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 therefore the predictability of human affairs.
It is important not to be misled by this. It is true that there are aspects of the convocation ritual that tie you back to graduates of three, four, five and six decades ago, and that is reassuring. But the time at which you are graduating, the situation prevailing right now - in Ontario, in Canada, and in the world - is entirely your own. It is the platform on which you will be required to build a future for yourselves and, crucially, for your peers and for your posterity.
I am a product of the post-World War II multilateral consensus. I was born eleven years after the United Nations was founded “to maintain international peace and security,” “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” and “to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character” (just some quotes from Chapter 1 of the UN Charter). I began attending university as an undergraduate less than 30 years after the end of World War II, the child of a father who could never bring himself to talk about the suffering he had witnessed as a soldier during that conflict. But despite its dark origins, the postwar consensus oriented itself towards the achievement of a future that was optimistic and progressive and was for the most part inclined to see conflict and acts of inhumanity as aberrations in that onward march towards a collaborative and just future.
On March 31, 1968, at the apex of the United States civil rights movement, speaking at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King observed famously that “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Those words, echoing Theodore Parker, an abolitionist minister from the 1850s, in many ways exemplified the clear-sighted but determined optimism of the consensus period - the belief that ultimately justice must prevail, in race relations as in so much else. You may recall that the statement was given new currency by Barack Obama during the years of his presidency, an upbeat reassertion of Martin Luther King’s faith in the benign inclination of “the moral universe,” possibly informed by an awareness that currents were afoot in the world in the face of which such faith would be tested.
I say all of this to underline the fact that you are graduating at a time when it is potentially dangerous to presume that the arc of history will follow any kind of predictable, let alone positive, trajectory- in the foreseeable future, at least. The COVID-19 pandemic, through which you all lived, was a disruption unprecedented in modern history. And you must all have experienced the extraordinary challenge which it presented to our assumptions of normality, to the very idea of predictability, and most memorably, to the traditional consolations of life in our culture: the dependability of warm human relationships and of supportive social networks, economic stability, and the expectation that one generation will succeed another in a process of gradual but inexorable improvement.
I remember that, at one point before vaccines began to turn the tide, COVID-19 seemed capable of bringing all that to a permanent end. And the corrosive effect of the pandemic on our physical certainties was matched with a similar effect on our moral and ethical confidence. To learn that our own country stockpiled and wasted millions of doses of the vaccine while low-income nations struggled brought home the extent of our own implication in global inequity and injustice.
The precise relation to the pandemic of recent perturbations and crises is complicated, and a more nuanced question than I am able to deal with today. But it is worth listing some of the signal developments of the five years or so since we first dared think that COVID-19 might one day become history: the global recession and job loss triggered by the decline in economic activity as the pandemic deepened, the emergence of popular nationalism as pandemic isolation metamorphosed into political insularity, the escalation of geopolitical tensions and confrontations under the influence of that shift, and - taking us back to my opening comments about the post-war consensus in support of multilateralism - erosion of the very idea of global citizenship and collaboration for the common good.
In such a context, I expect you will agree, it is difficult to speak with confidence about the arc of the moral universe “bending towards justice,” about the future as an inexorable march towards prosperity, or about the sustainability of life on this planet being assured. The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations will undoubtedly not have been achieved by their target date of 2030, and the date by which the critical 1.5% threshold for global warming will be reached is now likely to be 2034, rather than 2045, as originally predicted.
In all of this there is a consolation, however, and it arises out of the otherwise sad fact that these challenges are all the result of human agency. They have been caused by decisions and actions on the part of people like yourselves. That can and perhaps should give pause for thought, but it also means that the possibility of their remediation and resolution - and by extension the reinforcement of that positive arc towards justice, equity, global prosperity and sustainability - lies also in the hands of people like yourselves. What has been done can be undone, and that very possibility translates into an opportunity for you now to act upon the world in service to a vision of justice, equity, and sustainability. To do so is the responsibility of all of us who have enjoyed the privilege of an education such as the one you celebrate - but I hope do not conclude - today.
You are graduating in a ceremony steeped in history and surrounded by people who have contributed to that history by taking on the intellectual and social agency that you in turn must take on today. It is important to feel and value your kinship with the past and the shared values and mission of this university. But it is equally important to question that inheritance. Your orientation must be to the future, your focus on actively building the kind of consensus, locally and globally, that underwrites and advances both the kind of society you would like to inhabit, and the physical environment in which that society can prosper in harmony with - and not at the expense of - nature.
I know you have been admirably well prepared to do this. My congratulations, and warmest best wishes for a future in which I know you will surprise and challenge us - but also make us immensely proud.