Laureation address: Dr Gillian Tett
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws
Laureation by Professor John Hudson, School of History
Monday 24 June 2019
Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Dr Gillian Tett.
Gillian Tett was educated in London before going to Clare College Cambridge where she obtained a doctorate in Social Anthropology. For this degree, she undertook fieldwork in Tibet and then in Soviet Tajikistan on the southern edge of the former USSR, living there for some time in a small village. Her focus was on marriage practice, investigating thereby how the Tajik maintained an Islamic identity within the USSR. She found she learnt to observe not simply the obvious activities, but also the apparently peripheral – the skill which Pierre Bourdieu exemplifies as observing at a ball not just the dancers, but also the non-dancers. In 2014 she was the first recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute Marsh Award for Anthropology in the World.
Her career, though, would be in financial journalism, not academic anthropology. In 1993 she joined the Financial Times. She has been a correspondent in the former USSR and Japan, and had two stints as US managing editor. She now chairs the US editorial board and is editor-at-large US of the Financial Times. Her journalism has made her a regular recipient of prizes, including the 2009 Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards.
Gillian Tett is also the author of three books. Saving the Sun was published in 2004, looking at Japan’s economy and its business culture through an in-depth examination of Long Term Credit Bank. This was followed by her acclaimed study of the roots of the 2007-2008 financial crisis entitled Fool’s Gold, the Financial Book of Year at the first Spear’s Book Awards in 2009. This was characterised by its ethnographic research on JP Morgan and by its immense readability. It has the hard-to-achieve virtue of the best historical narrative. You constantly want to turn the page in order to what happens next, even though you do, in fact, know where the story is going. Related and further issues were explored in her 2015 book The Silo Effect: Why Every Organisation Needs to Disrupt Itself to Survive.
In 2011 Gillian Tett was awarded the British Academy President’s Medal, with the judges commending her explanation of financial instruments to ‘a supposedly informed public that had no knowledge of how they worked' - a characteristic that the book suggests may have extended beyond the supposedly informed public to many a senior banker. And as her 2014 Columnist of the Year prize at the British Press Awards indicates, her journalism extends more broadly; in her Parting Shot column in the Financial Times Saturday Magazine, she writes on titles from A fraud or the future? Bots and the bitcoin debate to The truth about cats and dogs and onto Only protect: the rise of the anti-terrorism urban planner. Regular readers will recognise the combination of financial insight and ethnographic eye that unites these columns, whatever their subject.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her major contribution to journalism and to the public understanding of business and financial cultures, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, on Dr Gillian Tett.
Dr Gillian Tett's response
Thank you very much indeed Professor Hudson for those very kind words and thank you Vice-Chancellor, it truly is a tremendous honour, and as someone who is a paid-up financial geek, I’m delighted to be in the company of a celebrity rockstar like Sir Ian.
I have just three quick things to say to you all. Firstly, most importantly, I would like to echo Sir Ian’s note of congratulations, not just to the graduates, but to everyone who has supported them to get to this point. It’s a long road, it’s an incredible achievement, well done.
Secondly, I’d like to echo something that the Deputy Chaplain said earlier. Which is that you are graduating into troubled times. Every generation thinks it’s graduating into troubled times. When I graduated 30 years ago (and yes, I am officially middle-aged, as my teenagers keep telling me), I thought I lived in very troubled times because the Berlin wall was collapsing, the Soviet Union would soon collapse, and the world seemed to be turning upside down. Today those troubled times are perhaps even more troubling. Given the fact that technology is overturning our lives and our expectations, given that populism, nationalism are reshaping politics and the geopolitical order is changing at an accelerating pace. Those create opportunities, but they also create big challenges.
And that leads me to my third point. Which is this: when you leave St Andrews today, or next week, don’t just remember the parties, though I’m sure they’re great. Don’t just remember your friends. Don’t just remember your studies and don’t just remember the weather (although frankly today it’s pretty forgettable). Also, remember what built places like St Andrews - which is something that frankly I think is one of Scotland’s best exports and gifts to the world - which is the Scottish enlightenment. The power and the celebration of learning, the respect for the power of reason, the respect for rational thought, the respect for the spirit of enquiry. And a recognition that tolerance, a recognition that an embrace of difference can be a good thing. And these sound like very obvious points to make. But I work today in America, in a country, where there is a war on science going on. And I say that knowing many of you have just graduated with a scientific degree.
I’m standing here in a continent, Europe, and yes we are still in Europe. A continent that is being ripped apart by the politics of hatred and emotion and all kinds of “isms”. I’ve dedicated my career to a journalism and media world that’s being undermined by fake news, a war on truth and a loss of trust.
So for those reasons, in these troubled times that Scottish export, that enlightenment thought which made colleges like this so great, which have influenced and been a bedrock of so much of what is good about the modern world, needs to be upheld and championed, whether you work in the law, the humanities, or in science.
So, that’s the end of my sermon. Go forth, go forth and celebrate. Go forth and hug all the people who have helped you get here today after this and say thank you. Especially amid the thunder. But also remember what you’ve learnt in St Andrews, and why you’ve learnt it, and use it to make your lives better, and also hopefully, the world a little better in 30 years time.
Thank you.