Tilburg University honours Michael Ignatieff, Orhan Pamuk and Robert Sternberg with doctorates
12 Nov 2007
Tilburg University in the south of the Netherlands has awarded honorary doctorates to internationally renowned psychologist Robert Sternberg and Canadian historian, writer and politician Michael Grant Ignatieff.
The award ceremony will take place on the university’s 80th anniversary on Novermber 15th. It was founded in 1928 as a Catholic institute specializing in the study of economics. Its origins are still recognizable today, although the choice of study programmes is now much broader.
It is customary for Tilburg University to award three honorary doctorates at each five-year anniversary. The university also awarded an honorary doctorate to Turkish author and Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk. Unfortunately, Pamuk was unable to attend the award ceremony because of other commitments. The university is working with Pamuk to arrange a date for the award of his honorary doctorate some time in 2008.
Michael Grant Ignatieff (1947) is an author, historian, documentary maker and is currently a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party in his native Canada. Before being voted into Parliament, Ignatieff was director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. He writes regularly on topics that lie at the core of the research and teaching at Tilburg Law Faculty (which nominated him for the doctorate), notably the tension between security and human rights, the fight against modern terrorism and the philosophy of freedom. Among the books that he wrote on these themes were The Needs of Strangers (1984), Asya (1991), Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998) and Virtual War, Kosovo and Beyond (2000).
During his time in Europe, Ignatieff made his mark not only as an academic and a thinker (at Cambridge University amongst others) but as the presenter of the Late Show for the BBC. He also has some impressive documentaries to his name, such as Blood and Belonging (on nationalism), Getting Away with Murder (on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission) and Future War (on the future of war). Michael Ignatieff is a regular visitor to the Nexus Institute, which is affiliated with Tilburg University. In 2000, he gave the seventh Nexus Lecture and published essays in several issues of the Nexus journal.
Robert Sternberg (1949) is professor of psychology and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University (Massachusetts, USA). Having built up an exceptionally productive and creative career (over 1,000 books and articles) Steinberg is regarded as one of the most important psychologists of his time. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a researcher, author and editor-in-chief of leading journals such as Psychological Bulletin and Contemporary Psychology. Sternberg has performed research and developed theories in a wide range of fields including intelligence, wisdom, culture and cognition, which - given the citation scores - may be regarded as highly influential.
Sternberg's work is an important source for academics at the Faculty of Social Sciences, which nominated him for the doctorate. His thesis on the duration of intellectual processes created the research tradition which lies at the centre of PACE (Psychology of Abilities, Competences and Expertise Center), the research institute at Tufts, where Sternberg is director. Sternberg's work at PACE revolves around research on the theme of intelligence as a non-static human attribute capable of being developed throughout a lifetime.