Graduation address: Principal and Vice-Chancellor Sally Mapstone
Friday 29 June 2018
Chancellor, honorary graduate, and particularly graduates –
At this time of year St Andrews looks at its best – sunlit, spectacularly beautiful, its memorable buildings silhouetted until late at night against the sky. Those of you leaving us and moving on this year can take heart in the memory of a place that architecturally remains very much the same: when you revisit us, as we so much wish that you will, those landmarks will greet you: the tower of St Salvator’s chapel; St Regulus’s tower; the cathedral; the castle; and of course also for today’s cohort, the Gateway Building, and the Medical Building.
But other things alter, or, to borrow a phrase that you can find on the walls of one of the very buildings in this town, ‘the old order changeth’. Now I realise that the cohort graduating today are dominantly medics and management but I also know that many of you are avid readers, and some of our medics in particular will have participated in the ‘Poems for Doctors’ project launched by the Medical School last year in collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library. So some of you, or others in our audience may recognise ‘the old order changeth’ as a quotation from the Idylls of the King, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a lengthy cycle of poems about the life of King Arthur, with more than a touch of Game of Thrones to it, and published between 1859 and 1885. It took Tennyson a very long time to write this very long poem. ‘The old order changeth’ is one of the last statements delivered by the dying King Arthur as the barge bears him off to Avalon, ‘the old order changeth, yielding place to new’. It is a recognition that comes after an extraordinary life, and it offers comfort even as it recognises transience.
So let me tell you where that wording is located in St Andrews. It is found on the walls of a building that many people when they first arrive here, and possibly even some when they leave, think is part of the University. This is Madras College, the town’s state secondary school, situated at the West Port end of South Street, behind the remains of the ancient monument of Blackfriars chapel. People think that Madras is part of the University because the mock-Jacobean frontage, which dates from around 1833 and which can be seen from the street, looks like so many of the other nineteenth-century University buildings in our town.
Madras College was the brainchild of a St Andrews graduate, Andrew Bell, and its curious name reflects the Madras system of education, where older children help with the teaching of younger children, which Bell had witnessed during time he spent in India, and which he expanded into his own approach. The first buildings of the school in his name was finished shortly after his death in the 1830s. But they have been much added to over the years, often with buildings of somewhat less distinction, but each telling their own story. In the 1950s a concrete and glass extension was built connecting a new building to the solemn 1830s buildings, and engraved on the wall of the antechamber between the two parts of the College, the old and the new, and beneath the college arms, in elegant capitals, was the legend ‘the old order changeth’. It is said that the architects added this into the design on the recommendation of Miss Brown, an English teacher at the school. So good for her.
‘The old order changeth’ is highly resonant in relation to Madras College because by 2021 the school that has had its home there for nearly 200 years will move to the new buildings that are being constructed for it on the Langlands site on land that is currently in the occupation of the University. In return – the Scots word is excambion – the University will acquire the 8-acre South Street site of Madras College. We will keep the iconic 19th century buildings,which I have mentioned, which are of course listed. We will knock down most of the modern buildings behind them, and on the site as a whole we will then be able to accommodate additional library and study space for our students, and three of our academic Schools, which will move there, including most probably, if not at the moment absolutely definitely – the School of Management. The Gateway is not for ever!
So that old order will change, and in a few years’ time, when you revisit St Andrews, an iconic part of South Street will look both very similar and, as you go further into the site, very different from how it looks now. The acquisition of the Madras South Street site is one of the most significant educational and building projects for this University for a very long time.
But ‘the old order changeth’ is also so very relevant to you, our new graduates, whom we are celebrating today. One of the reasons graduation is such a joyful occasion is because this hall, and the grounds of the University are filled with hope: hope for that you will all go on to achieve, the difference you can make to our world. As one generation yields to another, and as you develop in the next stages of your life, there comes both terrific excitement and fun (starting very soon) but also responsibility and challenge. The University has acquired the site of Madras College because it thought it was the right thing to do. It enables us to position part of what we do in a central location in the town; it also enables us to help the town’s state secondary educational establishment find a new home that will enable it to be equipped properly for the twenty-first century. But the acquisition brings us challenges as a University, not least in raising the funds to make the Madras site fit for the generations of students that follow you.
But life is about these challenges. For you, it is about recognising that the old order is changing and that you have the chances to make the choices that shape your destiny. It is about taking what St Andrews has equipped you with and making the absolute most of that, wherever it may take you across the world or closer to what will always in part be your home here. You are all a tremendous credit to this University, and we, and your families and friends are immensely proud of you. Enjoy today, and then set about changing the order of things as only you now can.
Professor Sally Mapstone
Principal and Vice-Chancellor