Graduation address: Principal Professor Dame Sally Mapstone FRSE

Thursday 23 June

Afternoon ceremony

The Graduate

As Principal and Vice-Chancellor, it is now my duty, and my pleasure, to deliver today’s graduation address. First of all, I would like to convey my heartfelt congratulations to you all on what you have achieved. You will have heard the word ‘congratulations’ a lot today – from your family, your friends, and your tutors here at the University who are all incredibly proud of you. We all are. The degree you have received was not easily earned: it acknowledges months or years of hard work, focus, and discipline. To each and every one of you, very well done and – yet again – congratulations.

Today, you have received your degree and, thus, transitioned from a member of our student community into the next stage of your life. You have done so by being part of a long-standing ritual – your name was called and you rose to cross the stage. You then walked a few steps – very carefully – to kneel and bow your head and be conferred with your degree. And, just like that, you walked off the stage as a graduate of the University of St Andrews, and one of the newest members of our vibrant alumni community.

Completing this ritual did not take long, probably 45 seconds or so from start to finish, though everyone who has gone through it knows that it can feel like a very public eternity. I will let you into a secret, which is that the team here and I always rehearse for these ceremonies in advance, even though they are so familiar to us, because we want to ensure that everything goes as well as it possibly can for you on the day. So members of the professional and academic staff who officiate in these ceremonies double up in the rehearsals as, well, as you, and I tap them on the head with more or less whatever comes to hand, which has ranged from an Ipad to a copy of the University Strategy. I want to let you know that even these hardened professionals can find it troublesome to manoeuvre their way across the stage without incident so again, you have all done really well.

However, it is also remarkable that this short moment on stage has symbolically transitioned you to a new stage of your life, from student to graduate, something on which you will always look back. It gives you a 45 second version of the 15 minutes of fame that is often attributed as a famous saying of Andy Warhol’s. But for me, this symbolic moment also brings to mind the equally famous soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques, which I am sure you are all familiar with. It begins:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

Shakespeare did not have a separate stage of life for University student, though Jaques did of course reference ‘the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school’. That is emphatically not you, and Jacques has, by definition, a melancholy view of the world which there is no need for any of us to accept at face value. At the end of the play his intention is to become a hermit, which while it may have much to recommend it, is probably not what most of you will end up doing. But what Jaques is getting at more fundamentally is that we go through defining stages in life, and to take this on further, as you literally cross the stage here, you are going out from one of them and into another. As we noted, it took around 45 seconds to walk across the stage today, which is just a tiny fragment of the roughly two billion seconds in the average human lifetime. You have a great amount to look forward to, and a lifetime of public moments to come where you will be further recognised and celebrated.

The roles you will play throughout your life will be unique to you and your own individual sense of what it means to succeed, to achieve and to realise your own goals. However, I want you to consider how you can use your time on life’s stage to do good and enact positive change. The world is an unsettled place right now, with war in Europe, the climate crisis, and the increases in the cost of living all so redolent in our daily lives. Consider the idea that one of your many roles could be to shape society for the better, by acting for climate or social justice, by fighting for fairness and equity, or by speaking up for those who are vulnerable.

I also want to recognise that, today, you have also supported those around you, kindly and appreciatively applauding each other, recognising your friends and peers for their achievements. Being a supportive member of a cohort – or indeed a community of alumni – is an equally important role and one that you are now playing to perfection. It is wonderful that we are able to celebrate this moment together, and that you are sharing it in the company of those who have been there during both your setbacks and your triumphs. That is something that, after the last few years, we certainly shouldn’t take for granted.

Your rite of passage across our stage has marked a certain end-stage itself, but it certainly does not mark the end of your association with our University. Whatever roles you choose to play within your own life, you will now always be a seasoned University of St Andrews graduate, and an integral part of our global and local community. Please never forget that.