Graduation speech: Moral courage

Speech given at University of South Australia Graduation Ceremony

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It is wonderful to be joining you this afternoon. To all those who will be graduating very shortly, my warmest congratulations to you. And my congratulations as well to the proud families of graduands.

In America, they refer to graduation as a commencement ceremony. The idea being that the occasion wasn’t so much about marking the end of your studies, but the commencement of your life beyond your years in education.

I rather like this way of looking at things. Because, graduands, while you are entitled to feel a sense of pride in what you have accomplished, you should also regard your graduation from here as only the beginning and not the end. Having a university degree doesn’t mean you have exhausted your quest for knowledge and wisdom. Don’t make the mistake of believing that you know all that you need to know.

Whenever I reflect on my own experience, I’m struck by how so many of the things I learned happened outside my studies. This isn’t at all to disparage universities or the idea of a university education. I say what I say as someone who spent almost nine years studying at university, and a further three as an academic.

However, no amount of training as a political philosopher prepared me for one encounter I had some years ago with Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. The Duke was visiting Australia along with the Queen. At a state reception, we had the chance for a conversation. The Duke asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I replied that I was a political philosopher. The Duke responded, ‘So what do you do?’ I told the Duke that I researched questions of patriotism and national identity. The Duke responded, again, ‘So what do you do?’

Taking pause, I asked what he meant: ‘Do you mean what do I do every day?’ After the Duke said yes, I reflected and told him: ‘Well, I sit, I read, I think and I write.’ To which the Duke said, ‘And they pay you?’

This was a lesson, if you will, about the importance of clarity. Having a university degree means little if you can’t actually explain what you do to a lay person – or, in my case, a Duke.

So far, I have referred to the importance of humility and of clarity. But there is perhaps one other, more fundamental virtue, which I wish to impress on you today: the virtue of courage.

Courage is something you can’t be taught through a degree. It is something that resides in experience and adversity. And by courage I don’t mean physical courage. Rather I mean courage of the moral kind.

Robert Kennedy said that, ‘for every ten men who are willing to face the guns of an enemy there is only one willing to brave the disapproval of his fellow, the censure of his colleagues, the wrath of his society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.’

Courage of this sort is indeed rare. Not many of us would be willing to do things without the assurance of success, to do things that may upset the powerful, to do things that may come at a cost to our own self. Too often, many of us would shrink and say that it’s too hard. We would explain to ourselves that the fight wouldn’t be worth it.

Yet these are precisely the things that many of you, in your future careers, whatever your fields, may be called upon to do. Maybe not every day, but maybe some day, when there is something at stake.

We also need to have courage as a society. When you contemplate the big questions for our society – how we deal with climate change; how we should care for and educate our children; how we should design our system of hospitals and health care – it’s not always the case that the answers aren’t there. Sometimes, it is just that we don’t have the will or resolve or courage to act on them.

So, graduands, as you now commence your careers – as teachers and educators, as pharmacists and medical professionals, as nurses and midwives – remember that your real examination has yet to come. You have, of course, passed some of your early examinations here at UniSA. But, as you now step outside the University, I hope that you will find some guidance in what the ancient Greeks said about all this: ‘Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.’