Graduation address: Professor Catherine O'Leary

Wednesday 4 December 2019


Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, everyone.

I would like to congratulate you all on your achievement – I am honoured to be here and to share this day with you, your families and your friends. Today is a day of celebration – for yourselves and for those who have supported you.

Looking around the hall today, we can see a reflection of a small university set in a dramatically windswept corner of Fife, a community that is both Scottish and international, happily and resolutely so; one that respects traditions and embraces new ideas; one that encourages both compassion and bold action.

You are part of this cosmopolitan, welcoming, and open tradition. I count myself lucky to be part of it too. I stand here today as someone who came from another country to find a home here, within this great academic community; but also as a teacher, who has enjoyed watching you grow in confidence and knowledge during your time here; and as the proud supervisor of Karunika and Guadalupe, two of today’s PhD graduates.

I work in Modern Languages – in Spanish – and have spent much of my career focusing on the creative works (mostly theatre) that emerged despite the hostile circumstances of dictatorship and the silencing force of censorship. When the press was not free and much news was fake, the theatre became a site of ideological battle, a gathering place for those with alternative ideas and a space where hope could be both imagined and enacted.

The theatre, literature and the arts and humanities more broadly help us to grapple with life’s challenges, to attempt to understand its paradoxes and to celebrate its beauty; the arts and humanities have given us many of our greatest, most inspiring, and most comforting achievements. Those of us who have the privilege of time to study these subjects know their value – their creative, social (and yes, definitely economic) value – they teach us to think about the technological advances and social and ethical challenges of our times and to find creative, human-centred responses to them. You should, therefore, embrace your role as the imaginative and resourceful problem-solvers of today’s and tomorrow’s society.

But it will not all be plain sailing. On this day of celebrating academic success, I also want to talk to you about failure. Like the dramatists I study, whose goals were constantly frustrated by a dictatorship, you will find that failure to achieve your objectives is part of life. My colleagues and I hope that, in addition to providing you with the skills to be successful in your chosen pathway, we have also provided you with the skills to fail well – as that international Irishman, Samuel Beckett said in his story, Worstward Ho: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again, fail better’. I use this quote to mean (and here I diverge from Beckett, that great explorer of the human condition, whose sentiment was less optimistic) that I hope we have equipped you with the capacity not to be daunted by failure, but rather to have the ability to pick yourself up, to go on, to remain positive to try again, to try something else.

Today’s achievement is, of course, both the end of something and a new beginning – another step in a lifelong learning trajectory. As you move on from your academic home in St Andrews, we hope that your time here has served you well and will inspire you to be creative and resilient in facing life’s challenges and that you will play some role in shaping a future that is both just and happy.

Congratulations again and enjoy this special day with your friends and families – good luck and, with apologies to Samuel Beckett, I say to you, not Worstward Ho, but Bestward Ho!

Professor Catherine O'Leary
School of Modern Languages