Professor Ronald G. Sultana, member of the Faculty of Education and founding Director of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at the Université Laval in Québec, Canada, for his lifetime commitment to education.
The ceremony, initially scheduled to take place in June 2020, was postponed to 27 November 2021 due to travel restrictions resulting from the pandemic. During his stay in Québec, Professor Sultana gave two public lectures and met with staff and doctoral students from the Universities of Laval and Sherbrooke.
The Honoris Causa ceremony was presided by the Rector of the University, Professor Sophie D’Amours, who invited Professor Annie Pilote, sociologist of education and vice-Dean responsible for research, to give an account of Professor Sultana’s academic achievements. Professor Sultana then gave a short acceptance speech:
Dear colleagues, my gracious and generous hosts have asked me to speak briefly to you about my past with the hope of inspiring your future. I speak to all gathered here, and especially to those of you who are filled with doubt about the spark inside of you. Today, on this very special day, all we see in front of us is precisely that spark. It is that spark, that promise and potential that I wondered about when, at age 13, I found myself struggling, a scholarship boy from a modest background propelled into an élite institution, to cope with a schooling that felt alien to me. My mentor, a wise man and a lover of wisdom – by one of the strangest of life’s coincidences now living not far from here in Cobourg – would look at us, his students, and saw what perhaps no one else could see: that spark in us, our potential.
Here I am now, 50 years later, sharing with you a back-to-the-future moment, mindful of Kierkegaard’s perceptive reflection that we can only understand our lives by looking backwards, but that we can only live it forwards. It is only when we look back on our lives that we can join the dots in our narrative, and yet we must make the leap of faith into the unknown, as we strive to shape our destiny, not quite knowing what the future may hold. We are born, we live, we die. We have little if any say on the first and the last of these. It’s what happens between the coming and going, between the becoming and the departing, that defines us.
The honour that is being bestowed upon me today acknowledges my work in career guidance. Guidance for what, to what end? It is about having the incredible privilege of sharing that liminal space, the in-between the past that was and the future that is yet to be so that, together, we weave a life worth living.
As we peer through the tunnel of the future – darker than it has perhaps been for decades – we might wish to go back to the past, before the pandemic turned our lives upside down. We might be hankering for the normal, the way things were. And yet, if we are indeed to weave together a life worth living, then nothing better than the words of the poet Sonya Renée Taylor to express my thoughts and feelings today… and it is with her words that I’d like to conclude:
