November 2010 - University of the West of England

The Chancellor, The Rt Hon the Baroness Butler-Sloss GBE PC
awarded honorary degree
The Chancellor pictured with Professor Paul
Gough (left) and Professor Steve West at the
opening of the new studio at Bower Ashton
Campus in February 2008
Chancellor or the Chairman of the board
of Governors how to run the show. She
has shown intense interest and concern
for the University and our students,
far beyond the call of duty. She has
visited us, she has found out about us
and what we do, and she has talked to
students, parents, staff and governors.
That has enabled her, rather like an
affectionate but wise and independentminded
aunt, to advise the University on
a number of parenting issues. Outside
the University she has represented us
among the higher reaches of what
for want of a kinder word we call the
establishment. She has undertaken
the ceremonial role with patience and
dignity, including scores of degree
ceremonies like this, tolerating with
superhuman patience and politeness
that most recycled of all commodities,
the Vice-Chancellor’s speech. She
has undertaken innumerable visits
abroad to help extend the University’s
hand to potential and past overseas
students, and to facilitate academic
and professional contacts that would
otherwise have been beyond the
University’s reach. And all this she has
done with a generosity and a humanity
that has endeared her to us all. And
with a lightness of touch: Her Majesty’s
Judges, especially of the higher sort,
are caricatured as stiff, stern, formal,
forbidding, with a sense of humour
detectable only by advanced science
beneath permafrost penetrable
only by advanced technology. This
Chancellor, however, has always had a
twinkle in her eye, and a lively sense
of the amusing and the ridiculous. Our
Chancellor is fun.
“It is for her unstinting service,
generously given, that the University
wishes to honour our Chancellor
today. If it were my decision alone,
I would also want the University to
pay public tribute to the enormous
contribution Lady Butler-Sloss has made
to the application and development
of the family law of England and
Wales, especially as regards the care
of children and their safeguarding;
as regards the contact that children
should have with their divorced and not
always co-operative parents, not least
in an international context where the
practical difficulties are enormous; and
in the development of the law about
those life and death issues on which
public opinion, let alone parliament,
is still feeling its way. In that wider
context Lady Butler-Sloss’s enormous
achievement has been recognised by no
less than 16 other universities conferring
upon her their honorary degrees. But
it is for her unstinting efforts on behalf
of this University, all of us, that we wish
to thank and honour her today, and it
is for that reason, Vice-Chancellor, that
we ask you to bestow on Lady Butler-
Sloss the award, not of Doctor of Laws,
but of Doctor of the University; and
to make her the first person to receive
that award, which is for those who have
made a significant contribution to the
University through their national and
international work. And as she intends
soon to stand down as Chancellor of the
University, we ask also that you invite
her, when that time comes, to have
bestowed on her the title of Chancellor
Emeritus.
“Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her
outstanding service to this University
as Chancellor, and of her outstanding
contribution to the University and
society through her national and
international work, I present to you
the Right Honourable Baroness Butler-
Sloss, Dame Grand Cross of the most
Excellent Order of the British Empire,
one of Her Majesty’s Privy Counsellors,
and Chancellor of this University from
1993, for the award of Doctor of the
University, honoris causa.”
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