Graduation address: Professor Nicholas Rengger
Tuesday 24 June 2014
At the start of this ceremony, about an hour ago, we came in to the joint singing of the Gaudeamus. This is, of course, an old song, dating back, according to some, to the founding of the University of Bologna in the eleventh century and popular in universities across Europe, and indeed elsewhere, ever since. It celebrates both the irreverence of student life and the joys of youth.
Gaudeamus igitur
Juvenes dum sumus.
Let us rejoice therefore
While we are young.
Graduation ceremonies such as this one, mark, of course, both the end of the academic year and the award of degrees. Some of those degrees, those given to our distinguished honorary graduates, recognise great contributions made to the various wider worlds outside St Andrews wherein they have made their reputations. But most of these degrees are awarded to those who have studied here and so mark the culmination of years of work and effort here in St Andrews. For those of you who have been students here, then, today marks the end of that journey. But like the Gaudeamus, a graduation ceremony does not simply mark that journey: it celebrates it.
But, also like the Gaudeamus, in celebrating the successful conclusion of those efforts we are also celebrating the years spent pursuing them and those who have helped along the way: parents, siblings, friends, even – dare I say it – teachers. I have often thought that the old saw that says that schooldays are the happiest days of your life should be amended to include university. Though it is now more years ago than I care to remember, I can still recall my own first day as an undergraduate at university. As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it, in words I cannot better:
‘Almost overnight, a world of ungracious fact had melted into infinite possibility…what opened before us was not a road but a boundless sea; and it was enough to stretch ones sails to the wind’.
And, amongst many other things, it is, I think, that sense of permanent possibility that we experience and that we carry away with us which makes the years we spend at university so important and so vivid, even many years later.
But that is a general point about university education and the point of course is that every university is shaped by its particularity as well as by its generality. It is, as the saying has it, ‘a place of learning’. And I want to dwell for just a moment, on three specific ways in which a university is a place of learning.
The first way is perhaps the most obvious one. A university is a place of learning in the most literal of senses. It is a physical location – a face-to-face society. The friends we find, the crises we surmount, the universe of activities we immerse ourselves in – even perhaps on occasion the courses we take and the lectures we skip – sorry attend – all of these help us to acquire something we learn to recognise, as time goes by, as one of the things most worth having in life and most worth celebrating: A mind and some thoughts of your own. And all this happens somewhere – here in a particular place, among particular people. And in this case, it happens here, in a small town on the East coast of Fife. Small in size, that is. For in no other sense is St Andrews small. Great and terrible things have happened here. People have been burnt at the stake for their beliefs, or been hung from the windows of their own cathedral to die; Parliaments have sat here, in crisis and in chaos (no change there then), and great men and women have been educated here. Their stories are part of the fabric of this place as a place of learning and give character to it. One brief example will have to stand for many. On the wall outside the Old Union Café, as almost all of our graduates will have seen, is a plaque commemorating one of our more notable undergraduates: James Crichton.
By the age of twenty, Crichton was fluent in no fewer than twelve languages, as well as being an accomplished horseman, fencer, singer, musician, orator, and debater. He was also noted for his good looks as well as his refined social graces. Travelling to Paris, as many a young Scot did in those days, he first came to prominence by challenging French professors to ask him any question on any science or liberal arts subject in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Slavonic, Spanish, or Syriac. They failed to trip him up, a feat he repeated after two years of military service, with famous Italian scholars of the day. Entering the service of the Duke of Mantua, Crichton became a rival to the Duke’s son, Vincenzo, who became hugely jealous of Crichton, a result of his father's strong regard for the young prodigy (as well, rumour has it, because Crichton replaced Vincenzo as the lover of the prince's former mistress).
On the night of 3 July 1582, after leaving this lady's dwelling in Mantua, Crichton was attacked in the street by a gang of masked assassins. He bested all but one with his sword until the last man removed his mask to reveal his face: Vincenzo. Tradition records that, on seeing Vincenzo, Crichton instantly dropped to one knee and presented his sword, hilt first, to the prince, his master's son. Vincenzo took the blade and with it stabbed Crichton, killing him instantly. James Crichton of Cluny, known to history as the Admirable Crichton, was then in his twenty-second year.
Note to our graduates. Obviously a serial over-achiever, so no pressure, but maybe you should turn down that offer from the Duke of Mantua, if and when it comes.
But there is a second sense in which a university is a place of learning. That is precisely the sense that amidst the particularity to which I have just averred, a university is a place where the inevitable power of locality is met and, to some extent transcended, where we are emancipated from the limitations of the locality that inevitably laps around us and where we can be moved by intimations of things of which we have never yet dreamed. As one scholar has said, universities are ‘sheltered places where excellences may be heard, because the din of local partialities is no more than a distant rumble’. Indeed, it is in the silences of the university – notwithstanding all of the passions and the interests that that first sense avers – that we find the things that a university education conveys to us, and which enable us to understand the multifarious things a university education offers us. To quote again, ‘the sufferings of Job, the silent ships moving out of Tenedos in the moonlight, the terror, the complication and the pity of the human condition revealed in a drama of Shakespeare or Racine or the chemical composition of water’ or DNA.
But this second sense of a university as a place of learning suggests also a third. And perhaps this third sense is especially important today, when, we are told, universities should play an active role in their society. Of course, at one level universities always have, still do and must. The question is what kind of a role it is. Many, these days, would urge universities to be ‘engines of economic growth’, purveyors of greater social justice and/or participants in the great debates of the day. It is not that any of these things are necessarily bad in themselves, of course. But the danger is that in trying to make universities into any of these things we narrow or even eliminate that sense of the university as a ‘sheltered space’ which is central to its performing its real role.
At the moment, for example, here in Scotland, we are in the middle of a debate about the future constitutional status both of Scotland and the country of which, at the moment, it is a part. Many individuals in the university, both staff and students, have strong views about this debate, from whatever perspective. The university itself, quite rightly in my view, does not have any view. Of course it has facilitated discussions about these issues – including hosting prominent speakers on both sides of the debate – just as it should. But on the morning of the 19th September, whatever the result of the referendum, what this university does will be the same as it has always done. This particular place of learning will not be fundamentally changed by what happens then for the simple reason that it cannot be and remain a place of learning in the relevant sense. The university, however much it should be alert to the nuances of real social, political, technological and intellectual change in both its local setting and the more general one, must retain its sense of being a ‘sheltered place where the excellences can be heard because the din of local partialities is no more than a distant rumble’. It is indeed by being itself, that a university contributes to the things that we celebrate here today and thus to the wider community of which it is a part and so it is the university as itself that ceremonies like this one also celebrate.
I said at the outset that, for those of you who are receiving your degrees today, this celebration marks the end of a journey. But of course, it also marks the beginning of many others. Other worlds of opportunity beckon you, and even in the rather squally seas that are likely to be ahead for the next few years, what you have learned here in St Andrews will stand you in good stead. As you journey, I very much hope that you will come back, from time to time, and tell us of your adventures, add to that rich store of stories that, in some measure at least, have their beginnings in this small corner of Fife. As I said earlier, you might want to avoid Mantua, but in any event, you will always be welcome here. In the meantime, let me close, as I began, with a sentiment drawn from a verse of the Gaudeamus:
Vivant membra quaelibet
Semper sint in flore.
Long live all students!
May they always be in their prime!
Good luck.