Graduation address: Monday 27 June afternoon ceremony (12pm)

Graduation address by Bishop Wardlaw Professor John Hudson FBA, School of History 

Vice-Chancellor, honoured guests, colleagues, graduates of the University – it is a pleasure to be here to congratulate a group of former students.

But this is a peculiar graduation. It is peculiar in that you come from almost every School in the University, instead of only one or two as is customary – I will try to mention you all. It is peculiar in that the majority of you departed from St Andrews a year ago rather than just weeks ago. I like both of these aspects: the mixing of students of different disciplines, which characterised your first year in halls, five years ago; and this being your first reunion – the first of many, I hope.

And it is peculiar in that you all have been doing things other than undergraduate degrees for the last year and indeed have graduated once already. Gone are my chances of recycling graduation address platitudes, wishing you well as you enter the real world. I wonder even what the correct term for you and for this ceremony is – the Social Anthropologists amongst you will know that liminality, threshold crossing, is often central to rituals – but in today’s ritual you all are stepping across the threshold from being a graduate – to being a graduate. 

Let us, then, reflect further on the words involved. Classicists amongst you know that the word graduate derives from the Latin gradus, meaning step. The same word gives us the modern term ‘grade’, those marks which – while you were receiving them but probably no longer now – mattered so much to you. These grades determined the classification of your degree. In such classification, etymology meets Mathematics and Computing, because Modern Languages scholars amongst you may know that the word ‘degree’ likewise derives from gradus. As Latin turned into French, the ‘d’ disappeared from gradus and gave us gré or gree and hence degree. Those of you who took English may have read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, where a character hurtles up a staircase ‘three degrees at a time’ – degree still meaning step. And that prompts the reflection that degrade is exactly the same word as degree. And those of you from Biology, Chemistry, Earth & Environmental Sciences, Geography & Sustainable Development and maybe Management too, will know that degrade is one of those words that has shifted from being a negative to sometimes being a positive. Moral Philosophers, even ordinary language analytical philosophers, might take an interest in how a preference for the non-degradable might now be seen as degrading. 

And the oddities continue. Some of you will be continuing in Medicine and know that third degree burns are the most serious; others may be at Law school and know that third degree homicide is the least serious. Some of you will now be completing a second, taught postgraduate degree, and some of that group will soon be discovering whether continuing to a doctorate is to undergo the third degree in that phrase’s positive or negative sense. Other types of ‘degree’ are particularly familiar to the Physicists and Astronomers among you, including degrees as measure of ‘gradient’, another of the relatives of that word gradus.

But it is not just the former students here who have made the grade but also all those others – parents, relatives, friends – who have contributed to this achievement. You will have dealt with the tensions of offspring unexpectedly studying at home – an exercise mimicking the combined challenges of International Relations and Psychology and quite possibly Economics too. You may have been alarmed by Historians telling you how similar measures against the Great Plague of 1665 were to those of the initial lockdown in 2020, or Art Historians showing you pictures of the metre long rods that Londoners were meant to carry during that plague – on meeting another, the rods were to be held out to ensure two-metre social distancing.

But to return finally to the former students. Commonly, our graduations ceremonies end with the conferment of an honorary degree but at this extraordinary ceremony, all of you deserve a form of additional honorary degree, for making it through such challenging circumstances. We have an MRes, Master of Research, but you each deserve a DRes, Doctor of Resilience. May your St Andrews experience stand you in good stead for your successful futures.