Frances Cairncross, Doctor of Laws
Your clear thoughts and crisp writing have helped illuminate the worlds of business and academe, both in Britain and beyond. Your career as a reporter was crowned by twenty years at that marvel of explanatory journalism, The Economist, including as its Management Editor. In prose as bracing as the early morning outdoor swim that is your year-round habit, you alerted the world’s business community to the challenges of environmentalism in your books Costing the Earth and Green, Inc. as well as to the looming impacts of new communications technology in The Death of Distance and The Company of the Future. You have served as Chair of the main body that provides grants for social science research throughout Britain, and as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Your insights as lecturer have been sought widely, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos. For the past four years you have served also as Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, with which Williams is fortunate to offer such an extraordinary study-abroad program. Williams, having only recently passed its bicentennial, has much to learn from Exeter, which, under your strong leadership, prepares to mark soon its seven hundredth anniversary.
I hereby declare you recipient of the honorary degree Doctor of Laws, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 1, 2008