Our Freshers Dinner each year welcomes the next. generation of undergraduates to St Anne s. For most of

Transcription

1 Good evening to you all. Our Freshers Dinner each year welcomes the next generation of undergraduates to St Anne s. For most of the Fellows and your tutors here tonight this is part of the annual rhythm of college life. But for you, our first year students, this only ever happens once; it marks the start of a phase of your life that is likely, in many different ways, to shape the rest of it. There are not many lives lived more to the full than the life of an Oxford undergraduate; equally, you will find, no phase of life passes more swiftly. Each year, as Principal, it falls to me to make a speech of welcome you all of you, our matriculated undergraduates and our visiting students, in which I tell you something about the college to which you now belong, and of its history. In one sense, because your path ahead has been trodden by many before you, I explore the same terrain for each incoming generation. However, every year I find 1

2 that it just does not seem quite right simply to repeat exactly what I said to your predecessors. In part this reflects my consciousness that every cohort of undergraduates leaves the particular mark of their collective character on the College. You will add to the narrative of opportunity offered and potential realised that resonates in this college across the years. First, I will tell you a little about where you are; what has made St Anne s what it is. Then I will talk about what we expect of you; and then finally I will ask you to think for yourselves about why you want to be here. St Anne s is exemplified by two buildings, our Library and this Hall; we are an academic community, here to work, but, living together we add something collective to our individual achievements. By the end of the week, our librarian Dr David Smith will have given you the key to the Library and you will have entered a place, even if you 2

3 seldom use books in your degree course, whose atmosphere will define for you in future years the idealism that your degree will come to represent. And, here in this Hall, you will share different aspects of your lives with those who will become good friends; you will have fun together and, at times when it all seems a bit difficult, take strength from one another. In short you will work well, you will live well - and you will eat well, so first let us thank our chefs and dining hall staff for serving us such an excellent dinner this evening. St Anne s began at the end of the nineteenth century to pioneer the right of women to a university education. Long before we had either library or Hall, we made it possible for women who otherwise could not have afforded it to come to Oxford; we were from the beginning somewhat at odds with the rest of Oxford, outsiders, international in our vision, in the vanguard of change. We were founded to 3

4 shake the place up. If the medieval Oxford colleges represent what made Oxford what it is, St Anne s has always stood for what Oxford should become. After we admitted men in 1979, we reconfigured that original ideal of women s intellectual emancipation to go beyond gender to seek out the widest variety of students from different cultures, backgrounds and nationalities. And then we mix you together, trust to your intelligence, and see what happens. Look around this Hall: there are tables of mathematicians and modern linguists, of chemists and classicists, of psychologists and philosophers, minds with the precision of the engineer and the precision of the fine artist just to name a few; you are sitting among as different a collection of minds and ways of thinking as one could imagine; but you are of a piece. You sit together now, grouped by your chosen subject, but when you go back to your houses later, you will find 4

5 yourselves living side by side with people very different to you, in intellect and experience, but who may become lifelong friends. You will learn something from them precisely because what they do is so unlike what you do. You will learn to respect difference. As you encounter the depths of thinking to which your own subject will lead you, you will recognise the same journey in your friend next door; you will then begin to recognise what is meant by an interdisciplinary, scholarly academic community. Most of you will in three or four years time take what you learn here into the wider world and make good use of it; but St Anne s does far more than educate undergraduates. What you do not see here tonight is the interleaved academic identity of the college; our 250 graduate students, the vast majority of whom did not do their first degree in Oxford; some study for Masters degrees; others are doctoral students embarking on their own original 5

6 research, where they know the problem they work on may not have an answer. You do not see here our post-doctoral research fellows, academics at the start of their careers, the lifeblood of the university whose scholarship and research will secure its future. Some will teach you; you will encounter others at College events and, talking to them, a few of you may be inspired to follow the path they have taken to carve out a life in the Academy. You will not be aware either of the 7,000 of our alumnae, our former students, though many of their names circle these walls, whose generosity as benefactors pays for the quality of teaching and life you will enjoy; their donations, great and small, are testimony to the debt they feel their lives owe to this college. They help pay for your bursaries, the salaries of your tutors, your travel grants, the rooms you live in. The financial support of our alumnae, month in month out, is a deeply moving expression of generosity 6

7 across the generations. They will never meet you but they believe in you; they donate their money to benefit you because in doing so they are giving to a memory of their younger selves when they were the age you are now. One day I hope you will feel you have a duty to do the same. So you see St Anne s culture is made up of a more complex network of relationships than it might at first appear. Now, what do we expect of you? Even as undergraduates, individually and together, you can enrich that culture further. Three or four years ago, another group of students sat here; they looked a lot like you. I am sorry you will never know them for they graduated last year; of the 117 of them, 40 got first class degrees, the best performance by this College in decades, probably ever. But, as important, the year contained people whose creative imagination, intellectual acuity, scientific curiosity, intellectual and emotional generosity made St 7

8 Anne s a more distinctive and distinguished place to be. In the work they did in schools encouraging others to apply to Oxford who otherwise might not, in their wide range of charitable work, here in the city of Oxford and internationally, in the music and the art they created each term, rowing on the river, in their seriousness of purpose in pursuing their future careers at the same time as protecting their commitment to their degree for its own sake, and, in particular, in the solidarity they showed to each other when they were all under pressure, they wove another skein into the collective memory of this College that makes it a remarkable place. But when they sat here as you do now, three days into their time at Oxford, they didn t know what they had it in themselves to do. Now, we don t really know anything about you yet, except perhaps the most important thing, each of you was selected as an individual to come here, in the teeth of the 8

9 most ferocious competition, because senior academics in this University took time out from the intense pressure of their own academic research personally to make that choice, and you are sitting with them tonight. That is what marks out Oxford from other universities. Oxford, in the world university rankings stands second equal alongside Harvard; only Caltech, a far more specialised institution, outranks us; yet here in Oxford, in addition to their commitment to pioneering research and original scholarship, our academics also take care to know each student as a person; your education is founded on a personal contract between you and your tutors a relationship based on mutual respect. Forfeit that respect by not being serious about the trust put in you when you were offered a place at St Anne s and you should no longer be here; earn that respect from your tutor and then the horizon that opens for you is one that will forever 9

10 change and enrich the way you understand the world, and yourself. It won t be easy; but if we have picked you right, you would not want to do an easy degree. Each term goes very fast, eight weeks where weekends are only different because there are no lectures or tutorials but where you should be working with as much concentration as on any other day. Vacations are not holidays but vital time to clarify what you have learnt the previous term; if you don t use vacations to consolidate and read forward for the next term you will be lost, and find it very hard to catch up. As each year passes, so time will accelerate; the work won t get any easier but you will get better at it; your final examinations will require of you a stamina, a nerve and a gathering together of your intellectual courage the like of which you will likely never have to deploy in the same way again; then suddenly it will all be over; your 10

11 time at Oxford will be past; it is like a door shutting behind you and you are out into the world; tonight that door has only just opened and before it closes again you have the chance to ensure that, ever afterwards, in whatever you go on to do, you can be confident that you need not be afraid of confronting complexity and that you have within you the capacity to exercise calm, reasoned judgement under pressure. I have told you what we are and what we expect of you; which takes me to my question to you: why are you here? That s for you to go away and think about. But let me try to prompt your thoughts. Your generation was described the other day as generation sensible. Not sure what you will make of that. It is undoubtedly true that your generation is faced by far greater uncertainties about future careers than your parents. You will be besieged here by offers of internships 11

12 and warnings about the dangers of not burnishing your cv at every opportunity. There was a time when it was accepted that university was a space for you to think and grow; too often these days you are increasingly asked to mortgage your academic present for the purchase of your future career. By all means be sensible in such worldly terms but be careful not to be so at the expense of your wider intellectual vision. Don t allow others to predetermine what you are here for. Don t close down your mind. There is unlikely to be another time in your life when you can open it so capaciously. But you may argue your degree can be a passport to a prosperous life; well, that is quite likely but I hope you are not so easily satisfied as to confuse a worthwhile life with a prosperous one. Indeed, it has been argued, especially in the Arts and Humanities, that one value of the academic mind is that, in a world where the public sphere is so 12

13 distortively geared to thinking in terms of economic profitability, we need a corrective input from those not so determined, who can demonstrate how a society profits from the wider values of a serious, rational and imaginative intellectual culture. This is not to say that a University is divorced from the responsibility to build a prosperous and cohesive society; after all, the underpinning of prosperity and social cohesion should be the respect for individual judgement that is itself underpinned by education. Our medical and physical scientists, through their research, will change probably beyond recognition the terms in which you will live out your lives. But they will be the first to warn that the value of their work is constrained if it is computed too narrowly in terms of profitability; the nature of academic research is that the answers pursued cannot be so narrowly predetermined. 13

14 You may believe your degree is useful. Undoubtedly it will be, but the more so if you do not narrow its utility just to providing some future career path. The depth of an Oxford degree in itself offers you a breadth of possibility that you should not deny yourself at this stage in your life. The scope of the Oxford engineering course, for instance, will offer you many different directions you cannot yet appreciate; how many of you medics know what sort of doctor you will be or whether the research project in your third year will take you towards a research career and not patient care. I would invite the lawyers to ask yourselves why Roman Law is one of the first papers you study. Your degree is useful precisely because it is not forcing you in a predetermined direction; rather it gives you the capacity to use your own judgement to guide you to whatever you will find both personally fulfilling and socially beneficial. 14

15 Some sociologists claim to find a correlation between income, education, and happiness. You may think that your degree will make you happier: I hope it will; there certainly ought to be moments of unapologetic selffulfilment in your years at Oxford when an idea slots into place in your mind. I have heard so many times a student say to me of their degree it has just clicked and their progress and enjoyment of their subject from that point demonstrated that it indeed had. But I do not think I am unduly gloomy to suggest that an examined life cannot simply be a bet that an investment in an Oxford degree will secure a return on your personal happiness. In life, you will find, stuff happens. However, to summarise the most cogent argument I have read on this subject, the academically trained mind can help us understand better what happiness is, how it has been construed from Herodotus to the present, how we may put ourselves in 15

16 the way of it, and how education may improve the kind and quality of some of our pleasures. Your degree can guide you to good judgements about what might constitute a happy private life and a good public life. When I was thinking of what to say to you last weekend, I got distracted. I started to read a novel, The Bone Season. The author is a St Anne s English Literature student, Samantha Shannon, who graduated last year. She started to write it during in her first long vacation. My guess is that it could become a cult book for your generation. It is published in twenty countries; Hollywood has bought the film rights. The Bone Season is set in a gothic, phantasmagoric, nightmare Britain where the supernatural spirit world of the aether comingles with humankind. Oxford is at the centre of the novel, the university transformed into a bleak penal colony where unearthly higher beings live in Magdalen and Merton and 16

17 inflict cruel punishments on their imprisoned human slaves. The heroes have ethereal powers that help them survive, but there is a prison camp on the outskirts of Oxford where those with no special powers at all are incarcerated, experimented upon and starved to death. It is not so named, but look at the map in the front of the book and you will find it appears to be located - at St Anne s. Don t be alarmed; it is actually a very good private joke, and indeed, in her acknowledgements, Sam thanks St Anne s for the college s support and kindness. I have found The Bone Season, somewhat against my expectations, a compelling and exciting novel of its genre, with an unleashed, wild imagination. But what stays with me most is the fact that this imagined world was teeming into prose inside Sam s head as she walked across the Quad just outside here, as she sat with friends in this Hall, organised College Arts week, worked on Emily Dickinson in 17

18 the Library. But, there again, to borrow from her book, there is perhaps a world in the St Anne s aether which hovers around and within all of you; you will find it in the scientific imagination captured in the understanding of molecular biology and genetics, in the landscape of computer science, the piecing together of a shard of the past in a historian s archival research, in the mental wrestling of philosophical enquiry, the composition of music, in the aesthetic appreciation of form in pure mathematics; in the invisible architecture of chemistry and materials science. The collective intellectual, analytical and imaginative life of this College scarcely admits of limits; explore it to the full in the short time you have here; this time will not come again but it can sustain you, in bad times and the good, for richer or poorer, for the rest of your lives. 18