Vice-Chancellor/Deputy Vice-Chancellor,

Members of the academic staff,

New graduates of the University of Sydney and your families:

I salute you all, especially those of you who are graduating for the first time, for the effort that has brought you successfully to this day and place. I congratulate you on your good fortune in now graduating from this foremost of Australian universities.

I also ask a favour of you; that you allow me to share in your graduation today. Not because I missed my own graduation here in 1965—I did not—but because, too clever by half, I put myself in a position where, although there, I could not enjoy the moment nor recall it thereafter. Perhaps you will allow me to make good that omission by completing my graduation with you today.

Why did I mess up my own graduation? Well, after years of service extending, so it then seemed, back to the creation itself, old Sir Charles Bickerton-Blackburn had recently retired as chancellor, replaced by a successor whom I—with a certain lack of moderation and good sense for which I have subsequently become all too well known—took it upon myself to admonish in an article in ‘honi soit’.

Displaying what we would now regard, and I did then, as an insufficient appreciation of the diversity, the multicultural pluralism, of the society that sustains this university, the new chancellor had made a point of declaring it an institution, not simply by ultimate origins but in contemporary social role, of an essentially Christian character.

My whole graduation experience the next week is now a blur, poorly recalled through the haze of my anxiety at having to encounter the man whom I had criticised in order to receive my testamur.

Yet, in his way, that upright Christian gentleman taught me a lesson which, many years later, I found best expressed by someone deeply grounded in the two great faiths and faith-based civilizations that have been the focus of my scholarly work.

The Jewish-Arabic poet and philosopher of Islamic Spain, Solomon Ibn Gavirol, wisely observed that “so long as you keep your words inside you mouth, you are their master; once you set them free into the world you are their slave”. An important lesson, one that many a young graduate, and the older too, might do well to recall.

To graduate from Sydney University and this faculty in those times was for me the beginning of a wonderful adventure, personally and as a scholar.

Facilities at the university in those crowded times of under-funded expansion were limited. The early 1960s, too, were a time of crisis.

But then our universities’ problems were those of a time of growth and optimism. Universities then were places that people wanted not just to go to but to be at, rather than, as today, places to go to, go through, & get out from as fast, and with as little financial debt, as possible.

In those days there weren’t a fraction of the books and places in the library that there ought to have been, but we learnt anyway how to learn and to think: from some outstanding teachers, and from endless discussion and argument with our remarkable fellow students, often as not at the old ‘forest lodge’ pub with its famous outdoor mural.

About a year after graduating, I left Sydney for doctoral studies in London. There, having previously assured me that my Sydney degree would be fully recognized, they now asked me to jump various hoops. When I did so to their somewhat amazed satisfaction, they allowed that I seemed to have been taught in the right way out there in Sydney.

“Why not?”, I responded. The university’s motto was mens eadem, sidere mutato, “the same spirit under other heavens.”

Confronted again with the same challenge after leaving a lecturing position at the University of London for one in New York, I responded in the same way.

“Mens eadem sidere mutato”: isn’t that the same idea, I was challenged, as the epigraph of your first great Australian novel, Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney? ‘Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt’? “his heav’n above the trav’ller may change, but not the soul within” [the great Kantian anti-positivist duality!]. Again, the same spirit under a different sky; wherever you go, you take your culture with you; you can’t run away from yourself.

Something of Australia, of what was best in our young national culture, was already implanted internationally.

As with literature, so with our universities. In those days what we had here in Australia was a small, isolated, provincial university system: one with its own distinctive character, its own peculiar qualities and well as quality.

It had no great “Oxbridgean” or Ivy League Everests; but we had our own perhaps modest academic “Kosciuszkos” upon which young minds could learn to climb and rise with the best.

When I got to London I was not the first to progress from graduate student to lecturer at that central institution of the modern social sciences and citadel of their core disciplines—the London School of Economics and political sciences of the university of London, or “the LSE” for short—on the credentialed basis simply of my Sydney University undergraduate degree.

After more than a decade of government tinkering and meddling as well as of politically self-serving “claptrap” about the first-class internationally marketable export quality of Australian university education, can the same still be said today? I think not.

Politicians and pundits opine that the time has come for change in the Australian university system, as if there had been none.

Yet those of us who have worked in Australian universities over the last twenty years have known nothing else, nothing but continual destabilization and upheaval promoted in the name of “reform”. One may doubt its yield, but not the massive fact of its unceasing occurrence.

It is just the same today, only moreso. Government ministers now offer new, more bracing remedies they may or may not work. But they are remedies for ills largely brought about by government—governments of both persuasions—over the last fifteen years, especially the last seven.

Clever politics. Create the problem, place under strain, induce the breakdown of, what may have worked but, politically disapproved, is no longer allowed to; then offer yourself as the supposedly external, impartial, disinterested repairer of the damage that is there for all to see. Offer yourself, with all plausibility, as the answer to problems of one’s own making, even contrivance.

Politicians of all stripes, it seems, always want to “fix” the universities: in large part, I suspect, because, as politicians, they exemplify, and have since youth, a certain character-type—self-confident, brash, opinionated and impatient—that will always feel undervalued and poorly appreciated within the more thoughtful, deliberative culture of scholarly life.

From university, where they feel they, their talents and their distinctively wilful wisdom have been inadequately recognized, they carry with them resentments that thereafter drive their petulant determination to “re-engineer” universities according to their distinctive preconceptions.

The self-interest, personal and professional, of these driven politicians in all this remains unrecognized, obscured. But if a working academic raises a worried head these days to express widely-held and well-grounded fears about the effects of this implacable wave of corporatist, managerialist reform for the life of autonomous scholarship within universities, they are howled down with accusations of special, self-interested pleading.

As a recent television forum made only too painfully clear, a situation, a new politics, has been created in which academics are simply not to be publicly heard addressing matters of which they, we—as new graduates, better than anybody else in our national community, are in a position to know—are the primary cultural custodians; or if heard, are positioned as speaking simply out of petty, narrow and churlish self-interest.

“Unhappily complaining? Well they would, wouldn’t they?”: this is how those who would speak for our universities from within are dismissed by today’s politicians, resourcefully borrowing what we “1960s types” know as the disarming and disabling Mandy Rice-Davies riposte.

When some of us started out in the 1960s, universities were places where people of imagination, though not necessarily of any overpowering self-interest, wanted to be. Today, things are different.

Who among this graduating class today wants to? For whom might this be the best, a good, even a possible choice for the application of special abilities and the development of a life’s work and vision?

For those who might be tempted anyway to chance this now bleak and risky option, what coherent prospects of a scholarly career, and meaningful human endeavour based upon it, can anyone these days point to?

As a result of all their tinkering and interference, all the managerialist, corporate refashioning, over the past twenty years, our politicians, on both sides, have made a sad truth of the mean old joke:

That “a professor is someone who was once clever enough to find his way into a university, but thereafter was too stupid to find his way out”.

Academics are increasingly made these days to work in institutions that operate with near-military chains of command and notions of line-management obedience. After lifelong careers of growing human emancipation and the intellectual autonomy to pursue scholarly questions where they and reason might lead us, many of us now experience again a measure of regimentation, control, mistrust, even infantilization unknown to us since the worst days of our primary school education.

We—you all and I—precisely because we are social science graduates know what is happening, are intellectually enabled to understand what is involved. We are now seeing the closing, in the universities, of Weber’s “iron cage”. Worse, ideas of advancing organizational rationalization are now taken up by experts in university corporate planning and control who see in that slamming shut of the “iron cage” not a human tragedy, as did Weber, but a managerialist opportunity.

Yet, like most kinds of work only moreso, the work of university scholars is not worth doing at all unless it is done well; it cannot be done well unless it is done gladly, with enthusiasm and energy; and it cannot be done gladly, enthusiastically and energetically by academics whose conditions of institutional existence and daily work strip them of their professional self-respect, dignity and moral autonomy.

Yet today’s universities, and tomorrow’s further down this grim path, provide a career framework not for committed, un-self-interested scholars of some generously inclusive human vision and moral stature but only for cynical, opportunistic, competitive conformists. It is they, not the principled and meek, who shall inherit the cloistered earth.

I am fortunate to have seen our Australian universities in better times. I am sad to see them as they now are and the future that they apparently face.

To speak up for universities and what they mean, an academic these days must, it seems, first retire, stand aside, to avoid the appearance of narrow, illegitimate self-interest.

So I too who share this day with you, and have asked to be included in your company, may soon be graduating from university: into the category of those “silly old duffers” whom irascible politicians have the occasional misfortune, as they see it, to encounter in shopping malls.

My apologies if I have offended by seeming to indulge in special pleading on this, your special day. Let me again thank the University of Sydney for honouring me with its invitation to address you today: a day on which a good, or not so good, Jewish boy like me ought to be in the sanctuary of his people’s faith, instead of here in this cathedral, in which we all as graduates share cultural communion, of enlightenment reason.

The question of how to reconcile the claims of both these “faiths” is not mine alone to manage. It is yours as well. Whatever our religion or lack of one, we all as graduates must seek, as we make our way through life, to find things to believe that are worthy of our reason.

That is the challenge, too, facing this and all our universities. It is signalled in this university’s motto that has accompanied me, and will accompany you as well, through life.

The same mind or spirit—the same culture-animating “geist”—under a different sky: this was the brave aspiration of this university’s founders; that the same civilizing values should find an appropriate haven under a strange heaven.

How to reconcile the two—the cultural, intellectual and moral heritage of all that is best in our enlightenment legacy with the fact that it is here, under the southern skies, that we live and must make our particular world—has been a problem ever since, not just for this university and all its younger sibling institutions but for all of us as Australians.

But for none more than for the graduates of our Australian universities, into whose humanly ample company you, as this country’s newest cohort, are today entering.

This university’s motto urges us to seek that reconciliation of faith and reason: to find something in life, a path in life, to believe in; a compass of moral faith, secular or religious, congruent with reason; to find things to believe in, and pursue faithfully, that are worthy of what austere reason itself requires of us.

This possibility is what arts, and especially social science, graduates gain from their studies, and what you will have gained from yours: the ability not just to understand but actually to confront the fateful clash between what the “iron cage” betokens and the humanizing impulses that we must bring to meet it.

Their studies, your studies, provide the basis for forming and living a life dedicated to that pursuit, and predicated upon an informed recognition of its cardinal importance.

Coherence, consistency, integrity of character in these fragmented postmodernist times can have no other secure foundation. It is the pursuit of these concerns by graduates such as yourselves, while you are here and even more important after your graduation, that makes these places universities.

This central problem of our civilization ever since the Enlightenment is one that Arts faculties and, especially, graduates in the social sciences—sociology, social policy, anthropology, social theory, politics and political philosophy—understand best.

This is why the areas that you have studied here still remain the core of any decent, proper, self-respecting university—no matter what “price” today’s cynical world may place upon arts degrees.

However low, in comparison with medicine, law and the rest, its employment-prospects-driven fee-scales may be set, what you and we study, and are, still embodies, however scorned in these hard-hearted days, the heart of the university and the essence of the human situation.

My personal angst notwithstanding, my undergraduate years here at the University of Sydney were a wonderful time. My graduation from here in 1965—admittedly in luckier, more expansive and encouraging times—proved the beginning of a wonderful adventure. I am ever grateful for the experience of life, and the opportunities to grow in my understanding of it, that my education here provided. “I wouldn’t have missed it for quids.”

[Speaking of “quids”, I note here that I left Sydney in 1966 with a ticket to England on the R.H.M.S. ‘Ellinis’ and four hundred pounds sterling in my pocket. That sum would not have sufficed to support me there in my studies. But when I arrived in London five weeks later, a letter awaited me from the University of Sydney, informing me that I had been awarded for two years the Hannah Fullerton postgraduate travelling research scholarship.

[I have never learnt who Hannah Fullerton was, but I would like to acknowledge here today my continuing gratitude to her; if she is buried somewhere here in Sydney, I would like one day to lay some flowers at her grave.]

[More, to adapt a political slogan from the 1960s, I urge you all as graduates, in small ways and big, to help create and support “one, two, three, many” Hannah Fullerton Scholarships that may enable bright young graduates of this university to pursue their interests overseas.]

As you, in turn, now move into the world as graduates, and I face the threshold of graduation from our besieged universities back into extramural life—as we move forward together as graduates, if of different kinds, from university life—I can only express the hope that your graduation today from this once and still great university will prove a new beginning as rewarding, as emancipating, as humanly enriching, for you all as mine was for me on that day of my tongue-tied embarrassment in 1965.

Good luck to you all!

Clive S. Kessler, 6.vi.2003