Winter graduation congratulations

Hi everybody!

You’ve done it, and are graduates! You, your families, and friends, will be rightly proud of your accomplishment, on which we warmly congratulate you.

Life will have demanded different things of all of you throughout your studies: nobody has reached the finishing line in quite the same way. For this important reason, every one of your degrees represents a unique achievement. Yet here you all are: at that same finishing line, your paths having crossed many times to get here. It is because of these, your common experiences, that you will all know, and feel, something of one another’s happiness – and, perhaps, sadness – as you receive your degrees, and your time here at Glasgow draws to a close. 

From what you have partaken of together during your studies, I hope you will all take three things with you into the next chapters of your lives.

 First, I hope you will take some knowledge. The most important thing which a university education imparts is knowledge of how to encounter, to learn, and to understand, new things. Better to carry this tool with you, than any of the changing law through the study of which you have acquired it. 

Secondly, I hope you will take a stronger sense of your own values: especially of honesty, both intellectual and personal; openmindedness; and respect for others. The study of law also presses home, in particular, the need to protect the weak from the strong. In far more law than we might think – not just the obvious places – we find this impulse. I hope you will take with you, both a keener sense of it, and a greater willingness to act upon it: sooner or later, you will likely have reason to do so.

Thirdly, I hope you will take some friends. You will all have come to Glasgow from different places, and at different stages in your lives: from down the road; from other continents; after school; for further study; for a change of career, and so on. But for each of you, in your own way, your time here has been a chance to meet different, interesting, challenging people, and – hopefully – to find friends you will value and cherish in the years to come.

So, as you celebrate the conferral of your degrees – thinking of everything personal to each of you individually, and everything you have shared together – here’s to you: law graduates of the University of Glasgow, for the year 2020.

Wherever you go, I hope you find what you are looking for.

The privilege has been ours.

Dr Mat Campbell