‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’

The following is an edited version of President Patrick Deane’s address at  convocation last week.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”: this was the title of an album by the ambient/trip- hop duo Arms and Sleepers in 2006 – about the same time most of you were beginning  to contemplate which university you would choose, which program of study might suit  you, and what career might best satisfy your talents, temperament and inclinations.

Today I expect that at least some of you – and a good number of your parents and  supporters – are marveling at the distance you have traveled since then.

As you sat there, weighing one university against the other, good sense against peer  pressure, fear of the unknown against desire for adventure, I’m not sure you would have  said you were in a state of bliss. Such discussions in my own family sometimes ended in  books being slammed shut and the question: “Yes, Dad, but whose life is it anyway?”  But to be poised at the opening of a new phase in your life, to have choices about that  phase, to dream of your future without fear you will be proven naive for thinking you  have one: this is an experience of privilege; and despite the superficial anguish, I know  you will today recall the pregnant quality, the powerful promise, of that moment. “Bliss  was it in that dawn to be alive.”

Those of you who love literature and whose tastes don’t incline to ambient/trip-hop  music know that the actual source for this quotation is the English Romantic poet  William Wordsworth.  In The Prelude he remembers the excitement he felt in France at  the start of the French Revolution. The lines are very famous:

O pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For great were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

You are on the whole “young” and gathered here today in a differently “pleasant exercise  of hope and joy” – the ceremony of graduation.

But there is a good deal more to the parallel. Wordsworth’s lines evoke a powerful sense  of community – “our side,” he says, is “strong in love”-confronting, even leading, a far-reaching and radical human transformation. What invigorates is the prospect of doing  something great, particularly in partnership with others. The goal is a new human  dispensation, a society which is not just an agglomeration of individuals, but an  organism “strong in love.”

It may be true that in every age the young feel a need to reconsider and reconfigure the  human order. But there are compelling reasons to regard the present as an “age of  revolution” every bit as critical as that which began with the American Revolution in the  last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, included the French Revolution, and continued  for approximately 75 years.

I was recently in Brazil as part of the Governor General’s educational mission to that  country.  In a meeting with Brazilian officials I was struck by the curious mixture of  assurance and abjection that defined our Canadian position. We were assured  (forgivably, perhaps) in our assumption that we had advantages that our Brazilian  colleagues might want – a mature and world-class university system, for example. But  we were abject in our awareness that this advantage is unlikely to continue much  longer, that soon the tables will turn and institutions and countries like our own will  need to adapt to a new world order – one in which they are not dominant.

About a month earlier I had witnessed a similar scene playing itself out in England,  during the British Council’s annual conference on Global Higher Education, as a British  cabinet minister addressed delegates from 120 countries. Oddly oblivious to the reality  that he was addressing representatives from the very market he wished to exploit, he  spoke at length about the need to cultivate and sell abroad the British “brand” in higher  education. The irony was profound and I imagine not lost on delegates from Brazil,  Russia, India, China and South Africa – the BRICS countries, as they have come to be  known. Such nations in the so-called developing world, having shaken off political  subservience and begun to realize their economic potential, are being invited back into  relationships with their previous masters, in a new role as customers – customers  increasingly vital to the economies of those formerly dominant states. Assurance and  abjection again, in that British cabinet minister as in our delegation in Brazil.

These are symptoms of a quiet revolution under way across the globe, realigning power  and wealth, complicating relationships that have seemed settled since the Eighteenth  and Nineteenth Centuries, challenging the hegemony of received ideas, of what one  might call normative Europeanness, and making it certain that the new world coming  will not be predictable on the basis of the old.

What fuels my own sense of bliss at this moment is the feeling that many of you are  open to active engagement with the globe not only as it is right now, but also as it is in  the process of becoming. Many of you have been active in addressing suffering, violence  and inhumanity across the world, and we should be very proud of this, of the way in  which a “without borders” sensibility has taken hold in your generation, giving life to  formal initiatives aimed at serving the world in difficult times.

The most influential model for these, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without  Borders), has a strong McMaster connection, as many of you know. Dr. James Orbinski,  who had been a medical student at this university, was a founding member of Doctors  Without Borders Canada in 1990.

Dr. Orbinski is also connected with another organization that is very strong at this  university: Engineers Without Borders, whose McMaster branch was last year named  Chapter of the Year by the national organization. As an institution we have a  distinguished history of engagement with global problems. Our Faculty of Social  Sciences is host to the McMaster Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition,  established in 1998 to study globalizing processes and the way they bear upon our  lives, our communities, and our environment.

In the Faculty of Humanities we have a combined Honours program and Minor in Peace  Studies, an offshoot of the Centre for Peace Studies which came into being during the  Cold War when scholars and physicians became concerned about the prospects for  human survival. Today the Centre concerns itself with “war and peace, violence and  nonviolence, conflict and conflict transformation.” Arching over these and many other  globally-oriented activities at McMaster is our institutional membership in United  Nations Academic Impact-which commits us to the practice of higher education and  research in support of the global good. Several years ago we dedicated ourselves,  through education, to the realization of the Millennium Goals of the United Nations.

Today all the talk is of “internationalizing” higher education. This is a stated aims of our  provincial government, our federal government, and of governments and educational  institutions around the world. Depending where you are situated on the globe there are  varying degrees of consensus on this issue. The Canadian consensus is very strong: our  future lies in our international commerce, particularly in knowledge-based industries,  including higher education.

But it is interesting to note there is far less commitment to the idea of  internationalization – in higher education at least-in countries of the Middle East, Latin  America and the Caribbean, for example. My stories about Brazil and the British  conference provide a clue as to why this is the case: the fact is simply that for countries  like our own, and even more so for Britain and the European nations, successfully  finding new markets for their educational brands is a matter of survival. For the BRICS  group, in contrast, partnership with mature nations and institutions helps to speed up a  process of national development which would likely occur without partnerships, if  perhaps a little more slowly. What has become essential for some nations is merely  convenient for others.

I say all this to indicate that while I could not be more encouraging of your every move  to be a force for global change, it is important that you not be so transported by the  promise of this moment – by the exhilaration of being “strong in love” with your global  brothers and sisters – that you fail to notice that your own interests may be different  from theirs.

In the face of so much global suffering it is tempting to come bearing the gift of  answers, rather than the more valuable gift of questions; it is tempting to be assured  rather than abject in your approach to others. And more problematically, even, you can  find yourself engaged in remaking the other in your own image, failing to understand  unfamiliar cultures, economies and nations in terms other than a lack of what is valued  and celebrated in your own paradigms.

To speak only of the internationalizing of higher education: what progress does it  represent if we simply strengthen the normalizing claims of Western rationality as a way  of interpreting and regulating others? I remember not so long ago when one first began  to hear talk of an emerging “knowledge economy,” a discourse that now dominates our  understanding of global commerce and culture. Relevant though it is at some level, one  has to wonder about the extent to which it helps or hinders the growth and prosperity  in developing regions, where industrial production on the Fordist model remains critical.

One gratifying outcome of the Brazil trip is confirmation that 12,000 Brazilian students  will come to Canadian universities as part of their own government’s Science Without  Borders program, which will provide scholarships to 100,000 Brazilian students to study  at the best universities around the world. The program will have a major impact-not just  on Brazil and its economic growth, but on the universities fortunate enough to host  scholarship students. For us in Canada and here at McMaster, there is potential for self- renewal and development, as our own paradigms and assumptions are challenged by  the presence of outstanding students from Brazil.

That must be the foundation of our engagement with the future and the globalized  condition from which that future is inseparable: traffic across borders must flow in both  directions, as must the benefits of engagement. Without that, a new world community  “strong in love” as Wordsworth puts it, will be an illusion, and the expectant bliss of our  present moment will go unfulfilled.

To all of you, my warmest best wishes for the lives and careers you will make in the  strange and unfamiliar territory that begins at the doors of this building.