Hye Sharzhoom Armenian Action
Staff Report
Just as Sweden has its Nobel Prizes and the United States its Pulitzer, Belgium has its annual Francqui Scientific Prize given to the outstanding young (under fifty) Belgian scholar. The yearly prize of some four million Belgian francs is the country’s most coveted academic distinction and its most famous award of any kind. It is the only honor given personally by the King of Belgium during a special ceremony in Brussels.
Dr. Dickran Kouymjian, Director of Fresno State’s Armenian Studies Program, has been invited to serve on this year’s selection committee. The jury is made up of internationally recognized non-Belgium scholars, who after reviewing the elaborate files of each candidate meet for two days in the Belgian capital to choose the winner out of a field of some dozen candidates. This year’s jury is made up of scholars from the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Taiwan.
The prize is named after Emile Francqui, a banker and sometime cabinet minister of Belgium who greatly aided his countrymen during the famine conditions of WWI. Francqui was a business rival of Herbert Hoover, but later a close friend of the American President. They worked closely together in a massive Belgian relief project at the end of the First World War, which eventually became the Belgian American Educational Foundation. This in turn, together with Francqui’s own funds, helped establish the Francqui Foundation in 1932. Like the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations in this country, the Francqui Foundation touches every sector of Belgian scientific and educational life.
In most years the prize is awarded to scholars in the physical sciences, but this year it will go to a scholar in the humanities or social sciences. The field of candidates reads like a Who’s Who of Belgian intellectuals and scholars. Kouymjian was taken aback by his nomination to the jury, though he has several colleagues in Belgium and has given lectures at the Catholic University in Louvain-la-Neuve. Kouymjian says he was surprised by the honor of serving, but absolutely delighted by it.
King Albert II will give the award on Saturday April 21 following a banquet for the jury and the candidates the evening before. Interestingly, all proceedings and documents for the Francqui Prize are in English rather than French or Flemish, the official languages of Belgium.