Graduation address: Friday 17 June afternoon ceremony 3.30pm

Graduation address by Professor Lorna Milne, Deputy Principal and Master of the United College

Chancellor, Friends, Colleagues, and especially new Graduates: warmest congratulations to you. It is a delight to celebrate here together with you on this important day of your lives.

The last time many of us were all together in this place was probably at nine or ten o’clock of your first ever Monday of University, at the Opening Ceremony for new students. We here on the stage were sadistically enjoying the cruelty of timetabling a gathering so early on your first Monday morning; you were nervously eyeing one other and thinking ‘how will I ever get along with all these strangers?’, not suspecting that the strangers thought you looked rather strange too.

Well, today, there are far fewer strangers in the room. But these people that you now know so well are not the same as they were on that first Monday; nobody here is. Because not only has the world altered around us – and it has, very powerfully, especially in these last two years – but education, and especially Higher Education, is actually all about change, and it always has been.

Now, some people do not agree with this, and of course it is easy (or lazy) to characterise any institution, especially one with traditions as prominent as ours, as stuck in the past. You may know the old question that goes: ‘how many St Andrews professors does it take to change a lightbulb?’ to which the answer is ‘CHANGE??!!!’ But in fact, the scholars here before you see change as our raison d’être. Our very vocation is to shake and reform the paradigms people use to decode the universe, and to pass that calling on to you. Through your studies, you have of course acquired an understanding of your subjects; but you also now have a perspective on the wider world that is built partly upon the work of this academic community which, in turn, is inflected by intellectual pioneers who came before us, as well as those with whom we are in touch all round the world.

Now, I am well qualified to speak with authority on this point because, as you can see with your own eyes, and as I have just confirmed by my reference to a lightbulb joke, I am quite old. In fact, to underline this point even more forcefully, I shall inform you for future reference that the correct answer to any ‘lightbulb changing’ question is that it takes 51: one to swap the bulb and 50 to switch it on by waving their hands in the air because, of course, many hands make light work. So, having established my advanced seniority, let me say that by the time I sat exactly where you are at my Graduation ceremony 40 years ago, I had learned not only that Baudelaire composed beautiful poetry, Camus wrote fascinating novels and Molière penned some of the least funny comic plays in human history, but also that everything we read, if we do it open-mindedly and analytically, helps us to reframe the way we see the entire world. Even more pertinently to me, I found female writers who could entirely revise how we thought about gender, equality and difference. When I came back here as a lecturer in the 1990s, I witnessed the students who took my courses go through the same type of radical revelations in relation to decolonisation and ethnicity, through the postcolonial literature we studied together. Today, all these years later, the concepts that seemed so revolutionary to me or my students are relatively commonplace for many young people: new critical perspectives on sex, gender, race and empire have changed into established ones, and are part of public consciousness.

I have absolutely no wish to over-state the academy’s role in changes like this; and I certainly do not feel complacent, as if our work were all done: it emphatically is not. My point is simply that universities have helped to alter our thinking and change society. Social Scientists like Professor Phoenix, our Honorary Graduate today, and her laureator Dr Sanghera, have made brilliant contributions to these developments, and so have researchers, teachers and students of languages, literature, psychology, science, film, philosophy and so on, all of whom ensure that universities play a systematic role in social change. Every one of you is a significant part of that system, and when you look back, you’ll realise you saw change developing first-hand, right here.

Graduates, I am delighted for your success, and I can see you are understandably basking in the satisfaction of believing your intellectual toils to be over. How wrong you are. This is St Andrews, I am a professor, and of course I have homework for you. Indeed, I have two things to ask of you before you leave us. First, remember how you have changed here and keep on doing it. Use what you have learned to keep your brain, your knowledge, your opinions and your judgements moving, and stay hungry to develop, for the rest of your life. And second, please: stand up for universities. There are some in our society who fear and dislike change, many of whom seem to believe that universities should exist only to pass on static information and enable ‘safe’ discoveries. Those people feel threatened by our capacity to foster new ideas with a social, cultural or political dynamic, and they would like us to stop. Well, we are not going to, and we hope you will not either.

I hope, when someone asks what University was like for you, you will tell them: ‘it was fabulous: I kept having to change my mind. From first to last, it was one long series of lightbulb moments’.

Congratulations again, all of you, and all the very best for your future.