Can
we justify the kind of celebrations accompanying an honorary doctorate? Putting
on funny gowns and hats, having bands and choirs, and walking through the
streets in procession? Not to mention the lectures and dinners that accompany
such an occasion. We can indeed. Not for the first time this year – see Bangkok
– I have had occasion to reflect that such celebrations are a wonderful
testament to scholarship. They take us out of the everyday political concerns
of austerity and cuts, the human concerns of war and refugees, the economic
concerns of global slow downs and market uncertainty and allow space to reflect
on what universities can contribute to our civilisation. Five of us received
honorary doctorates from Gent University – it has no “h” in Flemish, but seems
to have gained one in English – a statistician from Sydney, an expert in fire
safety now in Brisbane, an animal physiologist from Pennsylvania, a Belgian
choreographer and me.
The
diversity made the occasion even more special. I can illustrate. Several years
ago a visiting American colleague gave me a copy of A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. When my guest left I glanced at
the book. Then something happened that has only one or two precedents in my
life – I read through the night, literally. (If I recall, TS Eliot read through
the night and went south in winter. I stayed put with the book.) It is a story
of a small cluster of childhood leukaemia cases in a town north of Boston. A
local factory was pumping so much chemical into the water that it was coloured.
The question was whether the chemical was causing the leukaemia. Difficult
scientific question. Reading the book, riveted by the book, I was convinced
that a legal process is not the best way to settle scientific questions of
cause and effect. Louise Ryan, now a statistics professor back in her native
Australia, had had some involvement in this fascinating question while at
Harvard. In case you are wondering, the legal case did not resolve it
satisfactorily.
Next
up, I remembered a typical long article in the New Yorker. A man in Texas was
executed for murdering his children. There had been a fire in his house, the
children died and he was accused of arson and hence murder. A fire expert said
that the pattern of the fire was typical of arson and that clinched the man’s
guilt, despite his repeated professions of innocence. Later expertise, too
late, questioned the conventional wisdom and showed it to be false. It turned
out that the pattern of the fire was NOT typical of arson and should not have
been incriminating. Professor Jose Torrero from the School of Engineering in Brisbane
had been important in bringing real science to the question and revising
understanding.
My
‘promotor’ was Jan de Maeseneer who built up the Department of Family Medicine
and Primary Health Care of Universiteit Gent. They had been part of the knowledge
network on health systems of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health.
Now, under Professor Sara Willems, social determinants of health is an
important theme of their department. To that end they take students out into
the community to experience the reality of people’s lives and encourage their
feelings of empathy and their understanding of social determinants of health.
Another
theme running through each of the honorary doctorates is the importance of
networks and human relations in academic life. Though their countries of work
are spread, each of the honorary
graduands, now graduates, had close intellectual and personal links with their
promotor at Gent. There is a global community contributing to knowledge and
understanding. That surely is ample reason to have a day of celebration.
