Chancellor, distinguished colleagues, family and friends, graduands:
To be with you here today to celebrate the accomplishments of our graduands is both a pleasure and an honour. Looking at me, you will probably surmise that this is not the first time I have done this, and you would be correct. In fact I recently did a rough calculation and can tell you that since the early 2000s I have attended or presided over approximately 200 convocation ceremonies and formally addressed the graduating class at least 140 times. This was not all at Queen’s University I would hasten to add, but that’s quite a number of ceremonies by the standard of any academic leader, whether itinerant or non-itinerant.
Having shared with you that bit of revealing personal information, what I would like to say to you is this. To spend time with graduating students and to help celebrate their accomplishments is a fresh and invigorating experience no matter how often you do it. Indeed, the more often you do it, the more optimistic you become. Simply to know that ceremony after ceremony, year after year, brilliant, accomplished, energetic and properly ambitious people like yourselves are leaving the university and assuming their unique places in society - that is the reason we (by which I mean myself, my academic and administrative colleagues, and all the members of the Queen’s community who have supported you during the years of your study) do what we do.
Further to that last point, I should also let you know, if you’re contemplating pursuing a career in the university sector, that for the first few decades of that career you will experience a peculiar and delightful sense of timelessness. Because the majority of the student population is perpetually between 17 and 22 years of age, you will yourself feel perpetually young. That is until you find there always seems to be something wrong with the prescription for your glasses, and you start counting up the number of convocations you have addressed! After that you notice that your hair is either greying, going, or both.
Convocation, therefore, is a kind of dialogue between timelessness and historicity, between the cyclical process of renewal, on the one hand, and the demands of the present moment, on the other. In its observance of a traditional, one thousand-year-old format, convocation sends a reassuring message about social stability and