Winter Commencements Dinner
The 1592 Restaurant, Trinity College
20.00, Friday, 07 December 2012
Chancellor, Pro-Chancellors, Honorary Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen;
As we come to the end of the calendar year, and the end of the Michelmas term, and, indeed, the end of Trinity’s 420th anniversary, it’s a great pleasure to be here with you tonight, on the occasion of the Winter Commencements Dinner.
Tonight we honour four exceptional individuals who, in their different but equally powerful ways, have deepened human knowledge and enhanced the lives of those around them. Tonight we honour great achievement, and the difference that people can make.
It’s one of the privileges of universities that we’re able to honour people in this way - that we have a formal, traditional means of recognising achievement.
Universities, since the Middle Ages, have had this right to grant degrees ‘honoris causa’ on individuals anywhere in the world who are judged of merit. It’s a right somewhat akin to that of governments and states granting ‘the freedom of the city’ or other such honours.
It’s a right, which in Trinity, as I’m sure in other universities, we respect too much to ever hand it out except with the deepest consideration. You might say we’re quite stingy about conferring our honorary degrees because we don’t want them devalued.
Why do universities have this traditional right to reward excellence, almost as if we were mini-states? It has to do, I think, with universities’ work in the public good. Universities confer a private benefit on the individual, who receives an education enabling a successful career and interesting life; and universities confer a public good by educating the doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, and reformers that society needs, as well as yielding the research which ultimately improves our way of being in the world.
That’s why universities are entitled to reward individuals who, in their view, have also served the public good.
So, as we come to the end of this calendar year, I’d like to look very briefly at the ways in which Trinity served the public good in 2012. Because this reminds all of us here today of our core mission as educators.
It’s the 420th year since Trinity’s foundation and it hasn’t been the easiest year in our long history. Mind, it hasn’t been the hardest either! But these are not easy times – something I don’t have to remind you of the day after the Budget! All businesses and institutions in Ireland are feeling the pinch, and Trinity, being both privately and publicly funded as befits our dual role, is certainly feeling the cold wind of austerity.
Nevertheless this has also been a greatly positive year and, as Provost, I’ve been delighted with the energy, talent, and commitment, of staff and students. Unfortunately I don’t have time to list all Trinity’s achievements, but in terms of serving the public good, let me give three:
- In November we heard that the new children’s hospital is to be developed in a 16 acre site in St James’s Hospital. Trinity has been associated with St James’s since 1994 when we opened our Centre for Health Sciences there. It’s immensely exciting to think that our academics will now have a central role in developing Ireland’s National Children’s Hospital to deliver better services and improve the health of our children.
- This year saw the launch of two remarkable online digital resources for Irish history: ‘A calendar of Chancery Letters’ which brings together all known letters of the medieval Irish chancery; and ‘A Family at War: the Mary Martin Diary’, which is the diary of a Dublin housewife, spanning the six months from January to May 1916, and telling us much about how Easter 1916 appeared to ordinary, middle-class Dublin people. These two digital projects, together with the ‘1641 Depositions project’, have opened the way for new understandings of Irish history. Access is free, because contributing to the public good through research is part of our core philosophy.
- And just in the past few weeks, we have seen not only the publication of Bernard Meehan’s wonderful Book of Kells, which has been justly praised round the world, but the launch of the Book of Kells iPad app, created by a Trinity campus company, X Communications, working with the Library here. This app allows you explore all 680 pages of the manuscript. X Communications have managed to handle a huge amount of content without dissipating the quality of the image. Viewers can get close-up details for 21 particular pages, available at six times their actual size. Through such close-ups, viewers gain new understanding of the astonishing intricacy of the Book of Kells.
In Trinity we want to make a difference and serve the public good. We want to do this through medicine, history, computer science, and all our disciplines. Indeed, one of the ways we seek to serve the public good is to emphasize the strength of interdisiplinarity, collaboration, making connections, and crossing boundaries.
Because interdisciplinarity goes to the heart of what we do in Trinity, I’m particularly pleased that today’s recipients of honorary degrees represent such a range of disciplines and talents. Between them, they have illuminated the diverse fields of education, librarianship, literature, and human rights. They have excelled in their fields and they are remarkable for their ability to communicate the vital importance of their work.
They serve as role models and reminders for us of how we can use your talents to serve the society in which we live.
Valerie Coghlan [Doctor in Education (D.Ed.)]
Valerie Coghlan is a driving force behind the current vitality of both Irish and international children’s literature. She helped found many of the most important professional bodies pertaining to children’s literature, both nationally and internationally. She has published widely in her own area of expertise, and has tirelessly facilitated and promoted children’s authors and illustrators. She served as Librarian and lecturer in the Church of Ireland College of Education, and has played a key role in building up and archiving their collection, as well as Trinity’s Pollard collection, and cognate collections internationally. She is the face of Irish expertise and innovation on the international children’s literature circuit.
Dame Lynne Brindley [Doctor in Literature (Litt.D.)]
Dame Lynne Brindley has enjoyed a most illustrious career in British university libraries and has been instrumental in transforming the concept of library from passive archive to dynamic contributor to research and the wider education environment, as well as helping realise the potential of digital formats. For over a decade, from 2000-2011, she was chief executive of the British Library. She is currently visiting Professor of Knowledge Management in University of Leeds. Her contributions were recognised in 2008 by the award of the DBE. She has offered continuing support for our Library’s role as a Legal Deposit Library for the UK.
Sam Shepard [Doctor in Literature (Litt.D.)]
Sam Shepard is one of the most influential figures in world of drama, with an extraordinary body of work which has inspired a generation of writers, film-makers and theatre practitioners the world over. A remarkable experimenter with form and structure, few American playwrights have exerted as much influence on the contemporary stage. He is not only playwright, but also screenwriter, short story writer, actor, and director. He has a deep connection to Irish theatre, expressed recently in artistic collaboration with the Abbey, and he has given a new play to the revived Field Day Company which will be performed next year, as one of the stand-out events for Derry City of Culture.
Christine Buckley [Doctor in Laws (LL.D.)]
A tireless campaigner for victims of institutional abuse, Christine Buckley is a co-founder and director of the Aislinn Centre in Dublin which provides educational and support services for survivors. The 1996 documentary, ‘Dear Daughter’, which she worked on with director, Louis Lenten, was a ground-breaking exposé of the abuse that went on in institutional homes, and helped create the public outcry which led to commissions of inquiry. President Mary McAleese described her as a woman who has changed the course of history through her voluntary efforts. In 2010, she was selected as Irish Volunteer of the Year and went on to be awarded the title “European Volunteer of the Year” on International Volunteer Day. Christine told me earlier today that it is 66 years since her father graduated from Trinity College as a medical doctor.
* * *
I congratulate our new Honorary Doctors, and I welcome them to the roll of graduates of the University of Dublin.
I am going to ask Dame Lynne Brindley to reply on behalf of the new graduates. But before I do so, I would like to propose a toast to our four new Honorary Doctors.
I ask you all to rise to toast the new Honorary Graduates.
I now ask Dame Lynne Brindley to reply on behalf of the new graduates.
* * *