Cristina Garcia Married | Salamanca (EFE).- The poet Antonio Colinas, winner of the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry and National Prize for Literature, was invested this Monday as an honorary doctor by the University of Salamanca (USAL), together with the Irish physicist Margaret Murnane.
Colinas (La Bañeza, León, 1946) received the highest poetry award in Spanish in 2016 and the Spanish literature award in 1982, recognitions to which is now added the highest academic distinction conferred by USAL.
The ceremony was held with characteristic solemnity and tradition in the auditorium of the Escuelas Mayores, with the accompaniment of the university choir and the institutional representation of the Government delegate in Castilla y León, Virginia Barcones, and the Minister of Culture, Gonzalo Santonja.
The attendance of the president of the Board, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, had been announced at first by the University, but in the end he did not attend.
Barcones, in a few brief statements to the media before beginning the act, celebrated the “pride of the land” represented by the Leonese poet, who is a sign, he said, “that this land is great and gives great people.”
In the official presentation of Colinas, its universality has also been highlighted: he grew up in León but his life has passed through Córdoba, France, Ibiza and now Salamanca, his last residence.
Antonio Colinas is a writer by vocation and profession, one of the Spanish authors with the most published and most extensive work, who has worked as a literary critic, translator, essayist, novelist and, above all, poet.
Prompt defense of the natural environment
The Leonese poet is a benchmark in the defense of the values of humanism and stands out for his prompt defense of the natural environment, to which he was linked since he was a child.
He has been honored this Monday for his “sense of universality and his intellectual independence”, with an extensive work translated in Latin America, the Mediterranean environment and Eastern countries.
“At first it was a voice that he felt inside; He did not know that that voice and music that he felt was a gift ”, Colinas described his early vocation during his solemn speech after being invested honoris causa.
The value of contemplation by Antonio Colinas
The author has made special thanks to his wife and children for “their understanding” towards his work “of more than fifty years, not exempt from trials and many difficulties, but which today and here is so especially rewarded.”
For Colinas, “contemplation” has been the key element that has accompanied him on his “long journey through time” towards himself and that has allowed him to “turn into poetry a voice that was not heard, but that was felt in the inside”.
The contemplation that Fray Luis de León, another poet and professor at the University of Salamanca, “had recognized as getting in tune or harmony with the stormy world.”
The writer closed his speech with thanks to USAL and its offer to contribute so that “these classrooms continue to be a space for living culture, from here propagated and here eternalized.”
The physicist Margaret Murnane, eleventh woman honoris causa at the University of Salamanca
The Irish physicist Margaret Murnane has become this Monday the eleventh woman doctor honoris causa at the University of Salamanca (USAL), according to what academic sources have confirmed to Efe.
Murnane, born in a rural environment in 1959, thus joins a list that has been growing in recent years but which shows the great gender gap that continues to exist in honorary doctorates from Spanish universities.
The first woman to receive the honoris causa was Santa Teresa de Jesús by USAL in 1922, 340 years after her death. This milestone was followed by years of almost total emptiness for women until the last decade of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
Despite the attempt to reverse this inequality in recent years, only 6 Spanish universities have recognized 10 or more honorary doctorate women: the Autonomous University of Barcelona (15), the Complutense University (14), the Universitat d’Alacant ( 13), the Rovira i Virgili University (10), the University of Salamanca (from Monday 11) and the University of Valencia (10).
This is reflected in a study prepared by the University of Salamanca (USAL) with data from 2022, in which the 54 public and private universities that belong to the network of gender equality units were asked about this issue.
Most of the country’s universities only have between 2% and 28% of women honorary doctorates, a recognition that until recently was held almost exclusively by men.
The promotion of recognition of women has been linked to the implementation of the equality units of the universities, which in the case of the USAL, for example, was at the end of the 2000s: 8 of the 10 honorary doctorates have have been awarded ever since.
The candidacy of the feminist jurist María Telo, recognized by the USAL in 2008, was the first promoted by the equality unit, given the absolute disproportion between the number of university women and the number of honorary doctorates.
The best numbers of equality in the honoris causa are those of the universities that have been created since the 1990s, the decade from which most of these awards have been given to women.
For example, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) -founded in 1995- has 62% of women honorary doctorates, a figure that is very far from the average range, which ranges from 2% to 28%. EFE