WINTER 2012 HONORARY GRADUATES
A series of audio podcast interviews
At the winter graduation ceremony that took place at the University of Warwick between 17 and 19 January 2012, three people with long, distinguished careers were awarded an honorary degree. They each recorded a podcast explaining a little about their life and work, what the honour means to them and their advice to their fellow graduates.
 Lady Susie Sainsbury
Lady Susie Sainsbury CBE received an honorary DLitt degree from the University of Warwick.
She has had a distinguished career in publishing and the arts. Lady Sainsbury is Deputy Chair of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Chair of RSC America Inc. She is also Deputy Chair of the Royal Academy of Music and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was awarded a CBE for services to the RSC and the arts in June 2010.
“It means an enormous amount to be recognised in the field where I work most happily and Warwick is the closest university to Stratford-upon-Avon geographically, but it’s also the one we have the strongest links with,” she said.
She began her career working for Oxford University Press as a PA before being promoted to a junior editor role. Later she joined Jonathan Cape and worked her way up to become a Director of its educational division.
The RSC transformation project, in which the main theatre was rebuilt to suit the needs of a contemporary audience, was “daunting”. “We had a budget of £112 million, a lot of it public money and a lot from very generous donors." The original foyer area was preserved along with the Art Deco parts of the building and complements the more modern elements of the new building. As Lady Sainsbury says, “the whole building is very much more welcoming”.
Lady Sainsbury is a passionate advocate for the arts, believing that they, in any country, “are not an optional add-on. The culture of a society helps to form the attitudes of people in the society just as much as the economic situation does... through watching the theatre I think we learn a lot about our own dreams, problems and our aspirations”.
Listen to the full podcast below.
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Professor Alan Thorpe
 Professor Alan Thorpe received an honorary DSc degree from the University of Warwick.
Professor Thorpe is Director General of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Prior to this he was Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council and Director of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.
“It’s indeed an honour for me to come back to Warwick after being an undergraduate here so many years ago in 1970,” he said. Since then, Professor Thorpe has visited the university several times in the course of his job but “this honorary degree is recognition of my career and I’m incredibly privileged to have that recognised by one of the country’s, and the world’s, top universities”.
The University of Warwick has changed a lot since his undergraduate years. “It was often said, and it was true, that it was just a muddy field at that stage. It is phenomenal how Warwick has grown in that time; not only grown in terms of student numbers but in wonderful... academic and also social and arts facilities”.
Speaking about his day job he explained that “my organisation, ECMWF, is a consortium of 20 European countries”. The inter-governmental organisation’s remit is to develop the science and research behind predicting the weather up to ten days to a season ahead. “We are located in Reading in the UK – we have one of the largest supercomputers and databases for weather forecasting and we use the latest science to describe the atmosphere in the oceans and the land surface, to predict in detail some of the weather events, and particularly the severe weather, that occurs.”
His challenge is “to do research to improve our understanding of how the weather works so that we can predict it better”.
Listen to the full podcast below.
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Sir Robert Worcester
 Sir Robert Worcester received an honorary LLD degree from the University of Warwick.
He is the founder of the MORI (Market and Opinion Research International Ltd), a leading market research organisation in the United Kingdom. Sir Robert is involved with a number of voluntary organisations including the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust and The Pilgrims Society of Great Britain. In 2005 he was knighted in recognition of his outstanding services to political, social and economic research, and for his contribution to government policy and programmes.
“I go back, at least my family goes back, a very long way in Warwickshire. My family were there in the 16th century”. The honorary degree means a lot to him. “It means that the peers of my work in universities, as well as my work in charities and in founding MORI and developing it into what is now the largest market research firm in Great Britain, and part of the second largest firm in the world, that my contribution as a governor of the London School of Economics and a visiting professor there... are recognising me not only for the contribution to business but the contribution to universities, and that’s a very important part of my life.”
Sir Robert came to the UK in 1969 when he founded MORI. Public research has changed a great deal since then because of the introduction of telephone polling and marketing research, and then the use of the Internet. “In 2011 there have been nearly 700,000 interviews taken by all the polling organisations in the country,” he explained. Also in the 21st century, opinion-polling is an integrated part of the British political scene, something that wouldn’t have been dreamed of 40 years ago.
Listen to the full podcast below.
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By Penelope Jenkins
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