Graduation Address

"Variations on a University Theme" (16 May 1974). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Your Excellency, Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen. I need scarcely say what an honor it is for me both to have been given a degree by this University and to have been asked to speak to you. In the University of which I was Vice-Chancellor or President there were some heretical voices who proclaimed from time to time that the abolition of honorary degrees would be desirable on the ground that degrees ought to be something that one worked for. When I entered Canada this time the immigration officer said to me, "Is there any particular reason why you are coming here?" And I said, smiling modestly, "Well actually I am coming to get a degree." He said, "Huh! You are coming here to study, eh?" And looking at my sparse and graying locks he obviously regarded this as improbable. I said, "Not, not to study," and he said, "Oh, it’s an honorary degree." And I may have been imagining it but I though there was a touch of scorn in the usually bland voice of the Canadian immigration official.

Personally I am glad that honorary degrees still exist for they are justified I think, if in no other way, by the immense pleasure that they give to the recipient and I don’t think that I am only speaking for myself. I’m proud to say that my honorary degrees are from Canadian universities, though not from institutions as venerable as this. This no doubt proves something, but I’m not sure what, beyond being one among a number of reasons for my abiding regard for this country.

Why does one experience such immense pleasure in receiving a degree even it it’s only an honorary one? It is, I think, because one is being made a member of a community of great significance in the world, a community of learning that in its reputation and allegiance transcends national boundaries. Beneath our hoods we forget whether we are Canadian or English or anything else. We are members of this community. I am not simply thinking of the universities’ contribution to economic and social welfare, I’m not thinking even of their contribution to knowledge, but of the fact that at their best, the best they don’t always attain, they embody so many of the values that we include in the word ?"civilization." They are places where past and future meet. The past is not, of course, symbolized by an aging honorary graduate, but by the living body of ideas and experiences that it is one of a university’s duties to illuminate and to transmit. The future will be fashioned by the hopes, the attitudes, and the idealism of the young, by you men and women who have just received, or are about to receive, proper degrees for which you have worked. Because universities are places where these two elements meet there must always be a tension within them, a tension between tradition and renewal.

Today in addition to this natural and healthy tension, the universities of the whole world are facing problems greater then any in their long history. It is worth while on occasion just to look at some of them, even in the most superficial way.

First, there is the nature of their relation with the State. The pursuit of knowledge grows ever more expensive. The days when a university could be defined as a teacher sitting on one end of a log and a student on the other are over. Instead we have not only got great libraries at the heart of every university, but computers and laboratories of ever-increasing complexity. Financial considerations alone make it ever more necessary for universities to depend on governments. There are those who fear this dependence, some I think fear it too much: they fear that he who pays the piper may call tunes that are discordant with the pursuit of truth, and sometimes, though not very often in our kind of society, their fears are reasonable. Here, as in so many other fields, what we have to do is to seek a delicate compromise. Of course, universities must be socially responsible. They must respond, for example, to the needs of society for various kinds of educated manpower, whether it be doctors, or social workers, or engineers, or teachers. But in the last resort they must not simply give society what it wants but, since in the modern world they are custodians of value, they must do their best to teach society what it ought to want. They must speak with the authority of knowledge and sometimes of wisdom.

Secondly, of course, we are all faced with a crisis of knowledge. The rate of increase of what is known has in the past half-century become frightening. One sometimes has misgivings lest in a foreseeable future the process of higher education may grind to a halt, stifled beneath an accumulation of inaccessible and often trivial information. Somehow universities have got to select: somehow they have got to devise curricula which shall make their students inheritors of the tradition of civilized experience, develop in them a critical awareness, applicable to any field of activity, and in addition, of course, provide them with the information and skills relevant to their future careers. I have used the word "relevant", and few words can be more misunderstood. We are in danger in the contemporary world, I think, of concentrating on the obviously useful in information, and forgetting that for some people the study of Homer or Renaissance Art can be more important to them as people, more important to their lives, than the latest paper on sociology or electronics. It is for universities to preserve and pursue such studies.

Thirdly, of course, the universities are faced with the problem of growth. Increased populations, greater affluence, growing democracy all may lead to their massive expansion. In some ways, obviously, this is to be welcomed. It’s right, it’s just, that what a university can give should be made ever more freely available to all who can profit from it. But, the expansion has its dangers. It may lead to individual institutions becoming so large that they are unmanageable and impersonal, and impersonality is the end of true education. But it may lead, moreover, to the impoverishment and dilution of what a university should exist to foster and to transmit. The greatest of modern poets, T.S. Eliot, wrote: "We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline, that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago….For there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody we are lowering standards, destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground on which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans." I believe with all my heart that in saying that Eliot was wrong. But if the dangers that he foresaw are to be averted then we must not necessarily expand our universities too far, but rather create other and different kinds of higher education to meet the legitimate needs of those for whom the aims, the methods and the demands of the university as we know it are inappropriate.

Lastly, universities everywhere are faced with problems of government. No demands are more insistent than those for participations in its government by all those who work in an institution. There is great justification for some of those demands, it’s right that they should be met. But do let us remind ourselves that a university offers richer experiences than sitting on committees, particularly when one is young. Let us be aware that government of anything requires knowledge and hard work and not a mouthful of clichés. And above all, let us remember that a university has obligations not only to those who teach there or to those who learn there but to truth, and if matters of learning are at the mercy of majorities, which by their nature must be ill-informed, then the idea of a university is in danger.

These are some of the problems that face our universities, including this university of yours, and now I am proud to say, of mine. Our task is to show that the idea of excellence can be preserved in the more just, and equal, society that it is one of our greatest and noblest jobs to try to create. We’ve got to show that it is possible to maintain a belief in rationality in a world threatened by the ad-man and the misuse of the media, and we have got to proclaim the virtues of tolerance and the supremacy of truth. These are the principles for which universities must continue to stand and to fight, and because this place has been dedicated to them for nearly 200 years, I am indeed proud to have become a member of it today.