Graduation address: Principal Professor Dame Sally Mapstone FRSE
Friday 4 July 2025 – afternoon ceremony
‘What matters’
As Vice-Chancellor, I will now deliver today’s graduation address.
First of all, let me offer all our now graduates my warmest congratulations. Achieving a degree, particularly from a university that asks much of its students and gives much in return, requires discipline, resilience, and no small measure of courage. You will each have travelled your own path to this moment, and along the way will have made sacrifices, navigated setbacks, and uncovered reserves of determination you may not have known you possessed.
Today honours all of that. It is a day of celebration, of ritual, of formal robes and informal photographs, of milestones marked in a single, symbolic crossing – across this stage, yes, but also out into a world that will ask of you, in all sorts of ways, who you are and what you stand for.
In the course of your studies, I hope these are questions that you have given great thought to, and ones deepened by the challenge and rigour your tutors, lecturers and peers have set before you. A St Andrews education does not rest on the accumulation of information, but on something altogether more searching: the capacity to think and to rethink. In a tutorial where your view was upended, in an essay you argued yourself out of as much as into, in the quieter challenge of remaining curious when it would have been easier to retreat into certainty.
True freedom, the kind universities strive to protect and nurture, is not just the freedom to speak but the freedom to be changed – by evidence, by argument, and by encounter. It takes courage to venture beyond consensus, to sit with uncertainty, to temper conviction with tolerance. But that, too, is learning. And it is the bedrock of freedom of speech: not a licence to say anything at all, but the kind of intellectual generosity that holds a society together when ideas collide.
We often hear universities invoke the principles and practices of freedom of speech as a fundamental presence in university life. Yet, in recent months, we have seen institutions around the world, even the most storied and powerful, wrestle, publicly and painfully, with what those freedoms really mean, and how resilient they are when consensus frays or controversy erupts. In some institutions, open discussion in classrooms has been stymied and bold intellectual excursions discouraged, not always by decree, but through a culture of caution.
These tensions do not end at the university door. You are graduating into a world that is, in many ways, uneasy with ambiguity. Where pressure to signal allegiance – to be quick, clear, categorical – can overwhelm the slower, more generous work of reflection. It is in this space that words hold their greatest significance. Words can illuminate or obscure, include or exclude, liberate or confine, console or divide. They can bind us together, and they can drive us apart.
The power, and the peril, of language is hardly a new concern. In 1962, the scientist and novelist – do note that combination, because it was and is a distinctive and telling one – C.P. Snow, upon assuming the Rectorship of this University, devoted his address not to a theory or a discipline, or even an argument, but to a quality of character that might guide us through such complexity. His subject was magnanimity.
It is a word we hear quite rarely now. And Snow was already alert to its waning in the public sphere. But he meant something precise by it: a magnanimous person, he wrote (his language is the gendered language of its time, but his point is entirely relevant):
“…sees himself and the other person as they really are. Then he tries to get the best out of the other person. In doing so, he tries to get the best out of himself.”
This, I think, is a fine distillation of the best kind of university education. You have spent years among others of high ability and strong opinion and have been challenged to recognise both the gifts of others and your own potential. If university life has done its work, it has taught you not just how to excel, but how to recognise excellence in others. It has made you capable, but also generous, able to lead, but equally able to stand aside, when appropriate, for the better idea, the sharper mind, the truer insight. To live magnanimously is not to think less of oneself, but to think more of the good that may be drawn from others.
And yet, when he wrote, Snow was troubled. He noted how the tone of public discourse was growing shriller, narrower, more inclined toward suspicion than admiration. He lamented the erosion of language itself, how words like ‘moral’ were being hollowed out to mean merely ‘censorious’, how the fashionable use of the prefix ‘anti’ seemed to signal a retreat from building towards dismantling.
“We are,” he said, “in danger of forgetting what it is like to be generous to each other.”
It is hard to argue that this danger has passed. But it is equally true that institutions like this one continue to believe that generosity – of thought, of speech, of spirit – is worth cultivating. Freedom of speech endures only if there remain institutions and individuals committed to its pursuit. That is the charge laid on universities. And today, as you graduate from one of the oldest and most questioning of them, it becomes in some sense yours as well.
Listening – truly listening – is itself a kind of generosity. It asks us to pause, to weigh, and to resist the impulse to reply before we have understood. It offers not the freedom to dominate a conversation, but the freedom to enlarge it. And this is what will allow you to grow into deeper versions of yourselves. You will decide whether to speak in slogans or in sentences, whether to listen in order to understand or merely to reply. You have learned that ideas can be both powerful and provisional, that truth is rarely singular, and that even the firmest conviction may, in time, be transformed.
These are not just matters of intellect; they are acts of care. They are, as C.P. Snow also said in his great 1951 novel The Masters, “what matters”. When you exercise magnanimity, you will be honouring something more than your own right to speak; you will be upholding the conditions that make speech meaningful at all. That is how ideas move – across difference, through difficulty, toward truth.
It is the work of words, not just in their articulation but in their thoughtful consideration, that advances knowledge and understanding. So, as you leave this place and step into the wider world, carry that work with you. To the better and magnanimous use of words – in thought, in speech, and in the company of others.
Congratulations once again.