Harvard Honours the First Tibetan With PH.D in Law
Cambridge, MA, 10 June: In an elaborate commencement ceremony at Holmes Field this morning, Lobsang Sangay stepped on the podium in a red gown and bowed his head in respect as he accepted Harvard Law School’s doctorate degree.
Reportedly the first among six million Tibetans to earn a Harvard doctorate in law, Sangay was also one of the only two graduates who received this year’s special award for excellence. Sangay has also been offered the prestigious position of research fellow at the university.
The citation inscribed on Sangay’s special award read: “The 2004 Young K Kim ’95 Memorial Prize is awarded to Lobsang Sangay in recognition of his contributions to the understanding of East Asia at Harvard Law School and the excellence of his dissertation.”
In a voice laden with emotion, Sangay said he owes his success to the leadership of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the love of his parents “who never understood why their son needed to spend more years in university than in school”, and to the Tibetan Government-in-Exile who selected him for Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States.
“I am also indebted to Professor William Alford, an expert in Chinese law, and Professor Henry Steiner, an expert on international human rights law, under whose supervision I wrote my Ph.D thesis.”
“Although I have now joined the club of international scholars, I am an activist at heart, and a diehard one for that matter. I will always undertake activism for the freedom and happiness of our people in Tibet,” Sangay said.
Sangay specializes in international law and human rights. His thesis was on the Tibetan exile community’s four decades of experiment with democracy.
Sangay’s journey began in a refugee camp, near Darjeeling, India. Lama Hatta refugee camp is so small and so out of the well-beaten track that most exile Tibetans have not even heard of it.
But Sangay fondly recalls many winter vacations that he spent there as a child and young man.
“Whenever I went home for the two-month winter vacation from my boarding school, I helped my parents in doing household and farm chores. I spent most of my holidays gathering fuel wood for cooking. Oh yes, another important chore assigned to me consisted of collecting hay from wild hillsides… for our family cows.”
“In those days, I did not even dream that I would one day have an opportunity to study in the US. And, Harvard was like a distant planet that I could see only with the telescope of my childish fantasy.”
Sangay went to a Tibetan refugee school and St. Joseph’s College in Darjeeling. He then went on to pursue a Bachelor’s course in law at Delhi University. While in Delhi, he was elected as the Vice-President, General Secretary, and President, respectively, of the regional chapter of Tibetan Youth Congress, the largest Tibetan NGO in exile.
In his second year as a student at the Campus Law School of Delhi University, he was elected as one of the leaders of the apex Tibetan Youth Congress, based in Dharamsala.
In 1995, Sangay won Fulbright scholarship for a Master’s at Harvard Law School. Thereafter, for a year, he was a Post-Doctorate fellow at the Pacific Basin Research Center and Visiting Scholar at East Asian Legal Studies of Harvard Law School.
He was accepted as a doctorate student of Harvard in 1997.
Over the past nine years, Sangay has given more than a hundred talks on Tibet/China issues. He regularly gives lectures/speeches on Tibet at various centers and classes in Harvard University, including the prestigious Institute of Politics ARCO forum of the Kennedy School.
Sangay has contributed articles to many renowned journals, including the Journal of Democracy, The Boston Globe, and Harvard Asia Quarterly. He was also a researcher for the book-length report titled “Tibet: Human Rights and the Rule of Law,” published in 1998 by the International Commission of Jurist in Geneva, Switzerland.
His abiding interest is in reaching out to mainland Chinese scholars and engaging in discussions on issues relating to the resolution of the Tibet question. Following this interest with a rare passion, Sangay has organized and participated in scores of events involving mainland Chinese scholars and students.
But three events that he considers very important have been organized in the past two years under the auspices of Harvard University. Of them, one was a closed-door meeting between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and 35 mainland Chinese scholars in September 2003.
Sangay is also involved in social service, and has helped find funds to build schools in Puruwala settlement near Rajpur, and Pokhrabung in Darjeeling. Over the past four years, he has sought funds from a US organization to provide supplementary food aid to Central Tibetan Schools in Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Pokhrabung, and Sonada, and the Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Varanasi. He is involved also in environment and cultural projects in Tibet.
Sangay is married to Kesang Yangdon Shakjang.