1985
CITATION
MR. CHANCELLOR:
The Department of Economics at this University has been graced since 1978 by the presence here as Honorary Research Consultant of Dr. Colin Clark, as economist of international repute, and the author, singly or jointly, of many treatises on his subject. Despite the major advances in the theory of Economics which we have seen in the past two decades or so, even his earliest works retain their incisiveness and authority.
Educated at Winchester and Oxford, Colin Clark was employed for some three years on social surveys of London and the Merseyside, and on the economic staff of the Cabinet Offices. This was excellent practical experience for his Lectureship at Cam bridge, and successive Visiting Lectureships at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Western Australia. With his growing reputation as a political economist and statistician enhanced by his experience as a Labour candidate - though an unsuccessful one - for various English constituencies, he was appointed by the Forgan Smith Government as Queensland Under-Secretary for Labour and Industry, Director of the Bureau of Industry, and Financial Adviser to the Treasury. These appointments brought to the Government a quality of economic analysis and policy-making unrivalled in Australia. They also brought him into close contact with the problems surrounding the building and fmancing of the University's Forgan Smith Building.
Dr. Clark returned to England in 1953 to begin a period of sixteen years as Director of the Institute for Research in Agricultural Economics, Oxford, before moving to Monash in 1969 as Fellow of the Faculty of Economics and Politics.
In 1978, he returned to Queensland, where his children had grown up, and in this new phase of his career brought to us the benefits of a vast experience, a brilliant Economics intellect, and the willingness to expend time and patience in instructing a rising group of researchers. His services here have proved to be of immense value, and we have been honoured by his presence. His term here has seen the publication, in one case in collaboration, of two books and an important monograph.
Mr. Chancellor, for his service to Economics both in this state and elsewhere, I present to you Colin Grant Clark, Master of Arts of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Doctor of Letters of Oxford University, Honorary Doctor of Economics of Tilburg University, Honorary Doctor of Science of the University of Milan, Fellow of the British Academy, for the award of Doctor of Economics, honoris causa, to which he has been admitted by the Senate of the University.