Graduation address: Dr Tim Wilson
Tuesday 26 June 2018
Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, brand new graduates.
The honour of giving today’s congratulatory address is one that weighs somewhat heavily upon me. Ladies and gentleman, I stand before you as a repentant sinner. Ladies and gentlemen, I am ashamed to say that there was a time when I used to think that these occasions didn’t matter much. That graduations were, so to speak, merely a fancy dress parade for socially challenged academics who didn’t get out of the library often enough.
Ladies and gentlemen, I was profoundly wrong. In my case, there was one particular lecture that changed the way I saw graduations forever, that led me from darkness into light. Of all the many lectures in a now lengthening academic career, this is the one I remember the best.
It helped of course, that the lecturer on this occasion was my own mother. It helped of course, that she did not so much give me this lecture, but metaphorically speaking only you understand, hit me around the head with it.
Her lecture went something like this: “When it was your undergraduate degree, you applied for it in absentia. When it was your Masters degree, you applied for it in absentia. Now it is your PhD degree; you are going to be there on the stage, and I am going to be cheering you on.”
Friends, what my wise mother reminded me in my callow immaturity was what, of course, you all know – that yes, of course today belongs to you, our new graduates, but it also belongs to all those who have loved you, who have sacrificed for you, who have supported you, to bring you to the brink of today's success.
So welcome friends, partners, parents, grandparents, siblings, supporters, husbands, wives. This is very much your occasion, too, and our stage is the brighter for being lit by your reflected joy.
To our graduates, I offer my profoundest congratulations. I hope that you will remember your time at St Andrews for both camaraderie and curiosity. Camaraderie, because I hope you have had some positive experience of what a good university stands for socially, although I know there are those of you here who have trod the sometimes lonely roads of distance learning.
Curiosity, because I also hope we have given you some positive experience of what a good university stands for intellectually. I hope that perhaps, just perhaps, we may have convinced you that the 5,000-word essay remains a superior medium for intellectual expression over the expanded 280-character tweet with added emojis. And whether in essays or in life, the conclusions that stand up best are those that are not jumped at, but those that have been painstakingly compiled on the basis of all the available evidence, however awkward. And that those final conclusions must, in the end, be robustly your own. You have to do your own thinking.
But, for now, the accent is not on what we may have taught or not taught, but on what you will go on to achieve on the basis of your tremendous achievement celebrated here today. That is why today is a forward-leaning day of great hope and great rejoicing. We salute you.
This is your hour.
This is your day.
Go and celebrate it to the full – as is most surely your right, and your hard-earned privilege.
Dr Tim Wilson
School of International Relations