President Newbould Commencement Remarks 2009

20/05/2009

Commencement May 2009

Mr. Chancellor, Trustees, Governors, Faculty and Staff, distinguished visitors, parents and families, and most importantly, our graduating students, welcome to graduation 2009. Someone once joked that a graduation ceremony is an event where the speaker tells hundreds of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success. But I prefer to think of commencement as a time to take pleasure in what you have achieved, to thank those who helped you get here, and to be with them. What a glorious time for celebration!

By successfully completing your program of studies, and by earning the right to be awarded a degree, you have joined those who came before us and began, several hundred years ago in our medieval past, to earn degrees. That medieval tradition can be seen here today in the academic robes that have changed very little in a thousand years. The cap, gown and hood that you wear represent the degree that you have earned and the university granting that degree. These robes remind us that learning in a community of scholars is an ancient and worthwhile habit. Your achievement has been recognized as worthy of distinction throughout those thousand years.

While you might wonder exactly how your life here has any connection to that ancient world, the education, growth and development of each individual committed to our charge has not changed in the many hundreds of years since these robes were first worn. Consider this letter from a student to his father:

“This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg …that … you may assist me...”

Does that sound familiar? Or this letter from a father to his son studying in Orleans in France:

“I have recently discovered that you live dissolutely and slothfully, preferring license to restraint and play to work and strumming a guitar while the others are at their studies, … you have read but one volume of law while your more industrious companions have read several. …I exhort you to repent of your dissolute and careless ways that you may no longer be called a waster.”

The remarkable feature of these letters is that they were written in the thirteenth century! In this medieval pageant of parents paying and students playing, we might gain some perspective
When asked why a university degree is worthy of pursuit, many students respond with the answer – “to get a good job”. And, of course, it would be foolish to deny that such a goal forms part of a student’s thinking. But as you prepare to become a graduate, it would be well to think of the less tangible rewards of your education. When the early American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin suggested that “an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest”, he was speaking of something other than a banking career.
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, considered that “the mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”. [repeat]…to entertain a thought without accepting it. More than 2300 years later, Malcolm Forbes, the American business tycoon who founded Forbes Magazine, said much the same thing, that the purpose of an education “is to replace an empty mind with an open one”. Open minds, open to debate, unafraid of curiosity, have thus been recognized as the value of an education for more than two millennia. Replacing a closed mind with an open one is what matters. Turning an empty mind into an open one is our mission. It is what the poet William Butler Yeats meant when he wrote that “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”. As you go forward with your newly-minted degree, think of how your educational experiences have lit your fire, and how important it is to continue to read and to learn in order to keep the flame alive. When you came to Richmond, you ventured beyond your family and the safety of your home culture. If I had one piece of advice, it would be to continue to venture beyond the safety and comfort of what you know. This morning you will hear of our two honorary degree recipients who did that as well.

Dare to be curious. Just do it. Congratulations!

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/764.aspx