Greetings from sunny Hawaii!
First, let me thank ambassador Gutman
for opening his residence
to these wonderful Boas scholars,
their friends, and family.
And of course,
every Boas scholar
is also
a Fulbrighter,
having received
the benefit
of a Fulbright travel grant
and they are all now
members of the
worldwide Fulbright family.
Mr. ambassador, having served
on the Fulbright Commission in Belgium
for 23 years when I lived in Belgium,
I can think of no other program
that has done more
to promote the relationships
between Belgium
and the United States.
I now would would like to thank
all of the Boas scholars here,
and not only thank them
but also congratulate them.
And this of course would include all of the
Boas scholars
who were not able to make it
here this evening.
I want to thank you
for who you are
and what you've done.
Every Boas scholar
shares
a similar profile, in that
each Boas scholar
is
committed to
integrity,
academic excellence
and is
also committed to
service above self.
But I also want to congratulate you,
because
the Harvard Boas Alumni Association
is unique
in that it is the first alumni association
directly connected with
a private scholarship fund.
And for this reason
I want to
thank all of the organizers of this wonderful initiative
which, after I mentioned this
to our friends in Cambridge
very much
attracted their attention.
And they would like to use your initiative
as an example which
they would like to see followed
by other
individuals
or organizations
who might wish to set up
a scholarship program
and to interest them in also
including with this
an alumni
association,
as you have done here now.
I think at this point,
it may be
appropriate
to pay tribute
to someone who actually started the Fulbright
Commission in Belgium in 1948,
Dorothy
Moore-Deflandre.
All of us, of course,
who have worked with Dorothy as I did
for over 20 years,
have appreciated
her enthusiasm for the program
and I always benefited
from her wisdom
about international and
educational exchange.
But I wonder
how many of you actually know
how it came to be that Dorothy
came to Belgium in 1948.
Dorothy actually
was one of a group of
very young
and very talented
mathematicians who spent
the war years of World War II
in the X
of the Pentagon,
breaking the access code,
which they
did very successfully.
And after the war,
it turned out that
a very close friend
of hers - and colleague
in this program -
happened to be
the daughter
of Dean Acheson,
who at the time
was the Secretary of State
in the cabinet
of President Harry Truman.
And so,
one day when she was visiting
the Acheson family
in their lovely
Georgetown home,
Dean Acheson asked Dorothy
what she planned to do
now that her wartime assignment had ended.
But Dorothy
didn't have any
clear idea at that time,
and so Dean Acheson
mentioned to her
that the American government
was about to undertake
a very significant
educational
and cultural
exchange program
sponsored by Senator Fulbright
in the American Congress,
and that the plan was
to open the first
Fulbright Commissions in Europe,
and one of the very first
would be the one in Belgium.
So that is
how Dorothy
came to Belgium in 1948,
and eventually became
Dorothy Moore-Deflandre.
And so happened,
that in 1948
Douglas MacArthur
was First Secretary of the Embassy
and later
he became the American Ambassador
and in that capacity,
in 1964,
Ambassador MacArthur
appointed me
to the Fulbright Commission.
Well, shortly after I became
a member of the board,
I realized
that the finances
of the Commission were
running down rapidly
because the counterpart funds
that had been used
to fund this program initially
were rapidly
running down,
and that the Commission was reduced
to granting just a very few
travel grants,
and that many people actually had thought
that the Commission had closed its doors.
So I consulted my parents and we came up with the idea
that it might be very interesting and useful
if we offered a private scholarship
to young Belgians
and Luxembourgers
who would be able to study in any graduate department
of Harvard University.
And we thought it would be useful to
partner with the Fulbright Commission
which would grant
travel grants to the successful
applicants
and would also do the initial screening.
And I brought this up with my board and with Dorothy,
and they all agreed that this would be a good idea.
So then the next thing
that needed to be done
was to make sure that Harvard
would join in this program and make it possible.
So having
graduated
10 years earlier, in 1954,
from Harvard Law School,
I thought it would be useful
to begin
this program
with the Law School
and their
LLM program in particular.
So I went to Cambridge,
got an appointment with
dean Griswold,
and this was my first
face-to-face meeting with the dean
because when I was
an undergraduate
I followed the unwritten rule
to avoid the dean as much as possible because
summons to his office usually
meant rather bad news
for the invitee.
I explained to dean Griswold who I was
and then I explained to him
what the Fulbright program
was all about, with which he was not familiar.
And then dean Griswold said: "Well,
why in the world would any Belgian
want to come to Harvard Law School
and get an LLM degree?"
And then I reminded
dean Griswold that
in 1928,
when he graduated from Harvard Law School
a bright young Belgian
was just
finishing his LL.M degree
and his name was Pierre Wigny,
who at the time of our meeting was the Belgian Minister of Justice.
And I also said that a number of other very intelligent Belgians were also interested in studying at the Harvard Law School.
So the dean agreed with our plan and said that of course, Harvard would have the final say over admissions.
So having obtained Harvard's permission, I then returned to Belgium and we were faced with the rather urgent task
of finding a suitable candidate. We obviously didn't have time at that point to set up a search committee and do the
kind of interviews that all of you have experienced, we simply had to find a candidate. So Dorothy and I went over a number
of files and we came up with the name of Luc Schuerman, who had graduated at the top of his class at the Leuven law school
and had just finished spending a year studying law at the university in Rome.
So I managed to find Luc and explain to him what our program was all about, and he agreed to be our first candidate.
And to sweeten the deal, I said that we would provide him,
if he had successfully completed the program, with an all-expenses-paid trip to the United States.
Luc then kindly invited me to meet with his family
and I had the pleasure of meeting Luc's parents at their home and I also had the pleasure of meeting his lovely wife, Janine.
Luc and Janine went off to Harvard and Luc did brilliantly.
And now we had a successful program, because if
the first candidate had failed,
our whole program would have been dead on arrival.
Well, of course, all of you here and all of the Boas scholars have been winners and have done very well.
And in fact, the program did so very well, that in fact
a number of the Belgian grantees
went to a number of the graduate schools
at Harvard, including the medical school
and of course the law school, the school of public health
and also the faculty of arts and science.
A number of these very distinguished Belgians are now actually members of the Belgian Royal Academy.
So having a successful program
ongoing
my parents and I thought
that it might be interesting
to set up a second scholarship
which would be limited to the Harvard Law School
but which would be open to scholars from
what we had determined to be the small countries of Europe:
Benelux,
Scandinavia, including Iceland,
and Austria and Portugal.
And I think the first Icelander in our program,
Ms. Helwig Olafsdottir,
was the first Icelander
ever to go the Harvard Law School.
And of course, we now have
a very distinguished group
of alumni
from these countries and I'm delighted
that the honorable Imre Gard Reitinger,
President of the Austrian Supreme Court,
has agreed to join your board.
In closing I would like to mention
2 special cases which occurred
over the 2 decades that I served on the selection comittee here in Belgium.
The first one involves
a young couple,
Hans Van Houtte and Vera Van Houtte
who had graduated in the top of their class at the Leuven law school,
and who came to us and told us that they were engaged
and when we interviewed them, separately of course, each one said: "If one of us gets the scholarship,
then you should give it to the other".
As it turned out, Vera Van Houtte
got the Belgian scholarship
and Hans Van Houtte won the international scholarship.
And Vera went on to a very distinguished legal career,
both in the private sector and also doing important work for legal organizations
in the public sector.
And Hans has just celebrated
his emeritus status at the university of Louvain law school at Leuven
and he is now the president of
the US - Iran Claims Commission in The Hague.
The second, other
unique case
which occurred,
not surprisingly
involved
his Excellency Luc Frieden,
our keynote speaker this evening.
Luc applied in the mid-eighties
for the international legal scholarship,
having just finished
his degree
at the Paris law school
at the top of his class.
And while he was studying law there,
he also did important work
for Radio Luxembourg
which was based in Paris at that time,
and he also helped
the Luxembourg Prime Minister
revising the constitution of Luxembourg.
So we thought this was a really outstanding candidate and we sent his application to Harvard
with every expectation that he would be admitted.
Well, imagine our surprise when Harvard came back to us and said that they would give Luc a deferred admission (only at Harvard).
And the reason they stated was that
they felt that Luc was simply too young to come
to Cambridge and engage in the LL.M program.
When we mentioned this to Luc,
he - with his inimitable enthusiasm -
went off to Cambridge University in England
and obtained an international law degree there
under professor Lauterpacht
As coincidence would have it,
professor Lauterpacht's father, sir Lauterpacht, who became a judge on the World Court at The Hague when he was a
a member of the International Law Commission in 1953,
offered me to study under him
at Cambridge under the same program,
when I was
the assistant
to judge Manley Hudson,
my international law professor at Harvard
who at that time
was the American chairman of the International Law Commission.
Well, Luc returned
to us
in Brussels,
and we sent off his
application for the second time.
And this time, Harvard felt that
Luc was old enough
to come to Cambridge
and follow the LL.M program there, which of course he completed with his usual brilliance.
And we all know about
his subsequent career,
when he also became
the youngest member
of the Luxembourg cabinet.
Let me finish
by thanking all of you once again for all you have done
and express the hope
that this program
will always continue
as long
as Harvard
and the Fulbright program exists.
Thank you.