Download PDF - St. Catherine's College - University of Oxford

MESSAGES
The 1969
Chronically Sick
and Disabled
Persons
Act, which
Lord Morris
pioneered,
represented
the first piece
of legislation
in the world to
recognise and
give rights to
people with
disabilities
emerged from Professor Sudhir Anand (The Cost of
Inaction: Case Studies from Rwanda and Angola), Dr
Bart van Es (Shakespeare in Company), and Dr Marc
Mulholland (Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear).
In a reminder of lifetime achievements of our Catz
community, we were saddened this year by the loss
of life peer Lord Morris (1950, Modern History),
whose 1969 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act
represented the first piece of legislation in the world
to recognise and give rights to people with disabilities.
We also remember with gratitude the work of Founding
Fellow in Economics, Laurie Baragwanath, who sadly
died on his way back to Australia after last year’s Stated
General Meeting in College. Laurie, having served as
Founding Fellow in Economics, played a major role in
the investment of the College’s endowment in our early
years.
Our French connection was reinforced by the promotion
of Professor Richard Parish to Commandeur dans
l’ordre des Palmes académiques, and our work on the
drama front further acknowledged by an Outstanding
Achievement Award at the South Bank Awards to
Michael Frayn (Emeritus Fellow). In the words of Tom
Stoppard at the presentation, ‘whenever one of his
novels or plays comes out it is a red letter day in the
culture of the nation’.
The number of former JCR Presidents being awarded
Nobel Prizes must be a fairly limited set of humanity,
but surely we must be in the unique position of having
one such person subsequently winning the Copley Prize.
This is the world’s oldest science prize, first awarded by
the Royal Society in 1731, predating the Nobel Prize by
170 years. It is awarded for outstanding achievements
in scientific research and has previously been given, for
example, to Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and Albert
Einstein. This year it went to Sir John Walker (1960,
Chemistry) whose work concentrates on understanding
the mechanism underlying the synthesis of an enzyme.
His research has furthered our understanding of the
chemistry of living cells, what powers them, and
thereby all life. We aim to celebrate this achievement
with him, together with our students, during the
coming term.
In every generation we must find fresh agents and new
supporters as openness to growth and to change is
surely a sign of undiminished vitality. With this in mind,
we must expect some of our Fellows to be on the move
– Tim Bayne to a chair at the Manchester University
School of Social Sciences; Jonathan Morgan to a
Fellowship of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge and a
University Lectureship in Tort Law, and Jonathan Healey
to the Department for Continuing Education and Kellogg
College. All three have played significant roles in College
life, and will certainly be missed.
We are delighted to be able to welcome to the
Fellowship Professor Pekka Hämäläinen, previously
Professor of History and the University of California,
Santa Barbara, who arrives to take up the Rhodes
Chair of American History. With equal enthusiasm, we
4 /A /MESSAGE FROM FROM THE THE MASTER