Graduation address: Principal Professor Dame Sally Mapstone FRSE
Wednesday 4 December 2024
Afternoon ceremony
Making Waves
It now falls to me to deliver the Graduation address, and the first thing I want to do is to reiterate our warmest congratulations to all our graduates. You have achieved something in life that will always be with you: this moment in this wonderful place where through participating in this ceremony you have become something that you were not before, a graduate of the particular degree from the University of St Andrews that you now hold.
That is super special and everyone here is really thrilled for you, and also so pleased that your family and friends who have supported you along the way are here, in so many cases, to share the moment.
We prize tradition here at the University, and the materials that accompany this ceremony – your degree certificate that you collect, and the signage, programme and, of course, the tickets that you and your family will have been carefully clutching – follow thoughtfully designed and curated templates. However, one aspect of the design of some of these materials has changed this year. They bear the pattern of our University’s Making Waves campaign, which was launched in September and has a focus on securing our University for the next six hundred years of its history.
Why did we choose Making Waves? Obviously, it speaks literally to our seascape, our spectacular setting here on the North Sea. Everyone who has spent time at St Andrews has been alternately inspired and calmed by the ocean waves we see breaking every day. They put a lot into perspective. And many of you will have run in and out of those waves at least once during May dip, experiencing an unforgettable rite of passage.
Making Waves also speaks figuratively to our capacity to disrupt, challenge, and carry ideas and projects forward – waves of excellence, innovation, influence, and opportunity. Our campaign is about all of this: the scholarships we wish to support, the academic posts we wish to endow, the New College on South Street and the Digital Nexus Building on the North Haugh that we need to build.
But all of you graduates in front of me also have the capacity and the ability to make waves and we hope you will do that in the spirit of a University whose alumni and professors have over the years, including William Dunbar, the first Scottish poet to appear in print; James Gregory, who established the first meridian line; Sir David Brewster, who invented the kaleidoscope; Margaret Fairlie, the first female professor in Scotland; and Louise Richardson, who became the first female Vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford.
We believe you all have the potential both to make waves and to make your families and friends and University proud.
One should never push metaphors too far – I am sure that is a piece of advice you will remember from this address! – but just to take making waves one final figurative stage further, one truth crucially to bear in mind at this stage in your lives is that the tide can and will turn. Any of you who know Shakespeare’s 60th sonnet, ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore’ – a sonnet I often think about when I am walking on the West Sands – will remember the line ‘And Time that gave doth now his gift confound’.
Shakespeare’s reflection on time looks it hard in the face and offers a form of hope. It suggests that, in the face of time and change, we can create things that transcend time by achieving a valued permanence. If you walk along the East Sands path and see the University’s recent Scottish Oceans Institute building with its steel wave design you may reach a similar thought.
So doing things for good, making waves in a positive way and which does not intentionally or unintentionally erode the rights of others or irrevocably damage our planet is something also to hold in mind.
For we can all create, work for change, make waves for good across our lives. We hope you will all want to support the University’s Making Waves campaign, but our primary message to you today is that your University is here to support you as you go out into the next part of your life journey, and will always welcome you back, and encourage you to stay in touch.
Bon voyage.