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Great teachers should be rewarded.

In today's global economy, however, it is important to raise the bar of excellence even higher. Today's students must be prepared to compete effectively on an international level.

I'm a very happy university professor... the best thing about being a university professor is that you see young people as they're being shaped and molded toward their own future, and you have a chance to be a part of that.

As we talk about the need to foster academic achievement, we must recognize and reward those who strive academically, just as we honor athletic champions. Meeting the President of the United States is just the honor we should bestow on our academic champions.

I am delighted to have had students, friends and colleagues in so many nations and to have learned so much of what I know from them. This Nobel Award honours them all.

We are a studying nation. Scholarship from science is important to the whole world and those people need to be able to be safe and secure in what they do.

Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.

Not only do African students deserve excellent universities, they deserve good elementary and secondary schools, too - and then, to have access to ongoing vocational and job training to ensure their skills remain as relevant as possible to African organizations.

To be recognised by a whole country is incredible.

I have had many opportunities to visit universities all over the world in the past 50 years.