The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20071223211703/http://www.otago.ac.nz:80/alumni/graduation/16december2006/address.html

M. J. Grant : Graduation Address 16th December 2006, Dunedin Town Hall

P. E. Taylor: Graduation Address 13th December 2006, Dunedin Town Hall
Professor M. J. Grant
President and Provost, University College London

An honorary degree is the highest award that a university can confer. A wise recipient would under no circumstances agree to deliver a graduation speech, for fear of mounting a public demonstration of the folly of the University Council’s decision. But, as my presence at the lectern demonstrates, wisdom has today been trumped by sheer foolhardiness, a quality that this university imbued in me some 40 years ago.

I arrived at Otago University in early 1966 from Oamaru, where I had spent all my life so far. This was a big step from small town to huge city. It clearly had an emotional impact so powerful that I have never really left university since. Universities have not only been my life; now, they are my passion, and that is a theme to which I shall return.

But let me dwell briefly on 1966 and all that.

Otago was then a remarkable university. It was by today’s standards small and traditional. It boasted the country’s only medical school. The atmosphere was personal and friendly. I wanted to be able to take Music I in my first year, but it was not listed amongst the qualifying subjects for the LLB degree. So I went to see the Law Dean, Professor Frank Guest. In those days the Faculty was based in the Library of the Supreme Court, at the bottom of Stewart Street, opposite the Railway Station. He was amazingly welcoming. "No problem," he said. His own son, Stephen, was a violinist and wanted to do the same when he enrolled the following year, so he thought the rules could be changed. And so they were.

Another example of the personal touch came at the end of my third year. I was approached by a professor and told that the Faculty was thinking of creating two Teaching Fellowships in a year’s time. My name had come up as a possible candidate, and I might like to bear that in mind when considering whether to do any work in my final year.  It was a masterstroke: a spur to action, and it gave me the great luxury of being paid to teach and to write for the two following years. In the former capacity, I taught Stephen Guest, and he in turn subsequently taught Jeremy Waldron, one of the world’s leading legal philosophers now based at New York University, and your honorary graduate at this ceremony last year.

Indeed, none of this sense of Otago community has gone to waste. Stephen Guest has for many years been professor of jurisprudence at UCL, and he and Jeremy Waldron are now both helping in the global search I am undertaking for a new incumbent of the celebrated Quain Chair of Jurisprudence at UCL, recently vacated by Professor Ronald Dworkin. London itself is today a centre dominated by Otago graduates. They include Professor Julian Jack, the neurophysiologist, honorary graduate here in 1999, now retired from Oxford and working at UCL; Dame Judith Mayhew-Jonas, a law contemporary at Otago and close friend; Sir Paul Beresford MP, an Otago dentist who became British Minister for Housing and Local Government under Margaret Thatcher (you can imagine what strength of character was required for that assignment); and Professor Susan Irvine, who holds a chair in English at UCL, specialising in Old English language and literature, and is the daughter of former Otago Vice-Chancellor Robin Irvine.

Only this week we have had the sad news of the death of Professor Ian McDonald, emeritus professor of neurology at UCL and also an honorary graduate of Otago, in 2000 when he shared this platform with his old friend and colleague, Professor George Peterson.

But how well also the centre has held. Few universities today command the loyalty of staff in the way that Otago does. Several members of the Faculty of Law today were contemporaries – and in some cases even students – of mine, and I am proud to see them here today. 

Stardom came early in my Otago career. As the Orator has pointed out, I was not admitted as a member of Selwyn College on the basis of my sporting or dancing skills. That much will also be obvious to the audience from a quick inspection. But in 1967, several of us decided to revive the College’s great tradition of the Capping Concert ballet which had fallen into disuse for a few years. Training was rigorously undertaken over several weeks, with sessions held jointly at the school of physical education and the Captain Cook Hotel. Performances have picked up considerably since then. Another fortuitous achievement in 1967 – also cited by the Orator – was to become the first winner of the University’s home-brewing cup, in a grand competition judged – anonymously of course – by a team that included Pat Kilbride, already a famous lecturer in the Law Faculty. My parents, though fiercely proud of all competitive achievement, were frankly puzzled by this modest and eclectic assembly of accomplishments.

A third event, a few years later, initiated me into university politics. The student revolution took a little time to find its way to New Zealand. Student uprisings in France had dominated 1969, and they had been mirrored in London at the LSE. France has experienced student unrest again this year with the protests against the Government’s proposals to free up the labour market. Student unrest at Otago took a little longer to develop. There was a long wrangle, for example, over mixed flatting. At a time when men students were admitted to St Margaret’s College on the overriding condition that one of their feet must remain firmly on the floor at all times, the notion that men and women students might live in the same flat caused outrage in the University’s senior committees.

Several issues, including concern about a proposed new code for student discipline, eventually caused an uprising amongst Otago students. A well-attended rally in the Union led to a march on the old clock tower building, culminating in a sit-in in the Vice-Chancellor’s office. I recall that he was somewhat displeased. But he ordered a joint committee to be set up on student discipline, with representatives of the student union and of the University. I found myself being elected by the Union; and Professor Peter Sim, then the Dean of Law Faculty representing the VC. Peter was deeply uncomfortable about this, fearing that he and I would fall out in a public forum. That we did not was due not only to his professionalism, and to the qualities of the independent chairman, Mr Tom Ross, Dunedin’s outstanding stipendiary magistrate. The lesson: that handling difficult issues in universities, as elsewhere, is more likely to be positive when led in a way which values human beings and their inputs, and which challenges arguments, but respects people.

Politics and universities are like love and marriage. One of the great attractions of university life is the large measure of intellectual autonomy that is conferred upon academic staff. The traditional model has been that we appoint the finest scholars, in international competition, and we provide them with a working environment that allows them to exploit to the full their qualities of innovation and creativity. Academics are, in general, neither susceptible nor amenable to top-down management. I say in general, because there are certainly some interesting exceptions in the UK, and there is no shortage of Vice-Chancellors around the world who, faced with steadily deteriorating budgets, would prefer such a model for reasons of efficiency and effectiveness. In some universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, a medieval model of academic self-governance prevails to this day and, as John Hood has been discovering at Oxford, can be so widely valued in principle by the academic community that they will obstruct even modest attempts to secure rational reform.

Many of you graduating today will not actually be leaving university. Many will be going to further study, here, elsewhere in New Zealand, or abroad. And if you are not planning to do so now, you may well be doing so in the future. In today’s knowledge-based globalised economy, the intellectual challenges of employment are very different from what they once where when a secure job was for life.

Graduation never has been an end-point. Once you are a member of an academic community like Otago, you remain a member for life. That is not purely graduation-day rhetoric (though it certainly is that as well!). Today we are seeing around the world a significant rise in post-graduate education – some 2,500 PhD students now enrolled at UCL alone, and we are deliberately setting out to have a student profile that is 50:50 undergraduate and postgraduate – and in professional development and reskilling programmes taught across the range of university-level institutions. Demand for unskilled manual labour is fast declining. Brain-power will prevail. That is why nations around the world are coming to invest heavily in education and especially in universities; China, Japan, the US and India amongst them.

These are exciting times for universities around the world, and their future is something of an obsession for me. Their purpose, the way they function, how they compete, how they will serve the interests of rapidly changing societies. Students see surprisingly little of the university wood for the departmental trees; likewise, often, staff. So we fail to have the open debates that we need about our future direction, which is on a wider stage than simply how well we recruit and teach our students.

I challenge you to name any other institution that has the array of talent, transcending so many disciplines, as a modern university. There is nothing in the private sector to match this; and there is nothing in the public sector. Leaders of both sectors purport to know how universities should be run, and what key performance indicators should be developed to measure their effectiveness. But they rarely have the patience or insight to understand the precious environment which sustains and promotes the qualities of world-class universities. Central to this is the idea of disciplines. It is a curious expression, rarely encountered outside universities. For reasons that are largely traditional and administrative we organise ourselves around silos of knowledge, such as medicine, history, physics or modern languages. Students are schooled in the discipline; researchers explore its depths and outer limits.

It has been a hugely effective model, but its very success in promoting intellectual concentration and specialisation can put at risk our ability to grapple with the fascinating problems that lurk at the interfaces of conventional disciplines. For example, between engineering and medicine; between earth sciences and atmospheric chemistry; between economics and epidemiology or neonatal care in less economically developed countries; in nanotechnology between chemistry, physics, engineering and medicine. It has long been necessary for universities to figure out how best to develop structures that facilitate research and teaching that unleashes the disciplinary energy on new problems.

Coupled to this is a realisation that the uniqueness of universities that I mentioned before carries with it, I believe, a powerful moral responsibility. We have to throw off the ivory towers image of universities. Modern societies have little of the inclination of 100 years ago to show deference to intellectual superiority as a value in its own right. Universities need to be in the forefront of addressing global issues that affect the future of humankind: of poverty, disease and starvation in large parts of Africa and Asia, for example, which requires innovation collaborations between so many of the our disciplines: not just of medicine in characterising the causes of diseases and their treatment, but of disciplines which can understand how remedies can be produced and applied at scale; for example, engineering, anthropology, economics and law. The physical and social challenges of global climate change raise similar issues for ways in which universities must face the future.

These are challenges not just for universities as formal institutions, but for all of their faculty, their students and their graduates. Degrees are not licences to spin money and to furnish privileged life-styles, but to prise open minds, through the processes of critical inquiry and analysis in which you have all been schooled at Otago, and to stand ready and able to apply those talents to whatever cause, wherever it arises.

Otago has provided you with the raw material. You have the talent and the education to take on the world. Go and do it.

Alumni & Friends

Print Logo