Graduation Address

"Micheal and Kelly Meighen Convocation Address" (23 October 2003). (UA Case 69, Box 3)

Michael: Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President, Members of the Board, Honourable guests, Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Both Kelly and I deeply appreciated the honour bestowed on us today. To be associated in this way with so outstanding a university is something of which we will always be proud.

Kelly: It is a credit to this university that they saw the potential in each of you, and admitted you to such a fine institution. And it is a credit to each of you that your academic success has brought you to where you are today.

Michael: As a matter of fact, I’ve always aspired to be a graduate of UNB. As a younger fellow whose chief passion was—and some would say still is—fishing, I envisioned a career in forestry engineering, complete with much paddling and fishing up and down the Miramichi and on pristine lakes around the province—all of which a degree from UNB would have made possible. However, I am no less thrilled to have hooked a Doctor of Laws degree—and…without even angling for it!

Kelly: Fishing jokes aside, it is traditional for a convocation speaker to offer advice to the new graduates: some well-chosen words of wisdom distilled from the speaker’s many years of experience.

Michael: And there are two of us!

Kelly: Our duality does pose a logistical challenge: how should we do his? Should we each make a separate speech? Or should one of us stand modestly aside and let the other speak on behalf of both?

Michael: La manière toute canadienne et celle qui concorde bien avec la tradition bilingue du Nouveau Brunswick, serait que l’in de nous deux pronouce le discours en anglais, et que l’autre répète mot à mot en français. Apès tout, ce serait dans le même ordre d’ideé : dualité linguistique, dualité du couple…je pourrais continuer longtemps sur cette tangente, mais je reviens à nos moutons!

Convocation is a celebration of success, and all of you who are graduating today have unquestionably succeeded. And for that we offer you our warmest congratulations. You’ve earned them, along with the letters you now bear after your names.

Kelly: And yet we’re willing to bet that there are some of you here who feel—despite the evidence to the contrary—that you have not succeeded; or at least that you have not succeeded as much as you should have. I think this because that’s how I felt when I was your age.

Michael: We do remember what it feels like to be 21 or 22 or 23 and we have sons that age. We don’t want to sound in any way condescending but there are certain things you simply can’t have had the opportunity to know in your early twenties. Among those things is the fact of how very different a person you will be at twice that age, and what a very different idea you will have of what constitutes success, and of your own potential to achieve it.

Kelly: What we want to impress on you today is that, whatever you feel about your accomplishments to date, they represent only the very beginning of your story. You cannot yet know everything you are capable of, because up to this point in your lives, you have been measured only by certain rather narrow criteria. But those criteria will become less and less relevant as you get older.

Michael: Till now, the benchmarks of success have been defined for you in very set ways. Those benchmarks are established in high school and remain essentially unchanged until you leave university. They are defined, in the first place, by academic achievement, but also by very specific social and extracurricular accomplishments. Some people have a natural flair for those kinds of activities, and they’re the people—you all know them, or perhaps you are them—who become the stars of high school and university.

Kelly: Michael was one of those people. And I wasn’t. I didn’t know him when we were students, but I knew people like him, and I compared myself very unfavourably to them: the sorts of people who seem never to have known anything but success.

Michael: I should point out that Kelly, like every good spouse, is prone to exaggerating my accomplishments.

Kelly: You cannot deny that you won a scholarship to Trinity College School.

Michael: But I only want to go there because they had a good hockey team. Never mind that I was a terrible hockey player. And anyways, that scholarship turned out to be the highlight of my academic career.

Kelly: Apart, of course, from your diploma in French studies from the University of Geneva, your bachelor of arts degree from McGill and your law degree, cum laude, from Laval.

Michael: Well, it was all downhill after that.

Kelly: The fact remains that to "succeed" in high school you not only have to get good marks, you also have to make the sports teams, you have to get the lead in the play, you have to get on the cheerleading squad, you have to have a busy social life and you have to get the hot dates. Michael was one of those people to whom all those things came naturally.

Michael: Actually, I was never on the cheerleading squad.

Kelly: But I know you dated a few who were. And you were president of the French club, the debating society and the dramatic society.

Michael: Ah, but I wasn’t captain of the football team, so I never made it to the very top. That still rankles, though.

Kelly: Here, by contrast, is what distinguished me in high school: an endless string of low double digit exam results in all kinds of subjects—math being the constant along with French, Latin, history—depending on the year. And I was tall, so I was seated at the back of the class from where it was a long walk up to the front to retrieve my pitiful exams held high by the teachers so that all the class could see. I remember the feeling as if it were yesterday.

Michael: Those kinds of things can scar a person. Years later, Kelly would tell me that through all her years of high school, the sweetest sound she ever knew was the 3:30 bell in the afternoon.

Kelly: Outside the classroom, it was the same story. Every year I tried out for the school play, and every year I didn’t get a part and ended up doing the makeup. Nor did I ever get into any sports team I tried out for. Not even basketball—despite being tall. Then I applied for university. I won’t say which university, and it wasn’t this one, or the one I eventually enrolled in. In those days, you could actually get an appointment to see the registrar, and so on the Easter weekend of our Grade 13, my friends Jill, Brenda and I went to a certain mid-sized Ontario city, and trooped into this woman’s office.

She had three files on her desk. One was about this thick, and one was this thick, and mine was that thick. She started to talk about the courses, and about the university and what a wonderful place it was, and about how much we would enjoy the experience; and as she spoke, ever so gradually her whole body—along with her chair—was turning like this, so that eventually she was talking only to Jill and Brenda. And I was over here. I kept leaning over, to try to get into her field of view. Eventually she paused. She put the two big fat files to one side, and opened mine.

The expression on her face as she looked at the contents was that of a juror examining photographs of a crime scene. Then she closed the folder and said to me, in front of my two friends: "Do you really think university is something you should aspire to?" Well, they had to carry me out. Imagine my satisfaction when a few years later, I became Director of Recruiting for Kraft General Foods, and returned to that university which had so summarily dismissed me!

Michael: The younger you are, of course, the more keenly you feel this kind of disappointment. Fortunately, as you get older, your concept of success broadens, and you being to move beyond the constraints imposed by those high-school and university systems of measurement.

Kelly: In the end, I went to the University of Western Ontario, where I was moderately successful. I graduated and got my first job, as a filing clerk. At the time, I thought, "Well, this is about right for me, based on what I’ve accomplished up to now." I had shown no particular ability or flair at university, and I saw no reason to suppose that my career was going to involve any kind of leadership position.

Michael: Meanwhile, I was making the opposite mistake. I was assuming that because everything had come so easily to me in school and university, it would continue to do so in my professional life as a lawyer. But that very ease proved to be both a blessing and curse. Because if things come easily to you, you don’t feel you have to work hard at them. And if you don’t work hard at something, you tend not to acquire the same breadth of knowledge or sense of engagement. The result, for me, was that with the end of my university career, I hit a plateau. Suddenly I found that I had reached the limits of what I could do without much effort—or even with it. I hadn’t worked continuously hard at the law, and I was forced to realized that I was never going to become as good a lawyer as I might have been expected to be, given my academic record.

Kelly: And so each of us, in our different ways, had come to premature conclusion about ourselves and our places in the world. But then life took unexpected turns for both of us. My godmother had a phrase that sued to give me great consolation: "The world will catch up to you." And it turned out that she was right. Life started to happen to me after university: after I stopped learning about things and starting learning about myself. I began to get some sense of what I could do, and I began to experience successes that weren’t circumscribed by an academic situation.

Michael: As our formal educations came to an end, we embarked on another kind of education as you will! The kind that comes from living life. Life experiences bring confidence, and with that you begin to realize how narrow those old criteria that meant so much to you in school really are. And you begin to realize something even more vitally important: that success is generated from within yourself.

Kelly: The first volunteer board I ever sat on was a small group home in Toronto. I learned from that how meetings ran and what my role in them could be, and I moved on from there to what today is essentially a career in community service. And I found that I could be a leader in the field.

Michael: I, meanwhile was getting more and more involved in politics. This interested me far more than the law—and it began taking up far more of my time. I found in public life, just as Kelly did in community engagement, the thing that really galvanized me. Had it not been for those unexpected interests of ours—those passions, I should say—neither of us would have reached for the next level of achievement, and neither of us would be standing here in front of you today.

Kelly: Sometimes, when you don’t have to do something, you find you shine at it. It was curiosity about things we didn’t have to do—but that we found were important to us—that changed our lives.

Michael: You take the first step in some direction that might initially seem to be a digression from your path in life—it could be volunteerism, or amateur sports, or a professional association—and suddenly you find out something about yourself. You find an ability, an enthusiasm, a need, even, that you didn’t know you had. You find the context in which you can flourish, and suddenly you find yourself engaged with life. For many of us, that context is not supplied by formal education. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there waiting.

Kelly: And this, finally, is the point we want to impress on you. Your learning doesn’t end today. Your development doesn’t stop today. What you are now is not what you will always be. Education is a life-long process. It is as much about developing yourself and discovering who you are as it is about acquiring knowledge.

Michael: The fact that you are here today as graduates is proof of your potential. To properly fulfill that potential, though, you will have to set yourself new goals, rise to the new challenges that are going to come along: challenges that may have nothing to do with your chosen professions as lawyers or financial officers or even as forestry engineers! Above all, you must strive to understand yourselves, not only because self-knowledge holds the keys to success, but because without self-knowledge there can be no wisdom, and no true happiness.

Kelly: Your stories are just beginning. Each of you graduating today has written only your first chapter. We congratulate you on it, whatever you think it is worth. But the rest of your pages are blank, awaiting your ideas and your discoveries. Dare to write them with confidence and with imagination, for the best is yet to come!

Michael: Thank you.

Kelly: Bonne chance à vous tous!