Awarding an Honorary Doctoral Degree to the irrepressible Rula Jebreal
Last night AUR awarded an honorary doctoral degree to the irrepressible Rula Jebreal, a journalist who has used her many connections to confront the present refugee crisis. Meet AUR’s Syrian students, selected from many now refugees in Lebanon, and you can hear W.H.Auden’s gruff warning, made in the late 30s, in his elegiac Refugee Blues:
‘Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now………’
Will future generations look back on these times and wonder how on earth did this refugee crisis happen and what did they/we did, as we look back and study the late 1930s? Rula has hugely helped AUR to make a difference. There is so much more to do.
