, the country’s largest district, he re-established a functioning hospital.
But having seen women die in hospital because of the length of time it took for them to arrive, Samuel Kargbo realised medical services alone would not reduce high mortality rates.
He challenged colleagues, politicians and communities and introduced support groups in villages to help households plan how to quickly get women to a healthy facility. For those in more remote towns, he established a waiting home near the hospital where women could go before labour started.
In 2008, he was appointed Director of Reproductive and Child Health and, with national oversight, introduced maternal death reviews and defined an essential package of services available free of charge to all women and children. His work and achievement has been recognised by the United Nations and he is regularly consulted by international agencies. A leading madical journalist of more than 20 years experience described hi as “perhaps the most remarkable doctor I have ever met”. It is difficult to disagree.
Vice-Chancellor, today we honour a man who has motivated and inspired people to improve the health of women and children in Sierra Leone and across the region. I present to you for the degree of Doctor of Medicine, honoris causa, Samuel Kargbo.
Stephanie Flanders
Presentation address by Professor Guiseppe Fontana
Vice-Chancellor
‘Do not be alarmed by simplification; complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths’. These are words of the celebrated American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, but they could easily have been written by Stephanie Flanders.
After studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, Stephanie spent two years at Harvard. She has worked for the United Nations, the US Treasury, the Financial Times, the New York Times, London Business School and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She joined the BBC in 2002 and became its Economics Editor six years later.
In that role, Stephanie is responsible for the corporation’s economics coverage on TV, on radio and online, and for ensuring that its vast audience is kept abreast of the complex and fast-changing world of global finance and economics. She dissects that world and explains in a lively, accesible way how decisions made by financiers and politicians in New York, London or Beijing interconnect to affect everyday lives in the UK, and elsewhere.
Faced with such a task, it must be tempting to hide behind technicalities. It takes a deep and open-minded understanding of her subject to explain economics with the clarity she always achieves. Her TV series last year, Masters of Money, was itself magisterial, showing us with astonishing clarity how we can begin to understand the credit crunch through the insights of Marx, Keynes and Hayek. And rarely can programmes on economics have succeeded in entertaining with such élan as they simultaneously educated and informed.
Ms Flanders has even coined a noun. We already have Ricardian and Keynesian economics, and now we have ‘Stephanomics’. This is no economic theory, but rather her way of explaining complex issues to a wider audience – and it is the name of her widely-read blog.
A true role model of our times, Stephanie succeeds in juggling family life with the demands of professional life which can see the span of her day run from the Today programme to Newsnight. She is a passionate cyclist.
A fellow journalist once described her as the ‘Elthon John of Finance’ as she appeared to know everyone in that world. But, while Stephanie may be friendly with many of those on whom she reports, she is fundamentally objective and even-handed. She follows in the footsteps of her father, the great Michael Flanders (of Flanders and Swann) who was the master of ridiculing pomposity, affectation and hypocrisy. Like her father, she is unafraid to poke fun at – and criticise – those who deserve it.
Principled, intelligent but accessible: Galbraith would surely approve of her.
Vice-Chancellor, I am delighted to present you for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa: Stephanie Hope Flanders.
Susan Solomon
Presentation address by Professor Jane Francis
Vice-Chancellor
It is testament to the towering achievements in the field of atmospheric science that Professor Susan Solomon has a polar glacier named in her honour. The Solomon glacier is of such size that, despite polar warming, it should last for years to come. Susan’s accomplishments will, I am certain, similarly endured.
Susan Solomon was born in Chicago and she received her PhD in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley before moving to become head of Chemistry and Climate Processes at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. She is now based in the Massachusettes Institute of Technology.
Susan is an expert on the stratosphere, the middle layer of atmosphere about 12 miles above the Earth’s surface that contains ozone, the critical layer that absorbs damaging ultra-violet radiation from the sun, without which cells in all living things would be damaged.
As many of us remember, in 1985 it was reported that a hole in the ozone had developed over the South Pole. Susan led the US National Ozone Expedition to Antarctica that carried out important work that showed that the loss of ozone was due to the chemical reaction between ice particles in clouds and chlorine compounds.
It was Susan’s discoveries that led to the United Nations Montreal Protocol, which banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs (which we know as dry cleaning fluids and the propellant in aerosol cans). Susan’s work has since shown that the ozone hole is closing and, thankfully, this year the hole was smaller than ever.
For this work, and many other achievements in atmospheric science, Susan has received many awards, amongst them the National Medal of Science, the US’s highest scientific honour, awarded by the US President. She is an elected member of the highly prestigious US National Academy of Sciences, and is a foreign associate of the French and European Academies of Sciences. She is in the US National Women’s Hall of Fame and was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2008.
Vice-Chancellor, It is a pleasure to welcome Susan back to Leeds, where she has so many friends and work colleagues. I am personally honoured to present to you for the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, Susan Solomon.
Honoris Causa 