The whirligig of time.(Speech)

CHANCELLOR, Provost, Fellows of the Senate, ladies and gentlemen:

This occasion is for me a great honour and a great pleasure. The University has played a large role in my life. I cannot, to this day, drive past it and glimpse its towers, without recalling that summer morning sixty-two years ago when I first came here to enrol--an ignorant, spotty boy standing in awe and surprise before, as it seemed to me, this great temple of learning, at once medieval and modem.

The University has changed a great deal since then. So, I might add, have I! Yet it is the same institution. Let me say a word about my experience. I doubt yours, today's graduates, has been altogether different. We--the undergraduates of the late 1940s in what we called Lent Term--were presented with, broadly, three role models: the scholar in pursuit of truth, sometimes labelled a swot; the seeker or pilgrim desperately searching for a creed to live by, for the meaning of life; and the free spirit, liberally enjoying the careless pleasures of youth in a sort of extended Gap Year. Most of us had a bit of all three.

This has always been the way of universities since the Middle Ages--as is attested by the many ancient pieces of wisdom pressed on the sometimes baffled student in the inscriptions on the walls of this university's buildings, usually in Latin or Greek. The late Professor Kevin Lee collected them in his splendid little anthology, The Writing on the Wall. Some of them advise dating. Some caution. Some patience. Some extol love of country. Some look to a cosmopolitan civilisation without borders. Some praise moral simplicity in the face of the world's evil; others advise a certain cunning ("Be ye wise as serpents").

I doubt the student paid, or pays, much heed to these precepts. Some seventy years ago, delivering his inaugural address from this very platform, Enoch Powell, later a famous British parliamentarian but then a young professor of Latin and Greek, likened a university to a hospital for incurables. He meant that by the time the young man or woman comes up here, his character is already formed and no amount of advice, in whatever language, will make a lazy student industrious or a dishonest one honest. The best a university can do is to civilise him a little.

Perhaps the writings on the walls try to contribute to that. The scholar (or swot) will find encouragement: perseverantia et industria (perseverance and hard work). The godly will also find support: timor Domini principium sapientiae. (The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.) The freethinker can quote an opposing maxim: veritas sine timore. (Have no fear of anybody or anything, in the pursuit of truth.) The free spirit or bohemian may not find quite that degree of encouragement on the walls. Perhaps che sara sara (on the MacLaurin Hall) will serve, especially if you sing it.

Sixty years ago these ways of looking at life were well established. Are they not still? The scholar mastering a discipline is the same. So is the free spirit revelling in wild parties. So is the searcher for creed or faith. The political ideologist has changed but only in his preoccupations. In my undergraduate years the great ideological arguments were about Hitler and Stalin, national socialism and communism. They are now almost forgotten or beginning to be forgotten. But the ideological struggles continue in different forms--for example, over terrorism.