Bulletin Spring‧Summer 2001

Many of our finest cauliflowers—from Shakespeare to Charles Dickens—overcame cabbageness without the benefit of college education. Yet there can be little doubt that good college education can make a dramatic difference to human abilities and achievements. Indeed, not only can it transform individua l lives, its role in social change can be quite crucial. Our primary image of Mahatma Gandhi may not be that of a student bent over books on law and jurisprudence, or of Ka r l Ma r x as a graduate student in classical philosophy, diligently writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Greek philosophers Epicurus and Democritus, but that is exactly what they did. A n d the university education of these and a great many other leaders of practical thought has had quite an impact on the real world in which we live. The same can be said of the college education of Martin Luther King, or of Nelson Mandela, or of Aung San Suu Ky i (the courageous Burmese leader), or Mi kha i l Gorbachev (who was, in fact, the first university-trained leader of the Soviet Communist Party since Lenin). The world of ground-level practice has constantly drawn on the world of higher education. This is not to deny that the academia can be a limiting influence too, and the pejorative meaning of the term 'academic' i s not entirely undeserved. It is typically not high praise to be told that one's argument is ‘academic'. The dictionaries give the meaning of the word as: 'theoretical', or 'conjectural', or 'unpractical'. A l l this is quite understandable. And yet the real world does need the theories, the conjectures, the unpractical demands, to re-examine what it has got and to decide where to go f r om there. Consensus beliefs that influence our understanding of the world can be very misleading, and yet remain unchallenged, except from the distance of the conjectural tradition of the academia (as a graduate of the University of Padua, called Galileo, did). Indeed, it is not absurd to claim that being able to doubt is one of the things that make us human beings, rather than unquestioning animals. I remember with some warmth and amusement a Bengali poem of early nineteenth century, by Raja Ram Mohan Ray. This is, in fact, meant to be quite a serious (and I suppose, sad) poem about death — how terrible death is. But when 1 encountered it first as a boy of 101 remember being impressed by the poet's view o f what makes life worth living. The poem goes like this: 'Just imagine how terrible the day of your death will be; others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to contradict.' There is perhaps some plausibility in that characterization of the central feature o f life and death. Indeed the old slogan, articulated by Descartes, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) may be rivalled by the competing claim: dubito ergo sum (I doubt, therefore I am). Questioning and doubting are among the principal tasks of university education. 1 don' t doubt that in your later life you will not only put to excellent use the knowledge and skills you have acquired here, but also the spirit of questioning that comes from good university education. So please join us in expressing gratitude to this wonderful university. It's a great privilege to be with you all at this magical moment.