Graduation address: Principal Sally Mapstone
Tuesday 3 December 2019
Graduates – very and many congratulations. The degree certificate you are holding represents the countless essays and reports you have written, the dissertations and laboratory work you spent so much time on, and the examinations you have undertaken. So just take a moment to reflect on that, and then recognise that it was all worth it. Those moments when you wanted to throw your laptop out of the window; those moments when you thought that nobody else was up and about at 4am finishing their dissertation. But also those moments when you knew, absolutely, that what you had said in a piece of work what you wanted to say, that you had gone somewhere intellectually that you had not been before. So we want to offer you our warmest congratulations on everything you have achieved. You and your families and friends have every right to be really really proud.
This certificate allows you to do things you could not do before. Tomorrow when the festivities are over, you can, should you really want to, update your Twitter handle or your Instagram username to include MRes or MLitt or Dr – amongst others (if you have that degree of course) – should you feel the need to do this; it’s not obligatory. But your degree has changed you in a more profound way, too: each of you is a different person as you sit before me now from the person you were when you matriculated many months or years ago.
Time changes all of us – but time spent in education changes you in a more fundamental and accelerated way. You acquire new knowledge, new ways of seeing; you refine your self-expression; and you are able better to advance your development. These are skills that no one can take away from you and that no degree certificate can record, but now they are foundational to who you are and who you are going to become.
Someone who has recently written powerfully, amusingly, and very dextrously about the transformative changes St Andrews inspires is one of our alumni, Dr Eric Motley. His autobiography, Madison Park: A Place of Hope, was published in 2017. I would strongly recommend the book to you for reasons you will hear. I am pleased to call Eric a friend, and I have told him that I would be talking about his book in this address because I found it so compelling when I read it.
So the book again is Madison Park: A Place of Hope. Madison Park is a freed slaves’ town in Alabama, and Eric, an African American man, grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s in conditions of profound economic deprivation. Despite the challenges he faced, and with the incredible support of his family and community and his sheer scholarly determination, Eric went first to Samford University and then came here to the University of St Andrews as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar in 1996. In St Andrews, and he writes about this in the book, he read for a Masters degree in International Relations and Defence Studies, continuing also to attain a PhD at the University. Upon graduating from St Andrews in 2000, Eric became the youngest appointee in President George W Bush’s White House, and in 2005, he was appointed Director of the US State Department’s Office of International Visitors. Today, he is Executive Vice-President of the Aspen Institute, a non-partisan organisation that brings together experts from diverse backgrounds with the aim of addressing complex societal issues.
Eric’s memoir is full of rich descriptions of St Andrews, many of which I am sure will sound familiar: long days spent studying and debating with colleagues; what he refers to as ‘hundreds’ of dinner parties during the winter months, in the hope that warm company would dispel the cold; and many walks on the beaches and streets of St Andrews, during which the ‘the blue sky, the smell of the salty sea, and the tree[s] flush with cherry blossoms’ enlivened his senses ‘as if for the first time’.
Reflecting on these images, Eric muses that ‘this had been a moment of epiphany… during my time at St Andrews I’d become a citizen of the world… I’d been transformed by ideas, voices, and experiences’. Eric takes something of St Andrews with him wherever he goes; now, as a graduate of the University, you will do so too. However, the gifts that this special place affords you come with a challenge. None of you will have the luxury of being a passive spectator in the world, for you each now have a responsibility to yourself, to your tutors, to your family who may have supported you, and to the abilities with which you have been privileged to acquire, to shape the world around you for the better.
So, back to Eroc, as he puts it, on his last night at St Andrews before returning to the US, Eric and his friends ‘walked back to town silently and sat at the fountain in the town square until morning, recalling our antics through the years and laughing aloud’ [so yes, they were making noise, but a kind of measured noise they were making!] In the early morning Eric had to leave for the airport. He writes:
As I descended the hill beyond Strathkinness, St Andrews vanished from sight. The vastness of the great blue sky and open sea stretched before me like a clean canvas – a new beginning, a brave new world.
St Andrews will vanish from sight for all of you, too. But wherever you go in the world and whatever you go on to accomplish, the education and the incredible experiences you have acquired here will always serve you well; the friends you have made, including of course your tutors, will continue to support you; the community of alumni – of which you are now a valuable part – will always welcome you. And, most importantly, we at the University of St Andrews will always be waiting with open arms for when you return. This University is a very special place, and I believe it has given you many things; one great thing you can give back to us is hope.
Professor Sally Mapstone
Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews