Winter Graduation Address: Professor Dame Sally Mapstone FRSE, Principal and Vice-Chancellor
Wednesday 3 December – morning ceremony
As Vice-Chancellor, I will now deliver today’s graduation address.
So let me begin with my warmest congratulations to you all. Each of you has invested years of thought, practice and persistence to reach this point, and today we celebrate that accomplishment with joy. It belongs to you, and to those who have supported you along the way: your families, your friends, your lecturers and tutors, our professional services colleagues, and the chorus of people behind the scenes who ensure that ceremonies such as this one unfold with their usual grace.
Graduation also marks a moment of punctuation in the story of one’s life. For many of you, it is the end of essays, exams and deadlines, the final chapter of living by the rhythm of the academic calendar. You have crossed the stage and you have become something that you were not before: a graduate of the University of St Andrews. And with that transition comes a new cadence to your lives.
Our late Chancellor, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, understood the art of transition in a way very few people do. His was a life in motion, in the literal sense, but also in the more profound sense of someone always willing to evolve and to recalibrate his purpose along paths that were anything but linear.
He began as a university athlete, running on rain-soaked tracks in Glasgow in shorts that billowed like sails, in an era of plucky amateurism that looked, as he once said, like something out of Chariots of Fire.
From those beginnings he became an Olympian, competing for Great Britain in the 4 x 100 metres relay at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, at which he and his team established a new British record. Lord Campbell subsequently competed in the 1966 Commonwealth Games, later defeated O J Simpson in a competitive 100-metre race in 1967, and for seven years held the national 100-metre record.
In his autobiography, published in 2008, Lord Campbell captured with great economy the distilled force of his athletic life. He said:
“For less than 40 seconds on a damp October day in Tokyo I was among the 32 fastest men in the world, a competitor. I remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday.”
And then, when the cheers faded, Lord Campbell did another remarkable thing: he changed. He redirected himself entirely, training as a lawyer and entering a profession that could not be more different in its rhythms and expectations. Gone were the incandescent seconds of a race; in their place came the sustained focus of legal argument and the slow architecture of building cases.
He excelled there too, where he built a practice, argued cases in the highest courts, and was called to the Scottish Bar in 1968, later becoming a QC, then a KC. Those who worked with Lord Campbell knew him as a lawyer who respected both the letter and the spirit of the law.
And from law, as a seasoned firebrand in his forties prepared to start again, he took another turn – into politics. Lord Campbell came into politics by degrees; the Liberal tradition that tugged at him during his university days – a belief in choice, dignity and the responsibilities we owe to one another – was the instinct, rather than any blueprint for a political life, that carried him forward into a world in which service mattered more than ambition.
When others were content to comment from the sidelines, he was prepared to act. He understood both the privilege of public office and its weight, and he never allowed one to obscure the other.
Lord Campbell fought elections, lost, fought again and, in 1987, he was elected MP for North-East Fife, beginning more than a quarter-century of parliamentary service. His interventions as Liberal Democrats Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs throughout the crises of Bosnia, Kosovo, 9/11 and Iraq were sought because of his incisiveness and erudition.
Through changing times, successive governments, and as leaders passed from hand to hand, Lord Campbell carried with him a sense of proportion and principle that made his counsel valued across party lines. His ascent within his own party to Leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2006 marked him as a politician who valued measured reasoning over the theatrics that so often accompany political life.
It is distinctive and telling that in the months since his passing, colleagues and opponents alike have recalled his characteristic kindness, a quality rarely associated with politics, yet one that defined both his approach and his legacy.
But behind these public roles was someone who treasured the companionship of his wife, Elspeth, the late Lady Campbell of Pittenweem, whose presence both sharpened and steadied him. Their partnership was a source of humour, resilience and strength, and there was always the sense that their two vigorous minds were working towards something larger than either could reach alone.
Lord Campbell described Elspeth as his “constant political companion, always my encouragement, and forever my first line of defence”.
In another era, freed by the conventions that so often constrained women of her generation in public life, Elspeth might well have emerged as a leading politician in her own right. Their partnership is a reminder that even the most individual journeys are sustained by others, by the people who challenge and encourage you. They will shape your life as surely as any decision you make.
From tracks to tribunals, and from the courtroom to the Commons, Lord Campbell embodied a life defined by continual reinvention. He gained layers and shed past selves across a lifetime, but that reinvention was ultimately cumulative. He trusted that the capacities developed in one context would matter in another, even if their usefulness was not immediately apparent.
Indeed, little we do in life is wasted if we use it properly.
In his own words, Lord Campbell saw his life as one of experience, and not of achievement, and it is a testament to how far a person can travel when one is willing to move.
And this is, of course, the kind of choice you have ahead of yourselves as you now stand at a moment in which your own paths feel poised for movement. The world you enter will ask you to adapt, to test yourselves, to change direction when the map runs out. If you practise reinvention, you will discover that transformation enlarges you and gives you new vantage points, new vocabularies, and new ways of seeing, and it will allow you to keep looking forward, as Lord Campbell always did.
You leave St Andrews equipped with knowledge and skills, certainly, but also with the mindset to excel successively because you recognise that you have adapted before and you can do so again. And when you step into new stages of your life with the same openness that allowed Lord Campbell to cross so many of his with distinction, let kindness be the element that holds everything together. As Chancellor, he watched generations of graduates cross this stage and step into their next chapter of their lives with the same mixture of courage and possibility.
It is a real privilege to send you into the world from a university that Lord Campbell cared for so deeply.
Congratulations once again. Thank you.