Graduation address: Professor Louise Richardson

Thursday 26 June 2014

First and foremost I would like to offer my warmest congratulations to those of you graduating today. In the words of the immortal philosopher, Dr Seuss, ‘Today is your day.’

We have eight graduation ceremonies so each year I invite seven of my colleagues to give an address and keep one for myself. We see this as an enormous responsibility, we feel compelled to impart words of wisdom, exhortation to high achievement, (to do things we didn’t) to offer advice we wished we had followed at your age. If any are nervous I ask them: ‘Do you remember who spoke at your graduation and what they said? No? Odds are, ours won’t either.’

The truth is, of course, that you are only partially listening. You are primarily preoccupied with other matters: this afternoon’s Garden Party, tomorrow night’s Ball, whether your family will all get along, whether they will like your friends, what it will be like next year, whether you can really cope outside The Bubble, how soon you can get out of these silly clothes, have you packed everything? But amidst those crowded thoughts please keep a space for your parents and your families. This is a very big day for them too. Try to spare a moment in this hectic time to say, thank you. As Seamus Heaney characteristically put it, ‘Remember the Giver’. Without them you wouldn’t be here, and without them you would probably be leaving in far greater debt than you are.

These next few minutes will be the last quiet moments of the day before you explode in resplendent colour onto North Street in the academic procession. It is time to reflect on this turning point in your life but it doesn’t give you time to do so. Perhaps in the weeks to come you will have a quiet moment to think about the advice you’ve been given – unsolicited as it so often is – as you set a path for the future.

As I thought about this ceremony – and knowing that there would be so many young historians graduating – my mind was inexorably drawn to the graduation of 1914. What must it have been like? There was one graduation ceremony then and it took place on Thursday morning, July 9th. I turned to The St Andrews Citizen, then, as now, the source for all the local news that’s fit to print. The edition of Saturday July 4th carried a short account of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The Saturday July 11th edition carried a long account of the graduation ceremony, after which the entire assembly repaired to the Principal’s house for a garden party. Honorary degrees were conferred on eight worthy men and 87 students graduated. The popular Principal, Sir James Donaldson, gave a graduation address on the brotherhood of man. He warned the graduates, ‘If you are not straightforward and honest men, passionately fond of truth, the chances in life are that you will not do credit to yourselves nor bring honour to the University.’ He urged them to ‘strive after a noble character’ which they would gain ‘by a passion for goodness and a life of love to your fellow-men.’ The accounts do not make clear whether he noticed that a quarter of those graduating that day were women.

The sentiments have stood the test of time and are striking for a couple of reasons. His emphasis was not on the skills that had been acquired in the course of a St Andrews education but rather on the qualities of the individual that would ensure their future success.

The other striking feature of the entire occasion is how oblivious everyone present appears to have been to the cataclysm that was about to befall them in the form of the First World War. There are 972 names on the St Andrews Roll of Service. 130 on the Roll of Honour. If you have never noticed it before, take a look before you leave in the apse of St Salvator’s Chapel at the beautiful mosaic memorial to those students who lost their lives in the war. The student rolls tell the story. There were 500 students in St Andrews a hundred years ago. 300 male and 200 female. The number of female students remained constant at around 200 for the next four years, but the number of males dropped from 300 to 100 in the course of the war.  

It would be wonderful to think that the era of mass brutality was over, but we know only too well, not least due to the work of one of today’s honorary graduates, and her courageous coverage of contemporary wars, that this is very far from being the case. Future generations may also look back on this graduation and ask, how could they not have anticipated what was to happen?

On a more personal level, I look back on graduation last year. Sitting in the front row of the balcony, watching a friend receive an honorary degree, was the great Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. He spent part of last year’s graduation week here, speaking at a conference, staying at University House, mingling with honorary degree recipients. Two months later, shockingly, he was dead. His work and his memory live on.

He once said, ‘It’s difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir’ and yet, in The Cure at Troy, he wrote:

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of Justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

 

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge

Believe that further shore

Is reachable from here

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells. 

Another great writer died since we last celebrated a graduation ceremony. This was the remarkable author, poet and activist Maya Angelou. In her life and her work she provides an extraordinary model for overcoming adversity, for not allowing ourselves to be defeated by the defeats we encounter. Or as she colourfully put it, ‘You may be given a load of sour lemons, why not try to make a dozen lemon meringue pies?’ She once said that her mission in life is, ‘not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.’ Did she ever succeed!

As many of you know, JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan was Rector of St Andrews in the 1920s. He gave one of our most famous rectoral addresses called Courage. There was a certain irony in the fact that he was so nervous about delivering the speech that he delayed coming to deliver it for two years. When he did come, he stood at the lectern immobilised by fear, afraid to speak, until heckled to do so. It’s a terrific speech. One of my teachers, Judith Skhlar, has described Courage as the rarest of virtues, and Maya Angelou has described it as the most important, because without it you can’t consistently practise any other virtues.

The point is, we don’t quite know what kind of world you are inheriting from us. We hope, of course, that it will be a peaceful, fair and affluent one. We hope that you are embarking on lives of meaning and successful careers in the arts, academia, business and the professions. We hope that your ambitions have been raised by your St Andrews education and that you will be supported and sustained by the friendships you have formed here. We hope you have acquired the courage to practise the virtues required to ensure that you bequeath your successors a better world than you have inherited from us.

St Andrews University has entered its seventh century. The point of the place is what it has always been: to imagine a world that is different, that is better; to think about how to create it, and to equip the next generation with the attributes to inhabit it well. It is to be, in one of Heaney’s phrases, ‘Here for good in every sense’. We hope you are too.

‘You’re off to Great Places. You’re off and Away.’

Congratulations.

Professor Louise Richardson FRSE
Principal & Vice-Chancellor