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Don Aitkin, UNE's first student, awarded honorary degree

October 11, 2004

aitkin.jpgDon Aitkin AO, one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals, received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at the weekend from the university he entered as an undergraduate 50 years ago.

Presenting the Occasional Address during a Spring Graduation ceremony at the University of New England on Saturday, Professor Aitkin recalled his formal admission to UNE as a “matriculant” during a graduation ceremony in May 1954. It was in that year that UNE became an autonomous university. “Because my name begins with ‘A’, and there was no other surname closer to the beginning of the alphabet, I became the first student ever admitted to the new University,” he said. After his address, the Deputy Chancellor, Mr James Harris, presented Professor Aitkin with the honorary degree.

The ceremony on Saturday formed the second half of UNE’s two-day Spring Graduation for 2004, the University’s Golden Jubilee year. Professor Aitkin recalled that he had also given the Occasional Address at a UNE graduation ceremony in the University’s Silver Jubilee year.

Graduating from UNE in 1961 as Master of Arts with First Class Honours (the first such degree ever awarded by the University), Don Aitkin went on to a distinguished career as an academic (serving as Foundation Professor of Politics at Macquarie University from 1971 to 1979 and Professor of Political Science at ANU from 1980 to 1988), university administrator (Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra, 1991-2002), author and columnist.

Professor Aitkin said the Australia of the 1950s “was, in very many respects, much less interesting and enjoyable than the country we have today”. He attributed the change to three main factors: immigration, wealth, and education. “Education has been the real catalyst,” he said. “When I started here at UNE in 1954 there were only 30,000 university students in the whole of Australia. Today there are 850,000. When I graduated with my PhD in 1964 I was one of a couple of hundred who did so across the nation. Today, 5,000 or so will graduate with that degree.

“You will hear people criticise this increase as ‘credential creep’, or say that the students of their day were better. Well, I’ve been in the system for 50 years, and I think that, generally speaking, today’s students know more, work harder, and are better-rounded people.”

Speaking to the UNE graduands on election day, he said he had found the election campaign “singularly lacking in broad vision”. “Don’t blame the politicians, because we elect them, but press them to drop the short-sighted stuff and imagine a better Australia and a better world,” he continued. “This University exists only because people now long dead had such a vision.”

About 800 students graduated from UNE this spring, with about 400 of these able to attend the two-day Spring Graduation to receive their testamurs in person.


Media contact: Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049.
A photograph of Don Aitkin presenting his Occasional Address at UNE is at:
http://smithserver.une.edu.au/photography/media/aitkin.jpg
For other Graduation photographs, contact Jim Scanlan on (02) 6773 3049.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at October 11, 2004 05:14 PM