Graduation address: Professor Will Fowler
Thursday 28 June 2018
Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen:
ألف مبروك
FÉLICITATIONS!
GUT GEMACHT!
CONGRATULAZIONI!
آفرین و خسته نباشید!
Молодцы!
¡ENHORABUENA!
WELL DONE!
You’ve made it! What a magnificent feeling it must be for you, your friends and family. It is certainly a wonderful feeling for us…
One, two, three, four – in some cases – five years of study are now definitely over. You are finally free! Visca! Celebrate! Rejoice! No more will you find yourselves sitting in 9 o’clock lectures (if you ever did make them) nursing abominable hangovers. No longer will you need to memorise irregular verbs or suffer obscure films you never imagined ever wanting to watch in your own time, or battle to refute Descartes’ evil demon, or even study that impossible article by Bordieu. No more essays. No more seminar presentations. No more sitting in this very hall, nervously waiting for the invigilator to allow you to turn over the exam paper and start writing. All of that is now over.
It is an extraordinary achievement. Seriously. You have survived one of the most challenging academic programmes in the world, be that at an undergraduate or postgraduate level. This is the University of St Andrews, after all. And you may have had to overcome a veritable plethora of trials, obstacles, and tribulations to get here; heroically battled your way through what were extremely demanding exams, finished dissertations that seemed at times to be never-ending, navigated distractions (such as falling in love), analysed complex books, films, concepts, societies, and in some cases mastered a foreign language (or three!).
To those people out there that tell you it’s now time to get real and face the world, believe me, you are ready! You leave us endowed with an enviable knowledge of your subjects and disciplines as well as a whole set of breathtaking interpretative and analytical strategies you will be able to apply in the most unexpected of circumstances. You have even developed the extremely useful skill of eluding people you would rather avoid in a three street town. You are hard-thinking, hard-working, hard-playing (and hard-drinking) global communicators and intercultural transnational mediators. There’s nothing that can stop you now.
And so you can now turn the page and close this particular chapter in your lives and move onto the next. And yet, I do wonder whether this end, this beginning, staged so dramatically before us this afternoon, is as clear-cut as the ceremony would suggest.
One of the problems that haunts my research into nineteenth-century Mexico revolves precisely around the question of change and continuity. Did the 27th of September 1821 truly mark the end of the colonial period in Mexico, when Liberator Agustín de Iturbide rode into Mexico City at the head of the Army of the Three Guarantees, ensuring they processed along the Calle de la Profesa so that he could wave to his lover, la Güera Rodríguez? Can a date of itself result in the absolute end of a period of history and the beginning of another? Did New Spaniards change overnight, renouncing and forgetting the way they had been to become Mexicans the morning of the 28th of September?
Evidently, today does reflect a definitive end of a period of your lives, that of your studies. Evidently, there are things you will never do again.
And yet, I would like to think that in other ways, St Andrews and your time here, will remain part of you, grow with you as you move on to face the world and change it for the better. I am thinking of the people you met here. The ideas you grappled with in seminar rooms and library carrels. Those memories that will stay with you forever. The lifelong friendships made in halls of residence corridors, the life-changing revelations you discovered in the early hours of the morning in cluttered kitchens as you discussed the meaning of life over a bottle or three of wine, memories of beach walks, books, kisses, and songs, are all now an intrinsic part of your lives.
So yes today marks a glorious end – so celebrate, rejoice, party the night away – and an auspicious and exciting beginning. Most definitely. But rather than say: “Don’t look back! Off you go!” my charge to you is: “Go forth! And take with you the life skills and knowledge that have become part of who you are here in St Andrews”.
Professor Will Fowler
School of Modern Languages