Graduation address: Dr Julian Luxford
Thursday 28 June 2018
Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen.
Now that you have graduated, or seen someone dear to you graduating, it falls to me to give the ‘Graduation Address’, whose purpose is to congratulate you collectively on your achievement and also briefly to reflect on it. As I have vivid, happy memories of my own graduation day, it is a special treat for me to be asked to do this. I do it on behalf of all my colleagues present on the stage, and all those others who are here in spirit but not body. The stage will only hold so many of us.
To those who have been awarded a degree today. Regardless of degree type or classification, you all have an equal right to feel pleased with yourselves, and optimistic about that mystery we call ‘the future’. It is not that you leave St Andrews as better people than you arrived. How could you possibly be better than you were on the day you were born, or, indeed, on any day since? You may leave here more interesting, although again, it depends on who is taking an interest. But you certainly do leave here more sophisticated and resourceful people, and these are qualities everyone needs in a world that values and even requires self-direction. I would stress this point about resourcefulness, because it is an underplayed aspect of taking a degree from a place far from home. St Andrews is often characterised as a ‘bubble’, the implication being that it is somehow disconnected from the ‘real world’ (whatever that is). But this always strikes me as mistaken. It is hard to think of a more testing introduction to adulthood than entering a distant, unfamiliar, goal-oriented environment, having to make new friends and meet the demands of self-directed study amid a hail of short deadlines, manage – usually for the first time – one’s financial affairs and so much else. The undergraduate learns to shop, cook and clean even as she or he learns to research, analyse and reason: these two sides of life are interdependent at university. You must have achieved all this or you wouldn’t be here. Perhaps you weren’t conscious of acquiring useful skills, but I guarantee you that they will stand you in good stead. No matter how felicitous or daunting the future seems, you should feel confident about dealing with whatever it brings.
Now, it’s normal for the person giving the graduation address to exhibit a little déformation professionnelle, so I hope you’ll indulge me. I’m an art historian and a medievalist, and as such have made a study of the University of St Andrews’ three fifteenth-century maces. These ceremonial objects stand before you on the stage, flanked by modern counterparts. Their combination of intricate design, high-quality craftsmanship, precious materials and solemn imagery make them unquestionably the finest objects of their type to survive from any university, anywhere, and their material importance is reflected by the fact they are displayed in a bullet-proof glass case in the University museum (although I can’t think who’d want to shoot them).
Why, you might ask, do we continue to use these unique objects in our graduation ceremonies, when other ancient universities have taken to using more modern facsimiles of their regalia? The answer is simply that we think it an authentic, meaningful way to embody the 605 years of continuity between the foundation of the University of St Andrews and the moment and place in which you are sitting now. You are indeed scions of an ancient root.
Perhaps you feel little sympathy with a white, male, Christian, Latinate culture more than six centuries in the past. That would be perfectly understandable. Yet I encourage you to identify all you can with this ancient edifice of learning of which you are living stones. The modern diversity of St Andrews is a striking and cheerful phenomenon: I led a first-year tutorial group here not long ago with nine students from nine different countries in it, and few things here have given me more pleasure than that simple, complex fact. It led me to reflect that people from many countries and socio-economic backgrounds came here to study in the past. Undeniably, women were not allowed to study here until the 1870s. However, there is a sense at least in which the old masters saw themselves as subservient to a power and wisdom that was exemplified by women as well as men. Thus, the Arts Faculty mace – made between 1416 and 1419 – is engraved with the figures of six saints, three of whom are female. And the seal of office made for the Dean of Arts in 1457 was designed with (to quote from the original source) ‘a woman carrying a sphere in her hand’. This female figure personified Philosophy – that is, Wisdom. Thus, one can claim an enduring symbolic centrality for women in the Arts Faculty without apologising too vigorously for history.
This place has set its seal on you, and not just on your degree certificates. Rejoice in that fact; celebrate it, boast it, identify with it, exploit it as you go through life. It is a rich fruit of hard effort. Congratulations for obtaining it: you have every right to feel proud of yourselves.
Dr Julian Luxford
School of Art History