On 22 October I hosted a reception to mark the 800th anniversary of Cambridge University. Serbia ‘s existing Cambridge University alumni group was the ‘core’ of the evening, but we also invited some of our other Chevening scholars and (in view of the work we are doing this year to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, also a ‘Cambridge man’), some representatives of the Faculty of Biology of Belgrade University.
To make it a bit more than ‘just another reception’, we began with a panel discussion on ‘British-Serbia Relations, Past, Present, Future’, with one of Serbia’s Cambridge graduates as Moderator. The questions from the audience afterwards focused on Serbia’s EU integration, and the possible links between that and NATO membership and the ‘Euro-Atlantic security area’ ideas floated by Russia’s President Medvedev during his visit to Belgrade earlier in the week. Several journalists asked for interviews afterwards, to go into some of the points in more detail.
Our star guest for the reception that followed was Serbia’s Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremic, who studied physics at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and spoke warmly of his time there. We presented him with a Cambridge University sweatshirt as a souvenir of the evening. We were also delighted that Serbia's Education Minister, Zarko Obradovic, was able to attend.
This showed that, as in many countries, Cambridge still plays an important role here, not only for the academic training it provides to those fortunate enough to be able to study there, but also through its English language examination process and its textbooks. The language exams give many foreign students of English an essential qualification for their future working lives, and a representative of the exam system (Cambridge ESOL) was there, as was a representative of Cambridge University Press. Everyone seemed to enjoy the evening, reminiscing a bit about their times as a student, but mostly debating recent events and, as people do on such occasions, putting the world to rights.
Posted at 15:12 24 October 2009 by Stephen Wordsworth | Comments[0]
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